Small city, big impact
A Q & A with Knight Foundation’s Kyle Kutuchief
Akron, Ohio is the birthplace of Knight Newspapers and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Kyle Kutuchief, Knight Foundation’s program director in Akron, is focused on the city’s downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods, where Knight Foundation makes investments in talent, opportunity and engagement. Akron is also one of five demonstration cities taking part in Reimagining the Civic Commons. Through that work, Kyle is helping connect three very different neighborhoods and the people that live and work there: Downtown, Park East and Summit Lake. The Summit Lake neighborhood, which has suffered for years from disinvestment, is named for its proximity to one of Northeast Ohio’s largest lakes.
Q: Across the country, cities like Boston, Chicago and Portland are reclaiming their waterfronts for people. Akron has its own waterfront resource in Summit Lake, which for many years was unused by people in the city or even by the surrounding neighborhood. Why is it important for Akron to reclaim Summit Lake?
A. Some of the nicest parks in northeast Ohio are in the more affluent areas of the region. Prior to Reimagining the Civic Commons launching in Akron, the prevailing belief was that we needed to figure out ways to bring people from outside these affluent areas into these nice parks. Regional leaders rarely talked about how maybe people in all neighborhoods deserve an amazing park, right near their house.
Our Akron Civic Commons work at Summit Lake, which began in 2016, is an example of what providing high quality public space can do for a neighborhood that has been forgotten. Summit Lake is the city of Akron’s largest lake and one the larger bodies of water in the heart of a city in northeast Ohio. And until a few years ago, our community had let it become a place where few wanted to go. This was unacceptable to our Civic Commons team, so we decided that we were going to work hard with the asset we had and help it become amazing — a place of pride for the Summit Lake neighborhood.
Q: One challenge to reclaiming a place is stigma — misguided perceptions that can keep people away. These perceptions can stick around for years or even decades. How have you worked to overcome stigma about Summit Lake?
For decades, Summit Lake has been viewed as abandoned, polluted and dangerous. This stigma extended from the lake to the neighborhood adjacent. When Akron was first selected as a Reimagining the Civic Commons city, I and Dan Rice (President and CEO of the Ohio & Erie Canalway Coalition and a key member of the Akron Civic Commons team) gave a number of presentations about the project to anyone who would listen. At one point we presented to the Akron Metropolitan Area Housing Authority, which manages a large affordable apartment building on the eastern shore of Summit Lake — the only waterfront public housing in the city of Akron.
We asked the Housing Authority if people were champing at the bit to get into these apartments with a waterfront view. And they said no, that people viewed the lake as a liability. There was worry that their children were going to wander into the lake, and uncertainty about pollution. (Editor’s note: Summit Lake received a clean environmental assessment earlier this year.)
Our work to change the narrative around Summit Lake has taught us a few things. First, we have learned that you don’t need to wait for big wins, just keep achieving and celebrating small wins: a farmer’s markets at the lake, mowing the lake’s edge and cleaning up the landscape, hosting a fishing derby and incorporating arts and music.
Second, you need to listen to the people who live there. We asked neighbors what they wanted to see happen. They told us they wanted spots to gather and barbeque near the lake, and we created these places and invited them in. Neighbors started talking to neighbors, and bit by bit our momentum built.
Last, there are interesting, remarkable and delightful stories to be told about the people in every neighborhood. The police blotter and local paper cover the bad stuff. Our team has been focused on elevating the stories of poets, musicians and neighborhood leaders. It adds up.
Q: Have you seen a change in the perceptions about the lake and the surrounding neighborhood?
A: We just had a resident of the Summit Lake neighborhood publish an editorial in our daily newspaper. To see her love letter to her neighborhood in print for all to see brought a tear to my eye. When we started this process, I thought no one cared about this place, but working with Summit Lake neighbors, we found pride and amazing people who really care. They just had never been asked or invited in.
Another example of change is seeing new users on the Towpath Trail, which connects the three assets that make up the Akron Civic Commons (Summit Lake, Park East neighborhood and downtown Akron). I’m a runner and I often use the Towpath to train, or I host bike tours as part of my work. I have seen more single women using the downtown sections of the trail over the past few years than I have ever seen in my entire life. And as more women use the trail, the perception of safety on the trail grows. This is evidence that the narrative around Summit Lake and the surrounding area is changing.
Q: You work closely with your city’s elected leadership, and Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan is a believer in Reimagining the Civic Commons as a catalyst for neighborhoods. What can other cities learn from your success engaging local elected leadership?
A: Most of what elected officials work on every day is problems. In fact, when you’re in a city like Akron, a city that’s lost a third of its people since the sixties, it can be a lot of problems. What our Civic Commons work does is bring wins to local elected officials or agency leaders and show them a formula for creating more success in other parts of the city. We come to them asking them to be a partner in something that creates success across a neighborhood.
Our other secret weapon has been helping civic leaders and elected leaders learn from the playbooks of our partner cities. As a Reimagining the Civic Commons city, we’ve had an opportunity to expose a diverse group of local officials, from planning to engineering to the mayor’s office, to the Civic Commons Learning Network. The Learning Network allows them to have candid conversation with some of the country’s best city leaders and allows them to apply valuable lessons to their work in Akron.
Q: How important is it to create neighborhood ambassadors for Summit Lake and other public assets? What lessons have you learned about civic engagement of nearby neighbors that other cities could use?
We operate Akron Civic Commons as an open book as much as possible, even when it’s hard, and that helped established trust with people in neighborhoods who either haven’t been consulted or were consulted in the past but never saw results. We also have a small grantmaking program that builds trust. Our grants are about $500 to $5,000, and they go to neighborhood groups or leaders that want to solve community problems connected to the civic commons.
For example, Summit Lake Community Center got a grant for an improved bathroom and some equipment for their kitchen. We also supported a project called Leaven Lenses, a photography apprenticeship program that helped engage Summit Lake youth. With a $5,000 grant, we were able to get cameras in the hands of neighborhood kids and two local professional photographers to mentor them. The photographs these kids have taken are being used by our project, and the kids are learning valuable — and marketable — skills. We provided lighting for dark underpasses along the Towpath Trail, which we celebrated with a Lantern Parade, where everyone marched to the newly lit underpasses holding little LED paper lanterns.
These small grants have demonstrated how this process is different because residents are experiencing change. It has generated incredible word of mouth from neighbor to neighbor — this stuff travels! And by giving neighbors a stake in what’s happening, ambassadors for the Akron Civic Commons project have been created.
Q: The Akron Civic Commons project has a broad and diverse coalition behind it, and yet Akron has been able to be nimble in executing prototype projects, learning from those prototypes and moving quickly to the next project. How are you reimagining the civic commons efficiently with such a broad stakeholder group?
First, everybody doesn’t work on every piece. We keep the bigger team aware of what’s happening at our monthly team meetings, and we make sure that everyone understands we are working on one connected project, not three separate ones. (Akron Civic Commons is a project that connects three areas in the city, Summit Lake, Park East and downtown.) While we have smaller “strike teams” that work on each of the three areas, we’re also one big team. And, because we operate our project internally and externally as an open book, our team works together constructively.
We also think about serving the neighborhood first. When we announced the results of an environmental assessment of Summit Lake, we told Summit Lake neighborhood residents first and did a media event the next day. This approach is working: at the environmental assessment media event, which was held at Summit Lake, I looked around the room and saw the head of our Downtown Akron Partnership, the head of the Akron Civic Theater, folks from the art museum, etc. These are people who came from downtown but who deeply care about Summit Lake, two miles from downtown, and previously forgotten. They’re interested, they’re a part of the team.
Q: As a philanthropist who is making investments in the community every day, what most excites you about the potential of the civic commons work for Akron? How do you see it influencing Akron’s future?
A: We see the ripple effects of the work we’re doing month in, month out in the way we talk to each other, in the way we work and in the way we manage our organizations. It has become a way of doing business in Akron. One example is the re-organization at the City of Akron last February. That re-organization was spurred by a meeting that key members of the Akron Civic Commons team had with officials from another Reimagining the Civic Commons city, Philadelphia, in January. After hearing about how Philadelphia had successfully restructured their parks and public spaces work, how they put residents first, and how they are moving to accomplish more equitable outcomes, our mayor announced a similar restructuring, creating the Office of Integrated Development. This new office is intended to break down the silos between planning, engineering, recreation and economic development. Akron is now on a similar, and hopefully as successful, journey.
In addition, we’re very aware (in a positive way) that Akron is the smallest Reimagining the Civic Commons city. There are a ton of smaller cities at around Akron’s size in the U.S. that could use some of the strategies that are working here, who can learn from us. We would love to be a proving ground to show how Civic Commons can work in all of these smaller cities facing similar challenges — and that these cities, too, can take advantage of big opportunities.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration between The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and local partners.
