Easterday Construction has always supported Marshall County Community Foundation (MCCF). This year there’s a way to increase the impact of your donation either through existing funds or starting one of your own. Consider MCCF in your end of year charitable giving.
I was pleased to be one of the Marshall County Community Foundation (MCCF) board members to attend a regional meeting of MCCF with the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County (CFSJC) and the Community Foundation of Elkhart County (CFEC). The basis of this was to foster regional collaboration on a Lilly grant that would help create more housing in our respective counties. It was great to see the groups come together and work towards a common goal. MACOG was also there, having stepped up to consider offering their services towards a Land Bank or similar vehicle to help move this forward.
I have been involved with several of these types of collaborative efforts in the past. As a Culver Chamber of Commerce (CCC) board member, I helped John Thompson and Eric Freeman create the Culver Second Century Committee. The Second Century Committee used CCC support to pull various non-profits and governmental bodies together to work towards common goals. It was successful for a brief time, creating collaboration among the various entities and was responsible for the 1998 Community Charrette and the new Comprehensive Plan that was born of the Charrette.
I was a founding member of the Marshall County Economic Development Corp. (MCEDC), which brought representatives from the county and each of the municipalities together to foster a collaborative effort towards economic growth. While chairman of MCEDC, I worked with Roger Umbaugh and Kevin Overmyer to start the County Development for the Future (CDFF) meetings. The CDFF meetings were started to bring the communities of Marshall County together to discuss challenges, successes and ways they could collaborate to learn from each other and make things better. One of the successes of CDFF was the community collaboration that brought about Marshall County Crossroads and Marshall County’s successful bid for Stellar Region designation.
I always have high hopes for these collaborative efforts. They really do bring the strengths of multiple people, agencies and entities together to create something bigger than the individual parts. There does seem to be a limited life span for them though. The Second Century Committee came together and did great things by organizing the participating groups. But then as the second generation of leaders took the reigns, it devolved into an executive committee that met and did most of the tasks themselves. They no longer had meetings to involve the underlying groups so the big initiatives went away. As the members of the exec committee burned out, less got done. They attempted to evolve into a Main Street organization, but that transition was not very successful. Main Street reorganized as Develop Culver. While Develop Culver is creating some successes, it’s not with the same larger collaboration of groups that made the Second Century Committee successful.
CDFF was extremely successful. The collaboration between communities broke down the long standing basketball rivalries and had Marshall County Communities working together. Attendees applauded the successes of their sister communities and networked after the meetings on ways to replicate those successes in the other Marshall County Communities. The other communities were all-in when Culver sought Stellar Community designation and helped make it happen. Because of that, I think CDFF was largely responsible for spawning Marshall County Crossroads and the designation of Marshall County as a Stellar Region. But a transition to a new executive director of MCEDC resulted in meetings that were more about his self-promotion and less about the collaboration. CDFF helped move us into the larger region with St. Joe and Elkhart counties when Regional Cities as launched, but at the cost of lost focus on our local communities and the tending of those new relationships. The meetings have devolved further and no longer list the accomplishments and goals of the communities. While they often bring useful information to those that attend, some communities no longer send representatives and there is no longer accountability or celebration of successes.
I was only peripherally involved with Marshall County Crossroads, serving on the larger committee and a subcommittee without having any leadership role. Crossroads took the base collaboration of CDFF and injected it with new life. It was CDFF on steroids for a while! The number of people that it brought in was amazing and the work that got done by the volunteer group was phenomenal. They accomplished the base goal of obtaining Stellar Region designation for Marshall County and set a follow up goal of continuing the collaboration and moving other issues forward as well. But the huge effort required for Stellar became difficult to sustain with a volunteer group. Crossroads has tried to spawn a new and more formal group, ONE Marshall County, but funding has been difficult and communication has deteriorated. Many of the Crossroads leaders have stepped aside and the new group is struggling to sustain the enthusiasm while also fighting some local politicians that (falsely) accuse them of trying to bypass normal government procedures. This has devolved back to infighting among communities. It’s unclear whether the group will survive Wolfe’s Dilemma.
While I continue to be supportive of collaborative efforts and think it results in outsized returns on investment, I’m coming to think that maybe they could work best as task forces in lieu of standing committees or long term organizations. So much of the initial energy and work is done by the original people starting the collaboration, but that energy and focus can become lost as the initial leaders burnout and others come in who don’t understand or agree with the core mission. Maybe they should be treated like fireworks that explode in a bright frenzy that everyone is excited about, and then everyone applauds at the end and everyone leaves happy as the smoke dissipates… Trying to sustain that frenetic energy isn’t possible and lesser results are seen as disappointing.
For this reason, I’m pleased that the three community foundations seem to be coming together for a common goal, but instead of forming a new group, they’re looking to MACOG to expand their services to sustain this. Combining the excitement and energy that bringing volunteers together generates with the infrastructure of an existing organization makes sense. This could be a new model that works. Only time will tell…
The Heritage Park Pergola Dedication was in the Culver Citizen last week. The project was built by Easterday Construction Co., Inc. in the 90’s. It was commissioned by Richard Ford. I’ve discussed it here, here and here in the past.
One of the cool things about working in construction is the ability to drive around our area and see the projects that become history over time. Great Grandpa Easterday wasn’t the best about recording the early history of Easterday Construction… He was too busy running a business! But for those of us that remember, we see reminders of our beginnings as we look around Culver and throughout our region.
The Pony Barn remains adjacent to the Easterday Construction Co., Inc. office as a reminder of when the site was the Easterday beef farm at the edge of town. (Before the high school was built, neighborhood kids would ride their bikes to the north end of Slate Street and feed treats to the Grandpa Easterday’s Hereford Cattle in the field there.) The dedication marker on the elementary school gym is a reminder of a depression era project we completed, when we had a three digit phone number and our offices were in on the top floor of the State Exchange Bank Building (Now First Farmers Bank & Trust). Those that remember that history are disappearing. Only the 3rd and 4th generations of the Easterday Construction family remain and some of them have passed on. Those of us that are left still remain proud of the mark we have left in the history of Culver and surrounding communities.
When the Marshall County Community Foundation (MCCF) built their new facility, it was to house MCCF, Marshall County United Way (MCUW) and Growing Kids Learning Center. The building would belong to MCCF. MCCF would continue to operate with joint staff shared with MCUW. Growing Kids would be a rent paying tenant. When it came time to name the building, I lobbied hard for some iteration of MC2. I thought it was a no brainer, since it fit with the joint philosophy of MCCF and MCUW, that the two groups together were more than the sum of their parts, i.e. MCCF x MCUW not MCCF + MCUW. Oh, well… This was one of those cases where what seemed obvious to me wasn’t palatable to others. The building is now known as the Marshall County Philanthropy Center. I’m sorry, but 7 years later, who knows that or refers to that!? We could have had something much more catchy! Ha!
I wasn’t involved at the start of One Marshall County. I do kind of like that name, but I go back to it also being an organization designed to be more than the sum of its parts. Another missed opportunity to use MC2. If I’d been involved at the beginning of Marshall County Crossroads, I would really have hit this hard for them too!
So I’m throwing this out there. Some Marshall County organization or group of organizations should be the first to pick up MC2 and run with it! If your name works in an “E”, even better since you could really roll with all of Einstein’s equation. What group doesn’t strive to be faster than light? Well, I guess there’s always Heinz Ketsup which bragged on being think in their Anticipation commercial. Oooo! Oooo! Maybe MCEDC! They have all three letters in there!
You may not of heard it here first, but I haven’t heard anyone else in Marshall County using MC2. It’s free advice. Run with it!
One of the issues facing entry level workers is the issue of deposits. There is a deposit required for a rental unit. (In the case of a new home buyer, it’s the down payment.) There is a deposit required to get water turned on. There is a deposit required to get the gas turned on. There is a deposit required to get the electric turned on. For someone just starting out, this can be daunting. When someone moves, theoretically they’ll get their deposits back from the previous rental, but not before they have to put them down for the new place.
These have come about due to landlords, municipalities and utilities getting burned by tenants and homeowners skipping out on bills. For that reason, the justification for deposits is there. But… how often is this an issue in the first month when all the deposits are required? I would venture to say that 9 times out of 10, this is an end of occupancy issue, not a starting problem. Theoretically, the landlord renting to the tenant or the bank making the loan on a new purchase have vetted the tenant’s ability to afford their housing choice at least initially.
The new housing in Plymouth at Riverside Commons is geared towards lower wage earners. People that are good workers with steady income, but not at a level to afford good housing. These units are 100% electric and on city water and sewer, so there are only three deposits required. Unfortunately, Plymouth’s deposit requirement for water is $150. REMC, which provides the electric, has a deposit of $350, plus a $10 membership fee for the co-op. That’s $500+ in deposits without counting the rental deposit. This does not make it easy for a renter to move from substandard housing to the new units. The Paddocks in Culver runs into similar issues qualifying tenants, though I don’t think the start-up costs for water, sewer and electric are quite as high.
So, here’s what I would like to suggest for municipalities:
The above isn’t a panacea, but it would help low-income workers with a hand up that shouldn’t hurt the municipality much, if any. If the same principles could be applied to private utilities and maybe even rents, then it would be an equitable way of solving the insurance provided by deposits, while reducing the penalty those deposits put on low income individuals and families. This is just the beginning of a thought on a possible solution… But I think it is something worth consideration and refinement.