Radio station giving a comprehensive look at some ways people are surviving the new economy
Last year, public radio station WYSO-FM (91.3) worked with local filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar to produce ReInvention Stories, a multimedia project that examined how people in the Dayton region were coping with the recession — reinventing lives, routines, jobs, careers. Starting Wednesday, the station will launch the second series of ReInvention Stories, 10 radio reports with accompanying short films that visit new parts of the region. For times and details, visit wyso.org. The team that produced the series included broadcasters Jerry Kenney, Juliet Fromholt and Sarah Buckingham and filmmakers Eric Risher, Shawndra Jones and Basim Blunt, who also served as project manager with Bognar and Reichert. We talked with several of them and with WYSO General Manager Neenah Ellis at the studios in Yellow Springs about what they learned. — Ron Rollins
Q: So, talk about the project and the program, for anyone who isn’t familiar with what you worked on.
Neenah Ellis: Well, this is season two, an offshoot of the original ReInvention Stories. This time around, we scaled it back so that there are fewer people whose stories we tell. It was a hugely sprawling project last time, so we cut it back a bit. But Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert are still administering the project, and we got funding for it from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which was great.
Q: Foundation funding is always good.
Ellis: It is. But the basic idea of ReInvention Stories is to interview and profile people in the Dayton area who are finding they have to reinvent themselves. As everyone knows, our area has been through a terrible dislocation, a huge economic disruption that caused a lot of people to have to find new jobs, change careers, relocate or sometimes undergo family problems as they found a path by which they could reinvent themselves. So we stayed with that theme and premise for the second part, because even though the economy is improving in some ways, there are a lot of people who are still working at that. This time, though, we explored new neighborhoods — but with the same approach, of teaming filmmakers and radio producers to work together on the reporting.
Q: Last time you focused on east and west Dayton, mostly. Where did you go this time?
Ellis: This time we were in Old North Dayton, the Five Oaks neighborhood and Trotwood. Q: Why there? Basim Blunt: We wanted to bring more diversity into the stories, and broaden out the areas we explored.
Juliet Fromholt: Also, in the first year we heard about stories and people there we wished we could have talked to, that sounded really interesting. It grew out of that, somewhat.
Ellis: The diversity mattered to us. And in Old North Dayton, too, you have this phenomenal history of wave after wave of immigrants who’ve lived there, and we wanted to tap into that. That’s an important story today.
Shawndra Jones: And as we did research into each of these areas, we found more interesting stories — like big stores closing in Trotwood, or wondering how the area was doing after the Salem Mall closed years ago. We decided to go find out.
Fromholt: And it’s funny that while we were doing the reporting, the news came down about Target closing in Trotwood, which just added another layer.
Blunt: You don’t hear that much news about Trotwood, other than sports — it’s a huge sports town, with the high school football and basketball teams being so great.
Jerry Kenney: We attended a lot of neighborhood association meetings, and a lot more research than just hitting the streets and introducing ourselves, which is how we dug into the last ReInvention Stories project. This time, we had more planning and research before starting in.
Blunt: And we went to a lot of really cool local events.
Fromholt: Like Neighborhood Night Out in Trotwood — which, interestingly enough, was at the Target that’s closing, in the parking lot.
Blunt: We went to the famous Wroe Avenue block party in Five Oaks in Dayton, which has been running continuously for like 27 years. Some of us went to the Eid celebration in Old North Dayton at the Ahiska Turkish Community Center, which used to be the city’s Bomberger Community Center.
Q: So, what did you learn that surprised you about these communities?
Jones: I liked getting to know Trotwood better, and thought it was cool — for instance, how thousands of people showed up for a block party thrown by a local church. And I was impressed by the attitude of the people in town, how they were planning to invest in the community even though Target was leaving. They have lots of small community plans under development.
Fromholt: It was interesting to focus on Trotwood as a whole suburb, rather than the way we’ve usually looked a smaller neighborhoods. We found a lot of community pride, much of it based around the faith communities there. All our subjects talked about faith in some way — that seems to be where a lot of their sense of community comes from. But the city is still very much in transition for a lot of reasons, but the community is looking past the closings of the Salem Mall and all these big box stores and putting their hope in small business and bringing back their downtown. And they are hopeful, really.
Kenney: I was working in Five Oaks, and I was pleasantly surprised how much people are behind their neighborhood. That area has received bad press for years, and there’s a sense of it as a place in decline — but we found neighborhood cleanups, gatherings of the neighborhood associations, and people trying full-tilt to get things going.
Blunt: And in Five Oaks, you have four and five generations deep of families there, who’ve lived there since the early 1920s. Two of our stories were about families who’ve lived all those generations in the same house.
Ellis: We found people coming back, too. One of the teams reported on Evans Bakery in Old North Dayton, where a young couple moved back to town from Detroit to reopen the old family business. They thought the neighborhood needed a bakery.
Q: What did you find in terms of economic improvement? Do things seem to be getting better for the people you talked to?
Blunt: The quote that stuck in my mind from someone was that the city is still bleeding because of the loss of all the major employers, but that now there’s at least some gauze for the wound — and they can see the community coming back. That’s why people are staying in their homes, why they believe in the city. But it’s not all the way back.
Ellis: We tell two stories about people who’ve gone back to school and are done or nearly done, and still can’t find jobs in their fields. Until we’re fully employed again, we’re still in a state of reinvention. But we’ve made a lot of progress.
Jones: To me, it feels like the economy is in the same place it was when we did the first ReInvention project a few years ago — though you notice personal successes on a very small scale. People may have reinvented their communities, even though their jobs may not be as lucrative as they want them to be — so they’re happy and fulfilled on one level, if not on another.
Fromholt: It seems as though the shock is over. The first time, we talked to so many people who were saying, oh my God, I don’t know what to do. But one of my people, Felipe, talked about a different attitude — here’s what happened to me, now what am I going to do about it? I’m not going to simply live as an unemployed person, but as a whole person who is not wrapped up in being unemployed. Before it was shock and uncertainty, but now it’s “I’m here, here’s what I do now.”
Blunt: I sense that people love this city. They live here and whatever the economy goes through, they still love it. That’s a common theme I heard.
Jones: This project made me fall in love with it, too.
Ellis: Jerry’s people moved here sight unseen and fell for the place.
Kenney: That’s true. They moved here from Long Beach, Wash., because they wanted to get into sustainable farming. Where they lived they weren’t having success with the lack of four seasons, and also the housing was so expensive where they lived. They found a house in Dayton online for just $14,000 in Five Oaks.
Blunt: A nice house, too.
Kenney: When they arrived, they found about 20 neighbors waiting for them when they pulled up, people who were just curious to meet their new neighbors. That says a lot about the neighborhood. Now they’re farming right out of their backyard, growing most of what they eat. They’re both HIV positive and so they grow it for health reasons — but economically, they say, they’re trying to live off the grid. And they’ve fallen in love with Dayton — they say they feel they have a whole new family now. They found a tightknit community on Wroe Avenue, and a lot of caring there.
Q: Talk about immigration and how it played into your stories.
Ellis: Well, in Old North Dayton, as a lot of people, there are a lot of Ahiska Turks coming here from other places in the United States. In part it’s because of the affordable housing here, but now there’s a real community for them, too. The person from that community in the story talked about how he got a job at Citibank here, and when some customers demeaned him for being a Muslim, his co-workers stood up for him. He said he’d never encountered that kind of support before, and it meant a lot to him. He’s feeling very welcome and very accepted. That was surprising to me; there are about 400 Turkish families here.
Blunt: And they’re keeping a lot of their culture and native traditions, too, which you’ll see in the video for the story — the women’s head coverings, their food, the beautiful doors they use when they renovate their homes. So many beautiful traditions. You’d think you weren’t in Dayton. We kept hearing people say that Dayton is the Ellis Island of the Midwest. That was cool.
Kenney: Tad and John, from my story, are convincing lots of their friends to move here. They’re singing Dayton’s praises.