Wean grant will help revive Crandall Park neighborhood

Staff report

WARREN

The Crandall Park South neighborhood will be reviving its identity with historical street signs and street-corner plantings to anchor its place on Youngstown’s Fifth Avenue.

At Warren’s McGuffey K-8 School, students’ families are engaged with students, teachers and staff — bringing community to classrooms and improving grades, attendance and behavior.

Those initiatives and 11 others have been awarded a total of $43,956 from The Raymond John Wean Foundation in its latest round of grants under the Neighborhood SUCCESS program, designed to support grass-roots groups in small community-development projects that improve the quality of life in Warren and Youngstown.

Two grant-making committees, one made up of residents from Warren and the other from Youngstown, guided the Foundation’s funding of the projects.

A $3,789 grant to the Crandall Park South Neighborhood Association will help highlight neighborhood assets and improve aesthetics. Besides the plantings along Fifth Avenue and the signs, the group is organizing a community cleanup day and helping to board up vacant and nuisance properties.

Eric Holm, association president, said the group is focusing on Fifth Avenue because it is an important thoroughfare where signs can remind passersby of the neighborhood’s historical identity, which includes mansions that reflect the prosperity of Youngstown’s industrial era.

Part of the association’s effort is directed at engaging residents and public agencies to leverage public resources. An earlier Neighborhood SUCCESS grant helped the association to get an eyesore house demolished by the city of Youngstown and to purchase landscaping materials for the vacant lot left behind.

On Warren’s northwest side, McGuffey K-8 School has enlisted parents and other family members in building social and emotional skills of younger students through a variety of exercises that have resulted in more learning and fewer disciplinary issues. The Foundation granted Warren City Schools $4,950 for Tying the McGuffey KNOT (Knowledge, Neighborhood, Open Minds, Teamwork).

Skills for Life, a program of KNOT that is in its second year at all four Warren K-8 schools, has family members and students work together on exercises such as quiet moments for targeted reflection. It is one of several techniques that help develop better communication through understanding.

“If students understand themselves better, there will be better communication,” said Jennifer E. Roller, the Wean Foundation’s program officer for urban affairs and neighborhoods. “The focus is on emotional intelligence, and the result has been better behavior, students and teachers getting along and higher scores and attendance.”

Parents have been volunteering extensively, helping to develop school activities and implement programs, said Roller. The bonus has been the building of relationships.