17 Strong
Here are Hamilton’s 17 neighborhoods, not all of which have formal neighborhood associations:
*Armondale
*Dayton Lane
*Downtown business district
*East End
*Enterprise Park
*German Village
*Highland Park
*Jefferson
*Lindenwald
*Millikin
*New London
*North End & Fordson Heights
*Prospect Hill
*Riverview/2nd Ward
*Rossville
*Taft Place & Governor’s Hill
*Washington
If you live in Hamilton and are interested in connecting with people in your neighborhood, a good resource is www.nextdoor.com. To join a neighborhood’s private group, you must be a verified resident of the area. There is a nextdoor.com platform “for every square inch of the city,” says Brandon Saurber, Hamilton’s director of strategy and information.
Another way to learn about becoming involved with neighborhood groups is by email through 17strong@hamilton-oh.gov.
Yet another way to get engaged is Thursday’s 7-9 p.m. Q Commons event on the lower level of The Village Church, 210 S. Second St., in Hamilton. The registration site is at http://qcommons.com/hamilton and there is a $20 registration fee, which drops to $15 if you use the promocode hamiltonrocks.
City officials and citizens across Hamilton are trying to create more cohesive neighborhoods in the community, part of an effort called 17 Strong. To help create more unified neighborhoods, Hamilton civic leaders on Thursday will participate in a meeting with more than 70 other cities linked via television connections.
Hamilton participants will gather at The Village Church, on the lower level of 210 S. Second St. for the 7-9 p.m. event, which requires registration beforehand or at the event.
Hamilton’s 17 Strong effort — named for the number of neighborhoods in the city — and its Sense of Place Initiative were launched after a 2011 strategy-setting session led by the city manager who was new at the time, Joshua Smith.
Out of that effort the city developed four pillars for moving Hamilton forward: Create economic opportunity; Create a positive image; Connect people; and Create a sense of place, said Brandon Saurber, the city’s director of strategy and information.
“Neighborhood development was one aspect of creating a sense of place that we said very early on, ‘This really doesn’t require money, this requires time and legwork. We should take this on as maybe our first task within the Sense of Place committee,’” Saurber said.
Cities the size of Hamilton often require many years to foster creation of associations in each neighborhood, and Hamilton has been no exception, with groups holding regular meetings in not quite half of the city’s areas.
“It’s always been about building bridges within and between communities, within and between neighborhoods in Hamilton,” Saurber said. “This is about celebrating, not separating.”
Neighborhood-association meetings can have the added benefit of being places where new ideas are conceived, and bubble up to city government.
“It’s one thing for us to sit here in City Hall and think we know what neighborhoods want, or what the priorities are in different corners of the community,” Saurber said. “Not that one individual or even a few individuals speak for an entire neighborhood, but if we can have some anecdotal input as to what matters, then we’re better off than just making assumptions that the needs are the same across the entire city.”
At Thursday’s event, three national speakers will address the 70-plus cities, followed by local speakers Mike Dingeldein, executive director of the local CORE Fund; City Council Member Kathleen Klink, chairwoman of the Sense of Place and 17 Strong Initiative; Frank Downie, co-chairman of Lindenwald’s neighborhood association; and Leslie Simpson of Sojourner Recovery Services, who will speak about “Overcoming Addiction Together.”
Thursday’s event, called Q Commons, will be hosted by a Christian non-profit organization called Q Ideas, which helps churches find ways to advance good in their communities and globally, said Scott O’Donohoe, a pastor at the church. All are invited, regardless of their religious affiliation or non-beliefs.
The registration site is http://qcommons.com/hamilton. There is a $20 registation fee, which helps Q Ideas defray the event’s costs. People who use the promo code hamiltonrocks will get a $5 discount.
“The church doesn’t make a dime off of it,” O’Donohoe said.
Lindenwald leads
Lindenwald has been a leader in the community-building effort.
“The whole purpose of 17 Strong is to engage the neighbors in activities that would kind of bolster the standard of living,” said Frank Downie, a co-chairman of Lindenwald’s neighborhood association, PROTOCOL (People Reaching Out To Others: Celebrating Our Lindenwald). His organization meets almost every month on the third Monday and has helped create more unity in the neighborhood, although he’d like to see it doing even more after more than four years in existence.
“Lindenwald, I think Kathleen (Klink) and Brandon (Saurber) felt it was a neighborhood was very representative of all the other neighborhoods, and was still a very tight community, it was going to be a little easier, maybe, to get the ball rolling here than it would have been in some of the other ones.”
Among other events, PROTOCOL has hosted several outdoor movies in the neighborhood’s Schuster and Benninghoffen parks, has helped Debbie Doerflein’s business, Heaven Sent coffee shop/reception hall/bakery, distribute Christmas toys to more than 100 underprivileged neighborhood children. It also has hosted family-friendly “Trunk-or-Treat” events at Halloween.
PROTOCOL’s existence hasn’t merely helped Heaven Sent’s Christmas event, but also has helped the community embrace Lindenwald’s business district, the way people did in decades past, Doerflein said.
“There’s so many more people who are interested in Lindenwald’s business district than there were when PROTOCOL didn’t exist,” Doerflein said.
PROTOCOL operates on a shoestring budget, but Saurber said the city is considering making “micro-grants” to such groups for community events.
“Movies usually run us $300-$400, depending on the quality of the movie, how new it is, and we have no funding,” Downie said. “Everything we do is through donations.”
That’s one reason Downie is grateful for the DJ services Danny Jaqui provides free of charge at the film events: “He’s worth a fortune to us,” Downie said. “He plans it when he doesn’t have another event, but sometimes the opportunity arises where he could have done something else that day, and a DJ can make some good money on weekends.”
“It’s one of our biggest draws,” Downie said. “Probably between 200 and 300 people come by in a day, and they all tend to come back for the movie. I think sometimes the movie crowd might be even bigger than that.”
For more information about Lindenwald’s neighborhood association, contact Downie at unkblunt@gmail.com. A good way to connect with the particular Hamilton neighborhood where you live is www.nextdoor.com.
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