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Grafton Residents Mull Ideas to Turn The Town Around

Editor's Note: We bring you a story in our continuing series on how the towns of Grafton and Matewan are turning themselves around through a special…

Editor’s Note: We bring you a story in our continuing series on how the towns of Grafton and Matewan are turning themselves around through a special collaborative project between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, West Virginia Focus magazine and the West Virginia Community Development Hub. As Ben Adducchio reports, a recent town meeting in Grafton allowed residents to discuss ideas on what projects they would like to work on.

Grafton is the county seat of Taylor County and has a population of 5,000. It’s one of the two towns in the state selected as part of the “Turn This Town Around” project. Matewan, in Mingo County, is the other. These towns over the next year will be going through a makeover, so to speak, by members of the community, to make the towns look better.

At a recent community meeting, leaders of the Grafton Turn this Town Around project asked the 131 people who attended, to brainstorm about short-term, intermediate, and long-term revitalization projects.

One of the long-term projects suggested is a new entertainment park, near the Tygart Lake, which would host a state of the art movie theatre. Members of the community saw it as an ambitious but interesting idea.

It was a high energy meeting. People wanted to discuss and share ideas, no matter their age.

Grafton has its own community improvement coach, Eric Pories. He helps facilitate discussion at the community meetings, and works to get discussion going.

“Community’s are made up of people, not buildings,” he said to the crowd.

“And people have their own stories.”

Residents voted on what projects they would like to see and work on. The votes were compiled by representatives from West Virginia Community Development Hub. Some of the most popular ideas included: implementing a community garden, restoring an historic hotel in downtown Grafton to its former glory, and establishing a walking trail. Kent Spellman with West Virginia Community Hub says ideas are fantastic, but executing those ideas is even more important.

“This is about what am I willing to do. If you want to get engaged in a project, be aware there may be consequences. We want you to get up on your feet and be engaged,” he said.

“This process doesn’t work if you just sit back and watch. Community development is not a spectator sport, you have to be involved. You have to own this process.”

Spellman says although the Turn This Town Around Project is a year-long program, it may take longer than that to turn Grafton around. And he says, that’s perfectly fine.

“West Virginians are really proud of their ability to survive. Well I’m going to challenge you to change that thinking. It’s time to stop being proud of surviving, and start being proud of thriving,” he said.

“That’s what we are trying to do here in Grafton and Matewan. It’s to get the ball rolling. It’s not going to happen in a year, we know that, but to get the ball rolling so five years down the road, ten years down the road, we can look back and say, ‘remember how this got started?’”

Grafton will conduct a community clean-up day as part of its process, scheduled this weekend. That’s an important weekend for Grafton, as Mother’s Day began there back in 1908.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Turn this Town Around Project is a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, and West Virginia Focus magazine, along with West Virginia Community Development Hub. Wednesday, we will have a story from Matewan’s Turn This Town Around Project.

For more information on the Turn This Town Around project, click here.

They Are Trying To Change The World–One Basement System At A Time

It’s dark. It’s damp. It’s your basement, or crawl space. And for some people in Clarksburg, it’s a labor of love to go down there and find ways to improve energy efficiency.

Basement Systems of West Virginia does work to improve the energy efficiency of homes by encapsulating crawl spaces. That means they take materials, similar to pool liner, and other things to create what they call “clean spaces.”

It’s their hope to improve conditioning and energy efficiency in these dim, dark places.

“We live in a day and age when environmental issues are very important, people are concerned about their impact on the environment. What we’re doing here is helping to reduce energy use,” said Colin Reger, of Basement Systems.

To many people, doing work down in a crawl space may seem intimidating. Randy Shillingburg, who is the director of business development for Basement Systems, says many homeowners don’t even go into their crawl spaces but a few times in a decade.

“It’s out of sight, out of mind. I don’t want to go down there because I know it’s dirty,” he said.

“If you went to probably 9 out of every 10 homes that are being built today, you would find a very thin layer of plastic on the dirt ground, and over time, you will find problems.”

Click on the Listen link to listen to the full story.

How We Chose the Eight West Virginia Contestants For "Turn This Town Around"

“Turn This Town Around” is a unique and groundbreaking project to select two West Virginia communities to receive training, coaching, and technical assistance to help them achieve success in revitalizing their communities.

“Turn This Town Around” is a feature of West Virginia Focus, in partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting and the West Virginia Community Development Hub.

You are encouraged to vote right now for the two towns from a selection of eight contestants: in the north – Grafton, Hundred, Petersburg, and Rowlesburg; and in the South – Alderson, Hillsboro, Matewan, Pineville.

Lots of folks are asking how the eight “Turn This Town Around” contestants were selected. Most commonly, they ask because they want their town to have a shot at this opportunity.

We think that’s great. We wish we could provide that opportunity to every West Virginia community that steps up.

That being said, by my count there are 149 incorporated municipalities and 2,941 unincorporated communities in the state. In this first round of Turn This Town Around, we have the capacity to devote our resources to two communities.

So how were the eight contestants selected? There were several considerations. We knew we wanted to focus on one northern and one southern community. We thought selecting the two out of a field eight would narrow the focus and increase the competition. So we selected four northern and four southern communities.

Some of the thinking that went into the selection included:

· Where could we really make a visible difference in the course of a year?

· Where we did not already have a strong presence or relationships?

· We wanted towns that represented some geographic diversity.

· Which towns had attracted our attention as communities with potential that hadn’t been realized?

Yes, the selection of the eight was fairly arbitrary.

But here’s the point: Turn This Town Around is an experiment – a very exciting one that we believe has huge potential – but an experiment nonetheless. This is its pilot year. This will be a great learning experience for all of us, one that we hope will help us improve and expand the process in coming years.

And unlike some community development initiatives, Turn This Town Around will be very well documented. Tools, tips and techniques will be openly shared. The lessons learned will be made available to any West Virginia community that is interested.

If you want to revitalize your community, but weren’t selected for Turn This Town Around, pay attention, because you can do this at home! Learn from Turn This Town Around and apply those lessons to your town!

While the Hub and the many service providers in the WV Community Development Network will be providing whatever assistance we can to the Turn This Town Around communities, it is a central principle of community improvement that the community must determine and drive the process. Mobilize your community and get to work – don’t wait for us!

We’re exploring ideas about how we might open the process up next year to give your community an opportunity to join the Turn This Town Around campaign. Stay tuned!

VOTE: Which Two West Virginia Towns Should Get "Turned Around"?

It’s been a rough month in West Virginia, with the water crisis and all the negative, stereotypical coverage of Appalachia around the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty.

Let’s take all our anger and frustration and turn it into something positive. Let’s “Turn This Town Around.”

We’re partnering with West Virginia Community Development Hub and New South Media, Inc. to inspire two West Virginia towns – one north, one south – to develop their own solutions.

It starts with YOUR vote – you get to choose which two towns (out of eight candidates) will be part of this effort. Then, the community will take over. They’ll receive training and other resources to complete a project that builds on their efforts to revitalize their town.

As publisher Nikki Bowman of New South Media wrote in “West Virginia Focus” magazine:

The two towns you select will become living laboratories. Our goal is to help ignite change, to rally the community with a set of goals and deliverables, to showcase the successes and failures, to identify challenges, and to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The West Virginia Community Development Hub, a leader in community development, will coordinate the effort. The Hub will connect the two communities with training on civic engagement, leadership development, and project management; provide a community performance coach; help them assess their strengths and vulnerabilities; develop a community vision and plan; and link them to technical assistance providers in key areas like civic engagement, the local food movement, community sustainability, and organizational development.

You can (and should) read more of Bowman’s article here, which includes detailed information about each town.

You can check the current voting standing on the West Virginia Focus Twitter and Facebook pages.