This Saturday was Streetscape in Youngstown’s downtown. A couple of hundred volunteers from the community came out to plant flowers and to landscape the downtown together. It was a really awesome thing to be a part of, working side by side sometimes with people from your city that you know, and with people from your city that you’ve never met before. Even our congressman, Tim Ryan (below in our “Defend Youngstown” pose), came out to lend a hand.
There was a spirit of togetherness all morning while we worked from 8 until noon, at which time we ate an incredible meal supplied by a lot of the local restaurants and cafes. Everything from BBQ to five different kinds of salad, cookies and brownies, Italian greens. We also received nice green Streetscape T-shirts for volunteering to work. I saw lots of people wearing them from past Streetscape events and decided maybe I should start to collect these myself. I plan to be doing the same thing this time next year too.
If you’re a Youngstowner, or someone who would like to be a part of events like this in the future, take a look at the Cityscape website. Hopefully we’ll have more projects like this to complete in the near future. More pictures from the day can be found in my flickr on the sidebar, so click and go look at some photos that, for me, are truly inspiring. I think many of the people who volunteered on Saturday were surprised to find they weren’t the only ones who care about making Youngstown a beautiful place to live again.