Connections revitalize communities. Connections among streets, among businesses, and, most importantly, among people.
Susquehanna Style’s 2015 "Good Women" are three women who call themselves connectors in revitalizing their cities. They are facilitators. They are relationship-builders. When they bring people together, good things happen.
Their drive is fueled by a love for their cities—Leigh Ann Urban in Harrisburg, Megan Feeser in York, and Shelby Nauman in Lancaster. For them, revitalization is an unbreakable chain forged one connection at a time.
Leigh Ann Urban
Downtown Improvement District, Harrisburg
From childhood, Leigh Ann Urban was her dad’s little buddy. Whether Stephen Urban was selling insurance, winning Golden Gloves boxing titles, teaching inner-city kids to box, or serving as mayor of Camp Hill, she was his sidekick.
“That’s where I get my sense of community involvement,” she says. “My drive to help others comes from what I saw him do.”
But her father died suddenly at age forty-eight. Urban was twenty-three, a graduate of University of Pittsburgh wondering how to spend the rest of her life. She answered a Craigslist ad seeking a director of marketing and special events for the Harrisburg Downtown Improvement District (DID). With community service in her blood, she found her calling.
“Every day is a new adventure,” she says. “You never know what’s going to get thrown your way, and you have to be on your toes all the time. I like it that way.”
Urban created Harrisburg Restaurant Week, the growing annual event that draws diners to eateries citywide. She designs streetlamp banners. She welcomes ideas from 225 downtown business and property owners. She manages media relations and chooses trees for giant planters meant to green up spots otherwise inhospitable to trees.
As DID prepared to implement a bicycle share program, Urban took home refurbished bicycles, spray painted them silver, and stenciled “Bike Share Harrisburg” on them. “You come here to do marketing, to do PR and communications, but I have gotten my hands dirty in everything,” she says.
Urban grills drop-ins to the visitors’ center on why they came to Harrisburg, and soon “they become friends.” Downtown Harrisburg “has been resilient” through a national recession and the city’s financial struggles. “We have people who have stuck by the city and stayed with the city. We keep seeing new places opening up. I truly believe we’re on the upswing.”
As Urban strolls downtown—past the planters DID planted, the electronic message board she manages, and the colorful bicycle racks DID installed—she lauds the city where she was born and where she now lives. Harrisburg is the state capital—diverse, vibrant, bursting with opportunities for community service, and full of fun things to do.
“It’s always an adventure in the city,” she says. Her community service outside DID includes the Tri-County Community Action board, the Harrisburg Academy Community Advisory Board, and the BikeShareHbg steering committee.
Athletics has been a constant, from high school softball, basketball, and tennis to kickball, soccer, flag football, and running today. Following in her dad’s footsteps, she holds two Pennsylvania Golden Gloves titles. Sports, she says, taught her self-confidence and relationship-building. They’re traits she tries to instill in young girls by serving on the Girls on the Run board of directors.
She met her husband, John Eidem, through involvement in Friends of Midtown. She juggles work, sports, board service, and wedding planning as a recent newlywed through meticulous checklists for every task at hand. She constantly pursues improvement because “we’re not guaranteed tomorrow, so do what you can with what you have in the time that we’re here.”
From her parents, Stephen Urban and Polly Ranck, Urban learned about sharing her time and talents.
“If I have time, if I have energy, I want it spent helping other people. It was instilled in me from both my parents that this is where you came from, so you give back as much as possible.”
Megan Feeser
Downtown Inc., York
Meagan Feeser had city-hopped after college—Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., New York—but returned home to York to be near her parents and raise her own family.
She noticed the hashtag #iloveyorkcity. Followed people involved in York’s rapidly unfolding revitalization. Attended events. Made real-life friends. Volunteered to help.
“Knowing this was where I’m going to be for the rest of my life, I wanted to make it a cool place to be,” Feeser says.
Today, Feeser is marketing director of Downtown Inc. She organizes York’s First Fridays, Boutique Week, Sweetest Pint, and other events. And that’s just her day job. Outside Downtown Inc., she also co-founded the Foodstruck food truck festival, helps run York’s Restaurant Week, co-runs a York-focused marketing business, and co-owns York City Pretzel Company. All while raising her two children, ages three and nineteen months, who are the star subjects of her witty parenting journey on "Oh, Bother Blog."
The efforts of York’s tight-knit revitalization community have made a visible difference in recent years, but the graduate of West York High School knows they’re working on groundwork laid by many others.
“It’s not just us,” she says. “The city’s been in revitalization since the ‘90s, if not before. We’ve needed the work done before us in every decade to get to this point.”
Feeser calls herself a mouthpiece and a connector. From her first involvement in the revitalization scene, she noticed that social media postings about, say, a hip new restaurant would attract curious customers. She wears designs by Hilary Arthur, of the downtown boutique Arthur & Daughters. Her Facebook page says more about downtown York than it does about her children.
“If I can get one person to come downtown and check something out because I mentioned it, that’s huge for me,” she says.
The buzz from York’s First Friday celebrations, which have grown to attract thousands, inspired at least two developers to green-light downtown projects.
“It’s very validating, because some people think we throw these parties and ask what impact it has, but we’re giving people a reason to come downtown, and we’re giving them a quality experience when they’re here,” says Feeser. “We’re building that base of potential new residents, and potential new shoppers, and potential new diners.”
Not that Feeser gets to enjoy the festivities. She’s behind the scenes with a walkie-talkie. But when she sees a resident add to the fun, totally unscripted, by bringing a pile of hula hoops to the street party, she knows they’ve concocted the right formula.
Feeser’s mom was a server at York’s iconic Roosevelt Tavern. Her dad ran an after-hours club popular among restaurant workers. For years, Feeser says she “couldn’t go anywhere without someone telling me they knew my dad. Just that idea of being connected to people and forming those relationships is something that was impressed on me.”
Now, Feeser wants her children to grow up “knowing that this place is important to us. I want them to be a part of the community.”
In York, “nothing is someone else’s problem. Nothing is someone else’s job.” In 10 years, residents and visitors will see the results.
“They’ll see we were not multi-million-dollar tycoons,” Feeser says. “We were just people who had ideas and cared enough about our downtown and the place we loved to make them happen.”
Shelby Nauman
Lancaster City Alliance
A jumbled whiteboard scrawled with words like “neighborhood development,” “community safety,” and “economic development” dominates the Lancaster City Alliance conference room. That “mess of things,” as Shelby Nauman calls it, is the Alliance’s tracking system for never-ending meetings convened in neighborhoods citywide.
Nauman, vice president of the Alliance, embraces the zaniness.
“I really like to be busy,” she says. “I like to have a lot on my plate. I work better that way.”
Her background in communications, including time as morning-show producer for WGAL, feeds perfectly into her role today. When she left television, a young mother seeking stable hours, she worked as chief of staff for then-Lancaster Mayor Charlie Smithgall, and she “fell in love with revitalization.”
What does she bring to this small but mighty urban revitalization group? First of all, she’s the mother of three daughters—ages thirteen, eleven, and eight—and “when you’re a mom, you can really relate to anyone.” That leads up to her ability to connect with people “and build relationships.”
“It’s attention to detail and the ability to follow up,” she says. “Once I know someone, I know them, and I remember what’s important. Making connections. Being a facilitator and connecting the dots.”
When Nauman worked with the smaller James Street Improvement District, before a 2013 merger that folded it into the newly created Lancaster City Alliance, she focused on one part of the city. She could name everyone who lived in every home “and probably the names of their pets.” Now, she strives to bring that same brand of personal relationship-building to every neighborhood.
Her job is made easier by Lancaster’s all-for-one, one-for-all mentality and by her knowledgeable, dedicated colleagues who believe deeply in their shared mission.
“When you know the right people, you can bring people together much more quickly to solve problems in a more efficient way and really build confidence,” she says. “People should have a voice.” In the city of Lancaster, “people really do feel validated.”
Weekends are family time, deep-sea fishing in Maryland or biking with her daughters and husband, Andrew Nauman. She needs church for rejuvenation, “to come back to work and have my head on straight. To be ready to be positive.”
Nauman and her family live in Strasburg, in the home where she grew up. Her mother was kind and compassionate. Her father was ahead of his time. “Just because you’re a female,” he would tell her, “you don’t need to let that stop you. You can do anything you want to do.”
Nauman hears echoes of her father’s spirit in her daughters and in the girls she has coached for Girls on the Run. They talk about their limitless options in life. They’re not afraid to show their smarts. They do many things with ease—math, science, music, sports.
“They know they don’t have to fit one identity,” she says. “They can fit a lot of things and do them really well.”
Already, Nauman sees the difference that revitalization is making in the city, and she expects real impact within five years.
“Good things are already happening,” she says. “I get to meet people and build relationships with folks all over the city. I love to do that. That’s the work I love to do.”
By M. Diane McCormick / Photography by Donovan Roberts Witmer
