- We're on our way to the National Packard Museum for City Centric: Warren.

Let's go, Dean.

(upbeat music) ♪ So deep in love ♪ Oh, yeah ♪ With a wonderful girl ♪ That loves me instead I'm here at the National Packard Museum, which preserves the historical importance of the Packard Motor Company and its ties to Warren.

♪ Oh, it's wonderful being in love ♪ ♪ Nothing is greater than this fine love ♪ - And I think Warren Centric people are the people who say, "That may be wrong, but you can fix it."

- There's so much development happening in the city right now.

- Like we're all in this together.

- Because we were here, now we've come here, but we still have a ways to go.

- I'm gonna do everything I can to make sure this organization is a nationally and internationally recognized organization, because that's what Warren deserves.

- This vibrant and diverse community shines because of its unwavering determination to break down barriers.

Here, hard work is the driving force behind the city's success, and Warrenites never back down from a challenge.

(gentle music) I'm your host Sthephanie Marie, and this is "City Centric."

The show where we explore our region through the eyes of six passionate individuals who are shaping the fabric of our cities.

Their stories will inspire us with the ways they show up for their community, making every one of us a little more City Centric.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) This is City Centric-Warren.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - So the history of Warren goes back to the very late 1700s.

We were founded as a city in 1798.

And for the very beginnings of the city's history, the first, let's say, you know, 20, 30, 40 years, we were a village of just a few hundred people.

That consistently started to grow a bit, but it really wasn't until after the Civil War and really after the turn of the ninth, or the 20th century that we see the big boom.

(gentle music) I am Meghan Reed and I serve as the executive director of the Trumbull County Historical Society.

I first took that job in 2015.

I'm not originally from this area.

I grew up in Pittsburgh and then I went to North Carolina for grad school.

And after I graduated, I ended up accepting a very part-time job at the Trumbull County Historical Society at nine hours a week as their director.

It had been an all volunteer organization before that time, and they definitely took a leap of faith to see if the organization could support staff.

And over the next six months to a year, it became extremely clear to me at 24 years old, I was extremely young when I first came to Warren that this was a really powerful position that I had the authority to make some real change.

There's so many people in Warren that are trying to make things better and try to make things grow, and there's definitely a place for younger people who don't necessarily have as much experience, but have a lot of passion and a lot of drive to make something real happen here.

And I knew very early on that I wanted to be a part of that.

So I was able within a couple of years to make my position full time and it's just been sort of running from there.

- A city's history has a direct impact on its present.

This is why the people who keep us connected to our history are vital to a community's success.

Our next guest is our business leader, Rick Stockburger, who's using his Warren roots to build a more sustainable future.

- I'm Rick Stockburger.

I'm the president and CEO of Brite Energy Innovators.

I am the husband of Carly Stockburger, who is amazing, and the father of Reagan and Jake.

I grew up, went to West Branch High School just south of Warren and loved being in this community.

After high school, went to the military, was in the military for about eight years, served in Kosovo in Afghanistan, worked with Hungarian Special Forces and others there.

Came back and decided to found a couple companies.

You know, I went down the road to Kent State, which was awesome and all of that.

But one of the things for my generation, and I just turned 40, was there wasn't jobs to come back to.

So to come back to Warren, come back to the Mahoning Valley, you really had to make a purposeful step and kind of choose your own adventure and build your own career from that standpoint.

And the reason that I came back specifically for this position was I have two young kids.

I want my two young kids to have opportunities to grow up in the community that I love so dearly that really molded me as a man and my values in that space and get a good education and be engaged.

And yeah, I want them to go away to college, but I want them to have an opportunity to come back here and get a job at Ultium or Foxconn or any of these great manufacturers, any of these great IT companies that are growing here every day.

And so for us and my work, we focus on vehicle electrification and energy storage, batteries and grid resiliency.

And there's so many cool opportunities to change the world here from right here in Warren, Ohio, that that's what I wanted to build because I wanted our kids to have a chance to stay here or at least come back here after they get educated.

And that's what's exciting about it and that's what's exciting to me.

- Creating a space for people to gather professionally or personally is a great way to drive your community for a greater good.

Our humanitarian Jennifer Roller is accomplishing that through her work at the Wayne Foundation through constructing a more equitable society.

- There's what you do and what you have a passion for, and then there's what the foundation needs and quite honestly is willing to pay you for, and the extent that they overlap is our sweet spot.

And I think that I found my sweet spot here.

I am Jennifer Roller and I'm the president of The Raymond John Wean Foundation.

I came to learn about the foundation, I'll start there, through my mentor who had a connection to the foundation and then the foundation had just hired its first president and they were looking to do community outreach and just really some recruitment around resident councils and grant making.

I sometimes tell folks that it seemed like I had this mosh posh.

In fact, one of my coaches told me once that my career was a patchwork quilt because it was so varied.

But I built on the work at the university.

I was a foreman at General Motors.

So it was like all these varied experiences, but all still had this consistent and constant thread that working with people and I see myself as a resource to those that are often underrepresented or under-resourced.

And I feel like my people are women and people of color and students and residents.

So being able to do this work in this way was a nice...

Put it in a nice package for me.

The vision of the foundation is empowered residents creating an equitable Mahoning Valley.

And so we do that in partnership, whether it's grant making, we have a resident council capacity building, we wanna make sure that we're able to fund viable solutions.

And so we work with different groups a lot of times with a race equity lens.

We often will hire on folks with potential, younger folks, those who have not necessarily been in philanthropy so that we can have a diversity of thought and energy and excitement and creativity and innovation.

All of those things because it's really important to us that there are a lot of conditions that are holding us in place like the status quo, and we're trying to break those barriers to do something that we likely have not seen before.

(gentle music) - The work at the Wean Foundation is just one of the many ways people are caring for each other in Warren.

For 35 years, our educator Steve Arnold poured all of his care into teaching players as a head coach at Warren G. Harding High School.

- My name's Steve Arnold, born and raised here, grew up on the southeast side of Warren.

I go back to that always because I never would've dreamt of growing up on the southeast side of Warren in 2088 Milton Street, that I would've been the first African American head coach in the city.

(gentle music) You prepare, you try to prepare yourself in the right way, and I was reared to do the things the right way, as much as you can.

And so the credit for me, as it goes to my family, but number one, foremost, and you see a photo of my mother.

She raised me and my brother, my younger brother David, who we're very close.

She raised us to be close to one another.

She was worked in the engineering office at General Motors, Lordstown.

And she did a terrific job in raising me and my brother and showing us the importance of family.

(gentle music) But the city of Warren has reared me and grew me into the person I am now.

See, you can coach, and trust me, don't get me wrong when I say this, man, we want to win.

But the longer you coach, the wins and losses come and go.

The wins and losses come and go.

Can I get this kid outta here to be able to provide for his family the right way?

That's what this is about.

(gentle music) - It's inspiring to see the impact one person like Steve can have on a whole community.

Our next guest is a revitalizer who knows how powerful it can be to bring a city together and work on moving the city forward.

(gentle music) - My name is Doug Franklin.

I'm the mayor of the city of Warren and I'm so proud to be the mayor of the city of Warren 'cause this is the city that I was born and raised in.

My story, and I have to go back to my story, it's interesting because Warren was a lot different.

It's changed over the years in terms of how our community interacts and how it dealt with the issue of segregation and integration.

When I first started in grade school, I was in a primarily all African American school.

In the fourth grade after urban renewal took place in our community, all of a sudden, I found myself as the only African American in an all white school.

But looking back, it was an interesting and valuable transition and it helped me in the work that I'm doing today.

Our community is unique in that fact that when you go to junior high school and high school, all of our communities, all of our kids, regardless of race in our public school system went to school together.

We didn't have that segregation that was known in a lot of other communities.

So it sort of branded our city or at least influenced our city how we interact with each other and how we deal with issues of social justice and race.

So I'm very proud of that.

And it helped me to look across racial lines and look at common interest.

And I think that's been the cornerstone of my leadership style.

And my purpose, I think is to bring people together and to collaborate.

(gentle music) - The power of collaboration brings ideas of all kinds together, which is something our artist Bill Mullane is accomplishing at the Trumbull Art Gallery.

- I'm Bill Mullane, currently serve as gallery director here at the Trumbull Art Gallery, also still a public school educator.

Went to Kent State, graduated as an art educator and as an artist.

Started teaching art in the Warren Schools.

And then, as I say, spent the next years there.

And I had the opportunity in Warren to be both a teacher and a school administrator, ending my career after 10 years as the high school principal here.

Another position in which I got to work closely in areas of economic development, certainly safety.

As I went on, I've been very lucky and part of that I attribute to just being in a place the size of Warren, where it is easier to do things and multiple things at once.

But for a number of years, I founded and we did the Kenneth Patchen Literary Festival here in Warren, where we brought people from all over the country.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, Al Young, the poet.

We had Carlos Cortez from Chicago.

We had all kinds of literary people coming here, we were doing.

And it was all about exploring the history of the city and how it made that great poet who was from here, Kenneth Patchen.

But it was also about the notion of art and civic and social engagement and how art can be a means to that.

And so those things really jazzed me.

You know, how art can shape political thinking, social thinking, how art can take someone where they are and bring them somewhere else.

And I found as an art teacher when I first started with TAG, being able to bring my art students to work with artists and hang art and experience a gallery firsthand was both fun, but it was good too for the students I worked with.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - And Warren is an extremely diverse place to be.

I think that a lot of that goes back to the history of the area with different communities settling here and then forming sort of blocks within the town.

And it's really interesting when you look at blight in this area and how that has affected populations here.

Warren was extremely hard hit with redlining and urban renewal.

And at the same time, there's a lot of local work being done to rebuild those communities and try to lift them back up would be very, very fair to say that this area's diversity clearly impacts who we are as a community today.

And I think that you can't look anywhere but just the festivals that are downtown to see that too.

With the Italian festival and the Greek festival and the African American Achievers Festival, there are certain communities that have really tied their heritage to the community and to the city.

And that's very palpable today.

(gentle music) - So one of the things that I absolutely love about Warren is there's so many different people from so many different cultures and that all kind of mixes together to be culture of Warren.

- But it is a diverse city and the cost of living is pretty good.

How has the city inspired me?

I would say through our young people.

And they'll tell me, "Coach Arnold, I'm going to the NBA or I'm going to the NFL."

I'm not gonna crush those kids' dreams.

So the inspiration comes from being able to pass on knowledge to young people and people my age.

(gentle music) - The people here are, as I said earlier, like myself, like hardworking.

They care about what they do, they want purpose.

Having purpose is unbelievably important, I think, to folks that live in the city of Warren.

But also they wanna have fun.

- Generally speaking, Warrenites are resilient as proven by the people who have stuck out this region from good to bad, back to what is becoming, I think, good again.

So a very resilient population, a population that is committed to their families and doing well by their families.

People who are still very much interested in neighborhood, both the safety of and the livability of neighborhood.

All of those things I think are characteristics of our people here.

- I think Warrenites are also folks who may have done things differently in the past, maybe in a different time, in a different Warren know now the power of collective impact, whether that's what we call it or not, and then they come together and they get involved.

- So I think the biggest misconception about Warren is that it's like a scary place to be, right?

That it's like dangerous in some way.

There's definitely a sect of the population that can be very pessimistic because there has been so much downturn and there's been so much that people have struggled against.

And I think the biggest thing that we as citizens today can do is just advocate for our area and try to dispel that.

I lived downtown in an apartment by myself for many years when I first came to town, and never once did I not feel safe.

Downtown is a city and that we're gonna have challenges like any city, but that doesn't mean that it should deter people from coming down here on a Friday or Saturday night.

(gentle music) - Yeah, we've worked hard and relentlessly and it's a work that's ongoing in addressing crime in our community.

'Cause I've often said, if you don't have safety in the community, it doesn't matter what else you have.

So that's been the cornerstone of our public service directive is to make sure that we're doing all that we can to keep our citizens safe and to protect lives and property.

To that end, obviously we've hired over the past year, probably 10 new officers.

We're almost up to authorized strength in maximizing how many officers we can have.

That was deliberate.

Took a lot of hard work, a lot of budgetary prioritization, but we made that priority number one is to make sure that we have... And not only to have the number of officers, but make sure that they're well trained, well equipped, have a real good sensitivity to our community and the complexities therein of the different communities.

And we've been able to do that.

We've seen a reduction in violent crimes across our city, homicide reduction.

So we're all hands on deck in that effort.

Part of our police community trust initiative is to create a cadet program in our schools to recruit students and citizens from our own community to be part of our local police force.

We think that that's huge in changing the culture and how we do community policing.

(upbeat music) - Warren has a lot of amazing things going for it.

I'm not just gonna be a cheerleader.

There's things that aren't perfect about Warren too.

But being able to work towards making the city a better place, making your community a better place.

Making sure if you see trash on the ground, you pick it up.

Like, this doesn't have to be always world changing steps, right?

You know, I've always said, whatever you do is a movement of small movements.

- We ended up creating an environment that was conducive to new investment, and you can see it's evidence in our downtown.

Once where there was nothing but empty storefronts for the most part and very little new investment.

Now there's hardly any vacant storefronts left.

We have wineries, restaurants.

We have a new theater downtown.

The Amphitheatere is bringing visitors all the time.

We have a $150 million downtown expansion project that's on the horizon that we're working with a developer in the Dayton area who's taken on the project.

(gentle music) - The building that we're currently in is the future home of a science fiction and fantasy museum name to be determined.

We know that we want this space to be a nationally accredited science fiction museum that will draw for people all across the country.

And this story really started about a year ago when a local gentleman named John Zabrecky, he graduated from Warren G. Harding High School.

After high school, he moved to California after attending Kent State, and he started a movie prop design company, Modern Props, that would be renowned in the prop industry for creating high tech futuristic gadgets that did a lot of the very early science fiction films and TV shows.

- I believe deep in my heart that the city of Warren's future is a bright one.

Our schools have made a massive investment, creation of a $36 million student wellness center.

- It'll be a facility that has artificial turf on the first floor with a six lane track with a bistro.

The AVI is going to run with our students here, culinary.

It'll be meeting rooms, workout rooms, yoga room, weight room, golf simulator, eSports, a three lane walking track up top, Akron Children's Hospital will have a space in there.

I mean, it's like no other.

(upbeat music) - The people of Warren have put a great amount of time and effort into making their city a place where people of any background not only live but thrive.

Warrenites didn't just wake up with their signature grit, they had to earn it every step of the way.

What steps can you take to be city centric?

When you find a way to inspire, innovate, and energize within your community, you invest in a future that is better for all of us.

Are you city centric?

♪ Wha-Oh - I am Meghan Reed.

- I'm Bill Mullane.

- I'm Rick Stockburger.

- My name is Steven T. Arnold.

- My name is Doug Franklin.

- I'm Jennifer Roller, and I'm Warren Centric.

- And I am Warren Centric.

- And I'm Warren Centric.

- And I'm Warren Centric.

- And I am Warren Centric.

- And I am Warren Centric.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) - I think I'm gonna have to go with my favorite pizza in the city of Warren is Ken Haidaris' Sunrise Inn.

- Right, I will tell you this though, my best barbecue joint would be Cockeye in Warren because when I was still eating meat, that is where we went and it is delicious.

- The best place to catch a live performance.

I would say right now it has to be the Amphitheatere.

- The only thing I can say for certain about my future, I love the job that I'm doing, but the only constant thing that I do know, the only common denominator in my future is it'll be a future of service one way or the other.

I don't know exactly what that looks like, and I'm not a particularly religious guy, but I'm extremely spiritual.

So I always try to listen to the universe and listen to what God's telling me.

And if I let God make that decision, I'll probably be better off than me trying to make it with my own head.

So all I do know for sure is that it'll be a future full of service probably until I leave this earth.