Community conversation examines ways to improve safety, employment

By Sean Barron

news@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Matt Vinzant grew up on Cleveland’s East Side in a single-parent household, which often entailed living in homeless shelters and housing projects while being exposed to a culture of drugs and violence.

Amid the turmoil and instability that pockmarked much of his childhood, however, Vinzant also lived briefly with a man and his family who set a positive example and encouraged him to attend college.

“It changed my life,” recalled Vinzant, referring to an Introduction to Organizing course he took at Kent State University, which primed him to delve into community-organization efforts, such as going door to door organizing people to vote and running a voter-registration program.

Vinzant shared some of his neighborhood organization skills with about two dozen people who attended a four-hour community conversation Saturday in Youngstown State University’s Cushwa Hall.

The session examined ways to improve safety, employment, health, education and other key issues that affect numerous families and neighborhoods against a backdrop of what many see as racist policies, procedures and legislation that create or contribute to many of the city’s major problems.

Also discussed was the likely impact of state and federal governments.

Moderating the meeting were Vinzant and Marcia Dinkins, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative’s executive director, who contended many people have been socialized to accept certain faulty assumptions regarding education and black neighborhoods, for example, then build and formulate their thinking around those.

In the bigger picture, many people automatically equate simply building more prisons, having more firearms and seeing a greater police presence in a given neighborhood with increased safety, in part to assuage their own fear and distrust, Vinzant explained.

Similarly, it’s easy to blame poor people for their plight, and it’s important to examine who benefits from “systematic oppression and systemic exploitation,” he added.

For example, a “prison industrial complex” offers a financial incentive to incarcerate more people largely to the benefit of those at the top of the economic ladder, one of the attendees explained.

A strong education foundation is needed, but it’s often difficult to further educate many Youngstown residents because they’re working two or three minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet, said Linda Hoey, parent liaison with the Youngstown City Schools’ Parent Pathways program.

Nevertheless, efforts should be made to empower those who are most directly impacted by these challenges, she noted.

“Our goal is to build more collective impact,” said Dinkins, who stressed the value of having a greater number of community stakeholders consistently combine their resources, talents and stories to improve communities while setting aside their personal agendas.

Along those lines, it’s imperative to expand these conversations, develop steps with others’ input toward reaching goals and come up with an action plan, added Dinkins, who mentioned plans to bring U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, to Youngstown for a town hall meeting March 25.

Susie Beiersdorfer, a member of Frackfree Mahoning Valley, used her experiences in trying to stop fracking in the region as a template to demonstrate ways community change can take place.

Even though the anti-fracking community Bill of Rights charter amendment failed six times, lessons can be gleaned for improving such efforts, she explained.

“We the people do have the power,” Beiersdorfer said.

Attendees also engaged in a “life-at-12” portion, in which they recalled what their neighborhoods were like when they were that age.

Several people who were 12 in the 1960s and ’70s painted a rather bucolic portrait of life then, remembering little crime and drug activity as well as greater neighborhood cohesion.

Major shifts began, however, in the late 1970s, such as more concentrated poverty, greater striations in black communities, an increase in drug use and incarceration, and job loss that coincided largely with the demise of the steel mills, some said.