Last month I confessed my love of data, and how useful it can be in developing a strategy for where to invest the Foundation’s grants dollars, and how to measure the effectiveness of those grant investments.
But data, just sitting there on a page staring up at you, isn’t really that helpful on its own. For example, you can read thousands of pages of data, and still not know what to do! I know because I’ve done that before!
What unlocks the value of data is doing analysis of it and building a reasonable conclusion from that analysis work.
This month I want to focus on the topic of analysis, and how it turns data into action. Without quoting a bunch of data, here is a conclusion that is based on analysis done by an organization called the Brookings Institute.
A study conducted by Tracy Hadden Loh of the Brookings Institute made this conclusion based on a study of 45 cities: “A dynamic downtown generates employment, incubates small businesses, and makes a community proud.”
It is a conclusion like this that helps decision-makers in our community embrace the importance of doing work in our downtown.
But there are real challenges to having a successful downtown.
One of the main challenges a downtown encounters is when there are buildings that are 1) vacant (no tenant(s)), 2) dormant (have a tenant, but the tenant isn’t active in the building), or 3) in poor condition (repairs to commercial buildings are expensive and add up over time).
You may have noticed some of the efforts happening in our downtown. These efforts are designed to take on this main challenge over time. For the past 3 years the Foundation and the City of Barberton have provided funding support for Main Street Barberton (MSB). MSB is focused entirely on making our downtown a destination for our residents and people who are looking to enjoy a great family atmosphere in a charming downtown. They put on events, support small businesses with marketing and promotion, support building owners by helping them find quality businesses to move in, help administrate useful grant programs that building and business owners can use to make improvements, and more.
In the past few years, the Foundation has also funded a grant program that has been administrated by our friends at the Barberton Community Development Corporation. This grant program is called the “Downtown Building Rehabilitation Program.” It is designed to provide funding for building owners and businesses that wish to make improvements to buildings in downtown Barberton.
You may have seen the new street-level windows at Kave, for example. These new windows were paid for, in part, by this program.
In 2025 the Foundation is enhancing this grant program by expanding it into two different types of grants that are focused on bringing new businesses to our community and fixing up our downtown buildings.
One type of grant provides up to $100k each to purchase and renovate a downtown building for a business that is new to Barberton. This grant is a match, meaning to receive as much as $100k, the business has to invest an equal amount. This arrangement ensures that the businesses coming to Barberton are already successful and have money to invest. It also means they view Barberton as a great place to invest to see their business grow!
The other type of grant in the program provides up to $20k each to help a new Barberton business to promote itself and get set up to be successful in downtown Barberton.
There are buildings in our downtown right now that are vacant and dormant, and we are making plans to help activate them at the Foundation. The goal is to have a downtown that is full of useful, buildings full of activity!
This is a big opportunity, and a big investment that will take place over the next two decades!
We are fortunate to have a Foundation in our community, and a board here that is willing to collect data, analyze it, and make funding choices that will make our downtown a vibrant, energy-filled place to spend time now and into the future.
In Community,
Josh Gordon
Executive Director
Barberton Community Foundation
