Our Campaigns
What we focus our action and advocacy on to make Steubenville the best it can be
Public & Active Transportation
We seek to make it more possible to navigate and go about one's life in Steubenville without having to own a private vehicle. Highlighting our existing and hoped for public transportation infrastructure, hosting community bike rides, and highlighting multi-modal transportation investment for health, economic development, and community building are all things we do.
- We organize summer monthly bike rides throughout downtown Steubenville and beyond.
- We advocate for the building and dedication of infrastructure to bring the Great American Rail Trail through Steubenville.
- We build relationships with our regional transit authority (SVRTA) to continue to make the system a pleasant, useful, and dignified means of getting around Steubenville.
Civic & Neighborhood Pride
We seek to see our city be proud of itself, and live in and through that pride. Through creating neighborhood activation groups to coordinate block parties, cleanups, neighborhood walks, and doing local history research projects, we aim to celebrate and understand Steubenville's contemporary history for our present and our future.
- We conduct local history research projects and present our findings to the community and city council (such as our neighborhood history and centennial memorial arches presentations).
- We lead community clean ups and walks of Steubenville's shared infrastructure (such as the LaBelle staircases).
- We promote the formation of neighborhood associations in every neighborhood of Steubenville, helping to equip neighborhood leaders with support and resources to mobilize their own neighborhood and steer its future.
Transparent Local Government
We seek to hold accountable and build relationships with our elected and appointed officials through regularly attending public meetings. We also work to understand the finances of our city: reviewing our city's budget, how land and property is taxed, making plain how new infrastructure spending is prioritized, and how we are handling our existing infrastructure liabilities.
- We regularly attend city council and committee meetings and provide thorough writeups of their proceedings.
- We meet one-on-one with elected and appointed city officials and help citizens meet their city counselors.
- We read through city plans and reports (Comprehensive Plans, Financial Reports, etc.) and break them down into digestible summaries.
Downtown Redevelopment
We seek to see our historic downtown bursting with life! We do this through advocating for parking and zoning reform, responsible vacant building and land policies, encouraging residential redevelopment downtown, 2nd and 3rd story redevelopment, and historic preservation. We also want to see transparency in the processes to build and start a business in Steubenville.
- We make an intentional effort to be present at a wide variety of downtown events (such as First Fridays).
- Utilizing GIS and data analysis skills of our members, we produce maps and reports showing downtown parking quantities, value per acre analysis of property taxes, and more, to inform our leaders on steps they can take to make redevelopment of our downtown more attractive and feasible.
- We highlight each and every incremental step in the fixing up of downtown through celebrating new businesses and new festivals.
A Human-Centered Steubenville
We seek to be a group which can bring together citizens and community groups of good will to discern Steubenville city's human-centered future. It is important that we address the tension between reviving our downtown and dealing with old and embedded ways of doing things, so that we can pursue Steubenville's common good, today.
- We network with a wide variety of organizations, even those not directly focused on Steubenville's built environment, but whom nonetheless are focused on the common good of Steubenville.
- We speak about Strong Towns principles to community groups and associations (historically this has included the Steubenville Kiwanis, classes at Franciscan University, and the Ohio Valley Youth Network).
- We participate in Steubenville's many holiday parades (such as the Steubenville Christmas parade).
