Middlebury & Bristol

Four years after he helped spark the Vibrant Communities movement, inspiring Elkhart County residents to invest not only their time and energy but also their emotional attachment, Peter Kageyama is returning to speak at The Big Event on Wednesday, January 22, at the Lerner Theatre.

Kageyama’s message about the importance of quality of place was a hit with the beyond-capacity crowd of more than 600 who filled the Crystal Ballroom and an adjacent room.

The conversations that ensued about what residents loved about their city and what they wanted to be further developed or improved led to the formation of a 77-item Action Agenda. The proposals included steps to beautify downtowns and neighborhoods and make public spaces more vibrant and inclusive.

“Four years ago, we had a conversation that lit a bunch of fires. This year we’re going to celebrate those fires and figure out those next steps and where we’re going to take this,” Kageyama said.

In his first two books, Kageyama highlights the importance of the arts, parks and green spaces, aesthetics and community events. He wrote of the importance of “co-creators,” community leaders who led from grassroots to create lasting positive change, and a city’s “love notes,” gestures that build emotional attachment. He says emotions such as love for a place hold a tremendous influence on how residents experience their city.

“What I didn’t fully apprehend (then) is how important those things are to a community,” he said. “I have a deeper understanding of how it all fits together.

Kageyama’s latest book, “The Emotional Infrastructure of Places,” was published last fall. His insights will inform his talk on January 22.

As cities seek to rebuild streets, bridges and other public infrastructure, they need to consider seriously the emotional impact of those changes and not merely as projects to be engineered.

“Let’s think about this stuff in a more holistic way. (Projects such as new streets or bridges) will have a generational impact … we have to live with it for a long time, and when (a project) lives a long time, its qualities manifest itself (over a long period of time).

Elkhart County, it’s time for all of us to come together.

The Big Event at 4 p.m. Wednesday, January 22, at the Lerner Theatre is not only a chance to celebrate everything that makes Elkhart County vibrant and a great place to live, work, invest and play, you will also be the first to get a look at the county’s new destination brand.

While the formal presentation begins at 5 p.m., an exhibit hall will open at 4 p.m. in the Crystal Ballroom so that everyone can check out how cool Elkhart County is and the amazing things made here at an exhibit hall in the Crystal Ballroom. The exhibits will also be open for about an hour after the conclusion of the event.

Represent your community — everyone from Elkhart to Nappanee, Wakarusa to Bristol, and Goshen to Middlebury is welcome to hear all about Elkhart County’s brand identity as the platform to unite our diverse communities. The destination brand is the culmination of months of work that utilized community feedback from every corner, and offered in every fashion from workshops to surveys to social media conversations. The research helped identify Elkhart County’s place DNA — what the community feels at its core — and that contributed to the creation of the destination brand.

Festivities at The Big Event will also include exciting news about Vibrant Communities initiatives for 2020 that will build on the success of the Little Big Idea Grant and Vibrant People of Elkhart County programs. We’ll take some time to applaud the amazing people who launch Little Big Idea projects as well as those who were recognized as Vibrant People.

The keynote speaker is Peter Kageyama, who delivered an electrifying address four years ago when Vibrant Communities kicked off. The author and community development consultant is returning to catch up on Elkhart County’s accomplishments over the last four years and help consult on next steps to continue our growth and success.

By Arvis Dawson and Suzie Weirick, co-chairs

It’s the people who make Elkhart County so special.

More than four years after the Vibrant Communities movement started, the reason it resonates to this day is because of how much we love Elkhart County.

We’ve learned what it means to love where you live. We speak out and cheer on the projects and programs that create an emotional attachment to this place.

• Mark your calendar for The Big Event on January 22. Find out more.

From Nappanee to Goshen to Elkhart to Middlebury to Bristol to Wakarusa, neighbors and business embrace the arts as a major part of our lives. We have amazing works of public art, we go to concerts, and buy tickets to plays and musicals.

We love our downtowns and investors have noticed. New businesses are starting up everywhere — restaurants, craft breweries, shops, galleries, artisans, apartments — that add to the richness of life here.

Our parks and trails have never looked better and have never been busier. And there’s a hunger for more as more of us want to get out in nature.

We’re far from done though. The first four years were just a start.

Everywhere around us we see our neighbors putting their energy into things they care about — beautifying their neighborhood, volunteering at the school on the corner, starting neighborhood festivals, collecting food and other necessities for the needy, getting engaged in local government and fighting for policies that they care about.

We celebrated many of those people with Vibrant People of Elkhart County. But we don’t want to just celebrate; we want everyone to get out and get engaged. 

That’s why we’re starting Vibrant Champions, where you get to pledge how you’re going to better life in Elkhart County.

With Vibrant Neighborhoods, we’re going to figure out how to make our blocks and communities stronger through placemaking and policies.

We’re also reaching out to our teens, the next generation, to get them more excited about Elkhart County. And we’re bringing artists together to collaborate in ways that will just take your breath away.

2020 is going to be an incredible year. We know you’ll want to be involved.

No question Elkhart County is a more awesome place every day, but how do you celebrate that?

Not just any big event will do. We’ve got The Big Event in the works.

Mark down the evening of January 22, 2020, on your calendar for an amazing night at The Lerner Theatre in downtown Elkhart.

We’re going to celebrate all the people who make Elkhart County a special place, but especially the 60-plus Little Big Idea Grant winners and the Vibrant People of Elkhart County.

You’ll hear about the big plans we have for 2020 and how you can get more engaged in our neighborhoods, civic organizations, and charities.

Best of all, you’ll find out all about Elkhart County’s new destination brand. It’s really going to turbo-charge all the wonderful work we’ve done and elevate us to even higher levels.

Last but not least, we’ll be seeing a familiar face — Peter Kageyama — the speaker who helped us kick off this exciting journey at another big event in January 2016.

His talk energized us all and confirmed that we are on the right path. Kageyama’s coming back to celebrate with us and help us see the next steps as we build an ever more vibrant Elkhart County.

We’ll be sharing more details about this event as we get closer. Stay tuned.

Do you think you’re Elkhart County’s biggest fan?

Do you favor locally owned restaurants and breweries, taking photos of your dinner and posting them on social media? 

When you shop for Christmas gifts, do you buy from local artisans so that your loved ones always have a little heavenly slice of Elkhart County with them?

Does volunteering for a local charity, or reading to kids in the classroom, or donating your time and treasure to help your neighbors make you feel all warm inside?

Being involved in Elkhart County activities makes you a Vibrant Champion

Then you might already be a Vibrant Champion!

But we think you know many other Vibrant Champions.

2020 will be a year in which we want all Vibrant Champions to shout it from the rooftops, to keep on doing what you do, and bringing your friends, neighbors and co-workers along. 

It’s a program in which you pledge to be an engaged resident of Elkhart County and keep on making our hometown a great place to live, work, play and invest.

To help get this program started, we ask you to take a quick survey:

• Survey in English
• Survey in Spanish

Need more details? See below.

Building vibrant communities in Elkhart County has always been the ongoing goal, but it’s challenging to know how you’re doing when you’re not sure where you started.

With that question as a backdrop, more than 50 community leaders from Elkhart County’s business, non-profit, municipal and community development realms met on Thursday, July 25, to hear more about how to, well, measure vibrancy.

The setting for the discussion was a community room in the sprawling 171,000-square-foot Elkhart Health & Aquatics Center, one of the largest projects listed in Vibrant Communities’ Action Agenda assembled in 2016.

And with more projects being completed and momentum building in Elkhart, Goshen, Nappanee, Middlebury, Bristol and Wakarusa, it was time for the Vibrant Communities movement to define how it would keep track of vibrancy.

How to measure vibrancy was the topic of the day at a Community Champions Roundtable on Thursday, July 25, 2019, at the Elkhart Health & Aquatics Center.

Working with Indiana University South Bend’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Vibrant Communities organizers developed a survey of Elkhart County residents as well as the gathering of demographic data about the community.

The data includes everything from economic performance measures to educational attainment, health factors, crime and safety, and housing. That will be matched with the results of a survey in which Elkhart County residents are asked to rank the area on topics such as community pride, social offerings such as arts and culture and parks, and openness of residents to others.

• Marshall V. King, a free-lance journalist who wrote the Love Where You Live series for Vibrant Communities in 2018, attended the gathering and wrote a column for the South Bend Tribune. Read Marshall’s thoughts on the metrics.

The survey so far has 371 results from 4,000 sent to randomly selected addresses in Elkhart County. While that number of survey results gives a good baseline, IUSB researchers intend to review the demographics of the respondents and fill in gaps that may exist to assure that the survey sample is representative of Elkhart County’s population.

By sometime this fall, it’s expected for the data and survey results to be available on the Vibrant Communities website.

No matter which downtown you go to in Elkhart County — Elkhart, Goshen, Nappanee, Middlebury, Wakarusa or Bristol — there are parts to like and other parts that could be improved.

A team at enFocus has been working hard on research, interviewing downtown business owners and people who work in a downtown, and also conducting focus groups.

The final stage of the research project is a survey open to all Elkhart County residents. Click here to take the survey.

The research is a project commissioned by the Elkhart County Convention & Visitors Bureau to assess conditions in each of the downtown areas in Elkhart County. The project is specifically seeking feedback on retail and commerce, housing, events, partnerships, diversity, and design and aesthetics in the downtown areas.

Live in Elkhart County for more than a few days and you see that our waterways are drop-dead gorgeous.

Chuck Drake knows this, even though he moved away from Elkhart County years ago. He’s a member of the I Grew Up in Elkhart, IN group on Facebook and shared this memory recently:

Since we have the St. Joe cutting through town offering a sort of majestic beauty and leisure time, I generally took the Elkhart River for granted as I was growing up. Truth is, it’s a pretty cool river in its own right. The river starts from Port Mitchell Lake and Waldron Lake and merges to form the Elkhart River west of Wawaka, Indiana. It flows generally Northwestward through Benton and then turns northward. It then flows through Bainter Town and Waterford Mills into the Goshen Dam Pond. From there it flows northwest through Goshen, Dunlap and Elkhart and, after it’s 50 mile journey, into the St. Joe River at Island Park. The river lends itself perfectly to the kayaking craze and, with plans to remove the dam near downtown, fishing and kayaking can only get even better.

We couldn’t agree more, Chuck. The summer is a great time to go tubing in the creek or for some fishing.

Whatever you do, we encourage you to get out and enjoy the beauty of Elkhart County’s waterways, parks and trails.