After a four-year hiatus, committed citizens are working to restore the Sweet Home Active Revitalization Effort (SHARE), a community-driven organization that strives to essentially boost the city’s economy.
Some of the original organizers of SHARE – Bob Burford, Jo Ann McQueary and Scott Swanson – as well as former city manager Kelcey Young decided to try to revive meetings for SHARE after it essentially petered out due to the pandemic.
“The community has been talking about wanting to do something like this,” Young said. “It was like, rather than reinvent the wheel, let’s just bring SHARE back.”
She said the nonprofit had been doing really well with its mission to make Sweet Home better, and she lauded the city’s active volunteer base. Young envisioned SHARE as an opportunity for the local volunteer groups to connect and work together while also establishing goals related to SHARE’s mission.
An estimated couple dozen individuals have attended the monthly meetings, which began in June, and have begun tossing around ideas of what they would like to see come out of the revived group. First brainstorming ideas were verbalized during the Aug. 12 meeting, which included a teen center and support services, downtown improvements, creating more outdoor access and activities, community events, attracting recreation businesses and building up Quarry Park.
Those who have participated in the discussions so far included club members, Chamber of Commerce representatives, business owners and employees, local residents, city staff, city committee members, and representatives from the Forest Service and South Santiam Watershed.
SHARE formed in 2008 following a city-initiated series of public workshops intended to build conversations about downtown issues and opportunities. Swanson called it a sort of ad hoc committee under the SHEDG (Sweet Home Economic Development Group) umbrella. Volunteers made up of business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, the City of Sweet Home, interested citizens, property owners and SHEDG formed committees to identify a strategic plan for a “viable and vital downtown.”
They created a vision of what the city would look like in the future if no one addressed problems the city faces, ultimately stating, “Sweet Home has a long history of failure to change. There is a tendency of the community to focus on the negative rather than embracing the positive, of placing blame instead of moving on.” The future, they determined, if left unchecked would be the same pattern resulting in empty storefronts, minimal revenue in local businesses and good ideas with no significant action taken.
The vision of what they believed the city should and could look like included a positive attitude focused on “creating and supporting a business environment fostering economic success and community livability.” Resources would be available to support positive growth, with an improved economy driven by industrial and commercial development while downtown prospers in its role as the heart of the city.
A strategic plan was drafted to identify how to create the desired future while also working collaboratively “within the broader economic development efforts of SHEDG.” SHARE’s focus centered around improving the community by boosting the downtown core through leadership, funding and opportunity resources. Their mission statement became, “create the changes needed to have an economically and socially prosperous downtown.”
In one of the earliest gatherings this year to revive SHARE, Swanson said the nonprofit was one of the longest lasting efforts of many to improve the city, “serving a lot of purposes” until it was curtailed in 2020 by COVID-19.
In its dozen years of activity, SHARE sponsored or organized downtown cleanup efforts, held a chainsaw carving demonstration day, funded the Commercial Exterior Improvement Program (CEIP), partnered with the city to hire an economic development director, commissioned a downtown analysis identifying practical ways to attract and retain business, instigated the creation of murals, funded storefront window projects, funded holiday decorations, gave grants for Farmers’ Market and indexed commercial property.