CLARKSBURG, W.Va. — Community advocates in Harrison County and their partners are hoping to take their next step in revitalizing a depressed portion of Clarksburg by asking a simple question: What do community members actually want?
“We’re asking that you come with ideas and solutions,” Elizabeth Shahan, Executive Director of the Harrison County Family Resource Network, said Wednesday. “We know what the problems are. We know what people are experiencing, and we’re really focused on, ‘What else can we do?’ Here’s what our vision is. So what are we missing? What else do you all want to see in your neighborhood?”
Shahan and the Harrison County FRN will lead a meeting Thursday evening at Mt. Zion Baptist Church to continue discussions with the community that will advance the Monticello Ongoing Revitalization Effort (M.O.R.E.).
“We don’t want to discourage or take a step back, but we also want to acknowledge that this is up to them–the community,” she said. “We don’t want to force anything on them.”
The effort is to help revitalize Monticello Avenue and the surrounding area in downtown Clarksburg. But, Shahan said, any continued investment by non-profit organizations and their business partners must come with community involvement.
“If we go in and say we have all this money, ‘We are going to do this to you,’ we may build new parks and gardens and sidewalks and lights,” she said. “Who knows what else we can accomplish? But nobody will utilize it because they weren’t involved in the planning process.”
That mindset helped launch the popular community garden project on Monticello Avenue, and Shahan hopes to replicate that success. The idea for the community gardens, conceived in 2014, led to the successful acquisition of two mini-grants of $750 from the Try This WV conference. From there, support snowballed.
“Donations of materials, in-kind service, bulldozers and trucks, dump trucks, and all the help that we had in hands-on volunteer work as well as additional monetary donations, we turned $750 into $150,000,” she said.
That eventually led to completed community gardens on Monticello Avenue and Broadway Avenue; gardens that Shahan hopes are part of an increased focus on healthy eating for residents of the area.
“Maybe they can’t afford [fruits and vegetables] at the local grocery store,” Shahan said. “Maybe the Farmer’s Market has it, but they can’t get to the Farmer’s Market. Maybe they are shut in and don’t have that opportunity.”
After the success of those projects, Shahan and former Clarksburg City Council candidate Mateen “Tuna” Abdul-Aziz began putting pen to paper, trying to come up with ideas for new community improvement projects. When they began, both were encouraged and inspired by the ideas they were considering.
“What is a really big vision?” she asked. “What could we really achieve on this block?”
It was one of their community partners who provided a surprising answer to that question. MVB Bank, which operates primarily in Harrison, Marion, and Monongalia counties, wanted to help contribute their expertise to the next potential M.O.R.E. project.
“MVB Bank and [CEO] Larry Mazza got wind of what we were doing and said, ‘You guys aren’t thinking big enough,'” Shahan said.
Shahan said they’re going back to the drawing board, but by hosting Thursday’s town hall event, they’ll be able to get the community to “buy-in” to a project that they want.
“We don’t have any money yet, but the goal is that we set up a project, we have a vision, we want the community buy-in–which is the point of the town hall meeting,” she said. “Then we proceed with, how are we going to fund it?”
As Shahan said, “do this to you” or “do this for you,” are improvement models that don’t come with built-in community support.
The meeting is at Mt. Zion Baptist Church on E.B. Saunders Way in Clarksburg and begins at 6 p.m. Thursday evening.