This American Hero Was the Victim of a Scam, But These Volunteers are Saving the Day

After sustaining arm and leg injuries from shrapnel and a traumatic brain injury from a suicide bomb attack while in Afghanistan, veteran Everett “Alex” Haworth thought that life was on the upswing: He and his wife Mallorie closed on a house in Olmsted Township, Ohio and moved in with their baby daughter.
But unfortunately, their troubles were just beginning. Their remodeled ranch home passed its inspection, but once the family settled in, they discovered rampant mold behind the new drywall — rendering the house unlivable.
The family relocated, moving in with Mallorie’s mom, but they still had to pay the mortgage on their ruined home, a difficult proposition with Alex still in rehab and Mallorie completing her master’s degree in psychology, all the while raising their daughter.
“We put money in our house and in our attorney. We ran out of money both ways,” Mallorie told Regina Brett of the Cleveland Plain Dealer back in February. “It hurts. It’s been a few months of no hope. We’re not the kind to ask for help. We want to be the ones helping.”
But this month, a group of volunteers from the Home Depot, the Carpenters Union and members of the VFW are tearing out the damaged parts of the Haworth’s home and refurbishing it, providing new bathrooms, paint and even landscaping.
Alex tells Enrique Correa of Fox 8 Cleveland, “We are gonna have more than a home; we are gonna have our lives restored…It’s amazing and very humbling to know that people you never met a day in your life before, are coming to help you out.”
These very deserving homeowners should be able to move in by the end of October.
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Better, Faster, Stronger: Why Ohio is Sending Government Officials to Boot Camp

As the summer heats up, Ohio officials are heading to boot camp to shape up and earn white, yellow, green and black belts.
Despite the martial arts belt system, government workers are not there to learn kicking techniques. Rather, they’re being educated on how to maximize efficiency through streamlining processes, strategic planning and data analysis from LeanOhio, a statewide network providing a series of programs and certification to help state employees improve government services.
Government and municipal workers can attend a five-day intensive training, the LeanOhio Bootcamp, or attend one of the several sessions in the LeanOhio Training Academy — which allows participants to achieve credibility measured through the martial-arts system of white to yellow to green to black belts. The academy also offers participants a chance to prove their management chops by implementing an action plan after they return to work. If they’re successful, workers receive a camouflage belt.
During the 40-hour boot camp, participants identify redundant processes and discuss ways to eliminate wasteful steps as well as how to incorporate the Six Sigma process improvement system, with the goal of making government “simpler, faster, better, and less costly,” according to the website.
Courses are offered each week this month and into August throughout the state including in areas such as Cincinnati, Elyria, Bay Village and Columbus. College towns like Athens and Kent will also offer training sessions. Scholarships to attend are also available through the Local Government Efficiency Program.

“We really feel excited that the results we got in state government were such that now there’s an opportunity for cities, counties and local governments to get access to this to get those same kinds of results,” said Steve Wall, director of continuous improvement for the state of Ohio.

LeanOhio contends that for every $1 invested into the program’s activities in 2013, the state gained more than $40 in projected savings, Government Executive reports.

For Sherri Scheetz, chief administrative officer for the Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority, boot camp was a chance to learn how to be as effective as possible as budget cuts loom. 

“We are really feeling the crunch as our federal resources dwindle, our properties age and we still maintain high performance,” she said. “This is the way we will be able to build capacity even in the face of all these cuts and continue to provide the best of service. And that’s our purpose in being, to serve the public.”
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Ohio Takes Their Agriculture Industry to Auction

Haggling and bartering are hardly a pastime, and the familiar auction noises of the bang of the gavel and “sold” are the sounds of hope for economic revitalization.  At least that is the intention of Ohio Appalachian famers who replaced the traditional farmer’s market with a good old-fashioned produce auction.
While many famer’s markets are located near major cities, making them too far for many farmers to travel — especially when there’s no guarantee that the produce will sell. In contrast, produce auctions are more accessible to farmers.
The way a produce auction works is simple: On the day of the auction, farmers roll up with cars full of their produce, the auctioneer begins the auction, potential buyers bid on the goods, and famers return home with empty cars. Although the process is long, both growers and buyers leave satisfied.
The first produce auction sprouted in Ohio in 1992 with the help of the Ohio Farm Bureau Foundation and founders Jean and Marvin Konkle. Today, though, the government barely plays any role in it. The auctions are community funded, as the people sell shares locally to generate the money to start a new auction. Originally operating with a net loss, the past five years have seen an increase in profits for famers. Chesterhill, one of the poorest parts of the Ohio – Appalachian region had a profit of $223,000 for 130 farmers in 2013, while the largest and most cosmopolitan Mount Hope Produce Auction grossed a whopping $10 million in 2011.
Economics isn’t the only benefit, though, as educational classes for the farmers are also part of the deal. Rural Auction, who owns and operates the Chesterhill Auction, offers classes, which train and instruct farmers on how to clean their produce for direct sell as well as to how to improve agricultural processes, which, in turn, has boosted sales and the economy.
The quality and freshness of the food has attracted the attention of the community at large. In addition to the 1,300 registered buyers at the Chesterhill Produce Auction, are 35-40 commercial buyers — including Ohio University. Making the auction more appealing and easier for buyers is the ability to order produce remotely.
Bottom line, both commercial buyers and the community are eager to participate. But why? “At the very basic, basic level, it’s because the food’s better,” said Chef Matt Rapposelli of Ohio University told Dowser. “If you have an opportunity to support a neighbor rather than a corporate entity, you should support the neighbor.”
That support is being felt in a region facing high unemployment, particularly in agriculture. Produce auctions are continuing to pop up across the country, with the number currently at 50. In time, however, these fun community gatherings could be the needed impetus to rejuvenate the agricultural industry nationwide.
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A Safe Childcare Option for Low-Income Parents Working the Night Shift

It’s hard enough to find high-quality, affordable childcare. But when you work the night shift, as many low-income mothers and fathers do, it can be an insurmountable challenge.
Fortunately, for parents living in Chillicothe, Ohio, there’s an answer: An overnight childcare center.
The Carver Community Center is partnering with Goodwill Industries to expand its daycare services to offer childcare around the clock. Justine Smith, the director of the center, told Dominic Binkley of The Colombus Dispatch, “There are a lot of second- and third-shift jobs available in Columbus. (Parents) are more than happy to drive to Columbus for work, but when it comes to child care, they’re kind of stuck.”
As middle-class parents can attest, the cost of childcare isn’t cheap. (A recent report showed that childcare has become more expensive than college tuition in 31 states.) However, the Carver Community Center manages to keep prices low — most parents pay only $55 to $130 a week — through donations, grants, and support from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Some families that are especially needy only contribute a co-pay of a few dollars.
Still, even if the childcare is affordable, it has to be offered during the hours that parents can actually use it. The Carver Community Center’s rare nighttime hours will allow many parents keep their jobs and not depend on inconsistent or unsafe overnight care for their kids.
Currently there’s a waiting list for night care at the center. “I can honestly say I hate to turn a child away,” Smith told Binkley. “If somebody gave me $1 million, then I would have every kid in the world in this place, but I’ve got to look at the funding.”
For the families that the center is able to help, however, the security that comes with knowing their children are well cared for while they work is priceless.
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Volunteering Enables Low-Income Ohioans to Get Their Own Two Wheels

When it comes to low-cost transportation and exercise, nothing compares to a bike. But you’re more likely to see people commuting to work and school in high-income communities than in low-income ones.
Toledo Bikes! is looking to change that dynamic by spreading the benefits of cycling to people of all income levels.
The Ohio nonprofit recovers used bicycles and refurbishes them while also teaching low-income kids and adults how to make repairs. People can volunteer in the repair shop, and once they fulfill a certain number of hours, they are given a bicycle of their own. Last year, the center racked up 848 volunteer hours, and 44 people earned their own wheels.
Toledo Bikes! also donates bicycles to community organizations and sells them at affordable prices, using the profits to keep its programs running.
This year, Toledo’s Hawkins Elementary School held a bike-themed essay competition. The 12 kids who wrote the best compositions explaining why they’d like a bicycle got to ride one home, supplied by Toledo Bikes! Even those who didn’t win one were able to enroll in one of the center’s build-a-bike or bike maintenance classes.
Erik Thomas of Toledo Bikes! told Eric Wildstein of WNWO that kids who start out taking classes are apt to return to the bike shop. “A lot of them we see coming back over the years as they’ve grown up,” he said. “They’ve gotten their first job, they need transportation, they’ll come in here and earn some hours.”

Heroes of the Gridiron Lend a Hand to a Battlefield Hero

Justin Adamson, center for the University of Notre dame’s famed Fighting Irish football team, doesn’t just work hard on the field. Like many other college students whose finances are tight, he holds an outside job — working at Whole Foods Market, demonstrating salad dressings.
While dolling out tasty dressings to shoppers one day at a store in Ohio, Howard Goldberg stopped by Adamson’s table. Goldberg works for the nonprofit Purple Heart Homes, which purchases and renovates affordable homes for veterans.
Goldberg must also be a smooth talker, because by the end of their salad dressing exchange, Adamson had agreed to help renovate a home for an injured veteran. Not only that, but he said he’d bring along some of his teammates to provide additional manpower. Adamson told Andrew Cass of the News-Herald that he and Goldberg “talk[ed] for about an hour just going on about what this project means to a lot of people and what it can do in the community.”
Adamson took the idea to his coaches, who in turn, presented it to the team. Thirty football players jumped at the chance to volunteer, but only 12 players were able to be transported to the project. On April 25, the dozen helped demolish a kitchen and renovate the basement of the Ohio home of Leo Robinson, a wounded Marine Corps vet. (The house had been purchased by Purple Heart Homes.)
Once the renovation is complete, Robinson will pay 50 percent of the mortgage’s value, as part of the nonprofit’s mission to give vets a “hand up, not a hand out.”
Sophomore wide receiver Dajuhn Graham said, “I love doing things like this. My dad, that’s what he does for a living, he builds houses, and I actually do things like this so it’s nothing new to me.”
Homeowner Robinson told Cass that seeing all the football players pitch in to fix up his house “feels great. When we get back after going through everything we go through, it’s like you think people don’t care anymore, that society’s dead…But there are still people who care and want to help the community out.”
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Could Mentors Be the Key to Lifting Families Out of Poverty?

Countless programs have perfected the mentoring model between kids and adults. But what about a mentoring program for all adults?
For more than a decade, the nonprofit Circles USA has proved that mentors can help low-income adults thrive. Scott Miller started the organization (which pairs those struggling with poverty with higher-income coaches) back in 2000 as, according to the website, “a way to increase the capacities of communities to address poverty.” There are now local Circles branches in 23 states.
The mentors help guide their mentees through such important tasks as polishing a resume, negotiating debt repayments, setting up a bill-paying system, finding a job, and ensuring good childcare. Each week, participants meet together for support and to discuss life strategies.
Cynthia Bowers interviewed Miller in 2011 for CBS News. “If you’re in poverty in this country, it is just a day-to-day grind to get things done,” Miller said. “So very intelligent, very emotionally capable people are stuck in this cycle of non-stop problem solving. And so people coming along and lifting some of that burden is huge.”
But easing that burden is difficult. While Bowers noted that the drop out rate for the program is high — 58 percent — those who do stay involved in Circles reap big rewards: “Our research now shows that their income is going up on average 48 percent. Their assets are going up by 115 percent and their welfare is going down by 36 percent.”
In December, the Circles program in Coshocton, Ohio graduated its first class of leaders who will guide their own Circles groups. One of the new leaders is Larry Stottsberry, who told Mark Fortune of the Coshocton Beacon, “Being a veteran, being out of the military, and thinking you can be successful, sometimes you get down in a rut, something had to bring me out of it. This group brought me out…This is more about showing people that are struggling that you care about them when you are together. It’s more about helping each other out even if you don’t have anything to help them out with. It’s like my mom and dad always said, ‘Even though you don’t get anything for Christmas, it’s being there and sharing love.'”
With generous people like Larry Stottsberry signing on to help those less fortunate then themselves every year, the circle of success is bound to continue.
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What Do Kid Rock, John Mellencamp and Mitch Albom Have in Common?

Despite their divergent musical styles of classic rockers John Mellencamp and Z.Z. Top, rap-rocker Kid Rock, and country star Kix Brooks, they’ve come together in the fight to prevent homelessness among veterans.
These well-known Americans are giving their time and money to Toledo, Ohio-based Veterans Matter, a nonprofit working to unite the efforts of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Department of Housing and Development to identify veterans at risk for falling into homelessness and those already on the streets — connecting them with the resources they need to find an affordable place to live.
Best-selling author Mitch Albom is involved with the nonprofit too, serving as the honorary chairman of Veterans Matter’s Michigan chapter, fundraising and speaking to groups to raise awareness of the problem. “Our veterans — those men and women who have sacrificed so much to ensure our freedom—deserve better than a home on the streets,” Albom told Veterans Matter.
Ken Leslie, founder of Veterans Matter who once was homeless himself, explained to Lissa Guyton of ABC13 how the program works: “The VA finds the vets and gets them ready for the housing. HUD finds the section 8 housing long term and we provide the deposit money which is often the last barrier preventing them from getting over the threshold.”
Veterans Matter recently celebrated housing its 200th veteran in six states: Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Indiana, Washington, Tennessee, and Massachusetts.
Leslie told Guyton, “Helping people is probably the most powerful thing there is. There are more than 57,000 vets on the streets of our nation, and many of them are abandoned and forgotten. Some of them are beaten, robbed and even killed on the streets. If that happened behind enemy lines, Americans would be outraged. Veterans Matter is our outrage.”
With more vets helped every year, Veterans Matter will continue to demonstrate the power of transforming that outrage into compassion.  
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The Death of the Hanging Chad: How to Build a Better Ballot

There were few hotter spots on the political map in 2012 than the state of Ohio. President Barack Obama and Republican Party nominee Mitt Romney visited the swing state no fewer than 83 times combined over the course of the calendar year. And for good reason: Ohio has picked the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1960.
Heading into Election Day, polls showed the president had a narrow edge. On election night, Fox News, among others, called Ohio for Obama, putting him over the top and effectively ending the evening. The veteran Republican operative Karl Rove flipped out. Angry Republicans demanded a recount, arguing that fraud had influenced the result. It could have been a replay of Florida 2000.
But it wasn’t — thanks, in some small measure, to the efforts of a design consultant named Dana Chisnell. She’s the person election bureaus call to create bulletproof ballots, ones that are clear enough and understandable enough to ensure that every vote counts. For the 2012 election, Chisnell had some specific thoughts for Ohio: Simplify the instructions on the ballot, for starters, and put all the candidates in the race in one column — elements that were missing in Ohio in the 2008 election, when many confused constituents ended up voting twice. “I was confident that the ballots were fine this time,” says Chisnell about the 2012 vote. “When I was talking to the TV on election night, I said, ‘I know it’s not the ballots, you can recount all you want.’”
Fixing how a ballot looks seems like it should be a simple task — choose a design, and stick to it — but in fact each state has its own voting culture, with unique laws and customs that influence its balloting. Oregon and Washington have gone to all vote-by-mail systems, while other states favor electronic touch screens or paper optical scan ballots. New York actually reverted to decades-old lever machines after having multiple problems with newer technology. The result: no one-size-fits-all ballot.
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Into this confusion stepped Chisnell. Fourteen years ago, she was living in San Francisco and running a private consulting business, advising firms on how to improve the language and look of their websites by talking to users and testing the results. The year was 2000, and the country was in the throes of its ballot woes.
The infamous butterfly ballot, a staggered two-page layout with candidate names on alternating sides of a central punch-button column, had caused much confusion among Florida voters. Palm Beach County’s election supervisor had made the fateful mistake of enlarging the type on the ballot to accommodate Sunbelt voters’ aging eyes — unwittingly throwing off the alignment in the process. “It was pretty easy to vote for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore,” says Chisnell, who observed the saga unfolding on TV. “All the crazy recounts were happening not because of a security problem but because of a basic design problem. People had voted for candidates they didn’t intend to because of the design of the ballots.
Chisnell watched, fascinated by on-the-street interviews with grannies complaining that they felt tricked because the ballot was difficult to use. (She has since learned that about 20 percent of Florida voters were exposed to hard-to-read ballots.) This got her thinking: Aren’t there any professional designers involved in creating ballots? She asked around and none of her peers were. She began to search the Internet for ways she could help.
After checking out various government websites, she came across a five-person Ballot Simplification Committee in San Francisco — “It’s like Iron Chef for editors,” says Chisnell — that was responsible for writing the plain-language descriptions of ballot measures. It took a few years, but she wangled her way onto the committee, obtaining an appointment by the mayor. Chisnell, then 43, was the youngest person in the group by far. “There aren’t that many people who can spend 10 weeks a year working for free on this,” says Chisnell, who served from 2005 to 2009 on the pro bono committee. (Luckily, her day-job clients cut her some slack during exhausting election weeks.)
“Dana was really beneficial to the committee,” says Barbara Carr, management assistant at the San Francisco Department of Elections who served as the clerk on the committee. “She was good at making things clearer without losing the meaning.”
Chisnell resigned from the committee when she moved in 2009 to Boston (for love — she’s getting married this spring), but she’s made ballots an ongoing passion project. She went on to work on the Design for Democracy project — a group dedicated to using design tools to make ballots and voting more understandable; it researched and set forth the best practices for creating printed ballots, optical scan ballots, signs and posters at polling places. But Chisnell realized that getting various state election officials to implement the project’s 300 pages of findings would be tough. What’s more, the Election Assistance Commission in Silver Spring, Md., the major government backer of ballot research, was being gutted; research money was drying up. Chisnell and her colleagues feared that their findings would just sit there, gathering dust.
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One day, in the summer of 2011, after Chisnell had given a speech about the issue at a conference in Portland, Ore., a man approached her — “I had hoped he was a wealthy donor!” says Chisnell — and suggested she do a Kickstarter project to make use of her findings. With his help, she did. Working with colleagues Whitney Quesenbery and Drew Davies, Chisnell came up with the idea of raising money to create tiny field-guide booklets with easy-to-implement, actionable tips — the boiled-down essence of their research. “It was a stroke of genius on Dana’s part to take the big pile of paper and get it down to something cute,” says Quesenbery. “If it’s cute, it can’t be that hard to implement.”
Among her colleagues’ suggestions: Don’t use all upper-case letters, because they’re harder to read. Avoid centered type. Pick one sans serif font instead of many. And use shading and contrast to help voters navigate the different races featured on the ballot. “Simple things have had the most impact,” says Chisnell.
Chisnell launched a successful Kickstarter campaign in April 2012 to fund the creation of the Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent series. Her slogan: Democracy is a design problem. She emailed her entire address book, begging family and friends for money and asking them to do the same. With the support of 320 backers, Chisnell raised $20,761, exceeding her goal of $15,000. “The payoff wasn’t really the funding, but meeting a community of people who are really interested in this topic,” says Chisnell.
The Kickstarter campaign also caught the attention of the people at the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded Chisnell and her team of 30 volunteers a $75,000 grant. The money went to the creation, promotion and distribution of eight booklets on topics such as designing usable ballots, writing instructions that voters can easily understand and sprucing up election department websites. The money also financed two more studies on creating more effective county election websites and printed voter education material.
The guides are now in their third printing, with 1,500 sets being used in 43 states and in four Canadian and European provinces. Demand has exceeded supply. Georgia requested one set for every county. So did Ohio. “The measure of success is whether we have fewer spoiled ballots, fewer calls to the call center and fewer recounts,” says Chisnell, who notes that outcomes have been anecdotal. “We do [have all that], although it’s hard to say this is all because of the field guides, but we are pretty confident they’re making a difference.”
Election officials certainly agree. In the fateful 2012 elections in Ohio, Chisnell’s counsel was a godsend. “We took as many of the suggestions as we could from her,” says Matt Masterson, deputy chief of staff for the Ohio secretary of state, who noted that almost all of Chisnell’s ideas involved no additional costs. “She really made the ballot easier to use.” And her ideas worked. “Based on what we saw with the 2012 election undervotes and overvotes, time in the ballot box and general feedback from the boards,” says Masterson, “we have no doubt that the suggestions Dana provided had a positive impact.”
These days, Chisnell is still working to make every vote count. She testified before the Presidential Commission on Election Administration in Pennsylvania and Ohio about using ballot design to improve the election experience, especially in response to the long lines at the polls in 2012. She and Quesenbery have started the Center for Civic Design, which they hope to make into a funded research center. She’s also looking for ways to make multilingual ballots easier to use.
“Dana is one of the entrepreneurs in this field,” says Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, who has worked closely with her. “There is a huge need for the work she is doing and not a lot of support for it. She is making change happen through her own will.”
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Here’s How to Restore American Fashion Manufacturing

In case you haven’t heard, American manufacturing is making a comeback, and the fashion industry is no exception. For more than 75 years, Ohio Knitting Mills was one of the largest knitwear manufacturers in the U.S., producing private-label garments for stores such as Sears and Saks Fifth Avenue, and designer labels like Van Heusen and Jack Winter. At its peak, this business, owned and operated by the Stone-Rand family, employed more than 1,000 workers — an economic beacon for Cleveland. But amid the rise of garment outsourcing in the U.S., the factory closed its doors at the turn of the century, ending a well-known mainstay in American fashion manufacturing. But Steven Tater, a designer who met the family in 2005, wasn’t about to add Ohio Knitting Mills to the history books, alongside many other factories that have been shuttered across the U.S. Armed with a trove of creative works bequeathed to him from the Stone-Rand family, Tater has revived Ohio Knitting Mills and its brand.
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Over the past few years, Tater and his team have put together a small sewing factory in Cleveland, where they have used patterns from the Ohio Knitting Mills archive to create their own knitwear line. These garments are produced completely in their Ohio factory. From developing and dying yarns to designing styles and patterns; and from knitting the fabric to cutting, sewing and finishing the garments, the Ohio Knitting Mills is an all-in-one design and manufacturing company. Last year, the business created its first collection of men’s sweaters, and it already has retail accounts at stores in big cities across the U.S., as well as in Tokyo. Now Tater and his employees are looking toward the future. “One of the most important lessons we’ve learned on this journey is manufacturing makes communities,” Tater says. With that in mind, he’s turning to their community for help. “In order for us to become a fully operating knitwear factory, and to produce our new collection, we have to buy yarns and other raw materials to fill our orders, as well as add some special sewing machines and hire some folks to help us make our sweaters.”
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Tater has created an Indiegogo campaign to raise $33,400 in order to help Ohio Knitting Mills cement its place in American fashion manufacturing once again. With these funds, the business will not only grow its own eponymous knitwear brand, but Tater hopes they can also help produce knit-based designs for other labels, which until now have almost exclusively produced knitwear overseas simply because the resources didn’t exist in the U.S.. “Today, there is a large need for domestic knitting production,” Tater writes on the Indiegogo campaign. “Supporting this campaign not only helps our company, it also can help other designers to create their knitwear products with us.” If that doesn’t have you convinced, check out the awesome rewards the brand is offering. A vintage houndstooth knitted beanie? Count us in.
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