Dayton, Ohio has gotten a lot of negative media attention over the past 15 years — from making Forbes 2008 list of the fastest dying cities in America, to being featured in the 2018 Frontline documentary Left Behind America.
Dayton residents have also proven themselves to be strong and resilient in the face of recent tragedies — like the Oregon District mass shooting and the Memorial Day tornadoes, both in 2019.
What would happen if we used a new measure for the region's success, that transcends economic inequality, systemic racism and environmental degradation — and focuses on people's well-being?
On a busy Friday afternoon at the Second Street Market downtown, a random sampling of people were asked if Dayton was a good place to live and work.
Michael Thomas: I do definitely think that Dayton is a great place to live. It seems like things are really on the upturn. I know Dayton had a hard few decades.
Heather Regal: I think that Dayton has a lot to offer people already downtown. We have breweries, and restaurants, and shopping. The Oregon district, the baseball field and Riverfront. We just need to get more people to come down here and enjoy it, discover it, rediscover it.
Alicia Simmons: I lived out of the city for a really long time and I recently came back to the city. I would love to see development spread into the real, true city of Dayton and not just Downtown Dayton.
I’m just hoping that they really do start to push some of that funding into west Dayton. Because those people deserve nice sidewalks. They deserve really nice neighborhoods too, and nice Second Street Markets, and they don’t even have grocery stores.
Bahati: Personally, I believe it’s like hell living in Dayton — from a racial point of view. And we need to have more situations where we can get together and talk openly and be more transparent to what’s going on in the city of Dayton. Desoto Bass is forgotten. Oh yes, it is.
Let’s put the money where it’s needed. Let’s put the money with our kids. I’m talking about the future. If we don’t address these issues now the future of the kids is going to be the same thing. I’m from the 60s and it’s the same damn way today as it was in the 60s.
Mark Fisher: Fundamentally the character of the people here is strong. So I think we are still a city of invention in terms of trying to overcome difficulties. I don’t think that people from outside are going to be able to come in here and improve us. I think that it’s going to be up to Daytonians to improve us.
Fisher’s sentiment is one that Peter Benkendorf, the founder and inspiration behind The Collaboratory, would agree with. The organization is kind of a sanctuary, a respite for people to come and share their vision for building a better Dayton.
Benkendorf is on a mission to make 2023 a year of well-being in Dayton. He uses five domains as a measure of community success. These include social well-being, physical well-being, financial well-being, sense of purpose and sense of community.
“It’s really about where you find joy and what brings you joy. So if you find joy sitting with six, five hundred other Daytonians watching a Dragon’s game that’s awesome. I mean all those things,” Benkendorf said sitting in a meeting room at The Collaboratory, surrounded by four walls of white board covered in ideas. “It’s thinking about what brings you joy and how much ability you have to experience joy. What’s the cost of joy and how many folks that have to work 2 jobs and are worried about hustling to their sister’s house to pick their kids up before they have to go do whatever it is, makes it a whole lot harder to experience well-being. Those are really the conditions.”
The mission of the Community of Well-Being Initiative is to move residents of the Dayton Region from where they are now to where they want to be through individual, organizational and community action. Benkendorf said “the beauty of the well-being initiative is that it really recognizes that it is the community's responsibility but it’s also individual responsibility. We need to do better as a community but we also need to help individuals find ways to take ownership.”
Benkendorf is using a combination of the Gallup wellbeing index, combined with the Rikter scale process, which gathers individual information to help people articulate and connect with their thoughts, feelings, emotions and behaviors.
He said “It allows people to really articulate what that future state of wellbeing looks like. So then we can figure out, ok, what resources do you have, what resources do we have to support you to take you on that journey from where your present state of wellbeing is to where you want to go.”
The Community of Well-Being Initiative is collaborating with local governments, educators and business leaders to use measures from the study to bench mark and track community well being, and provide insight to local leaders around best practices for the kinds of things that the community can do to support a culture of well-being in Dayton.
Benkendorf says that “at the end of the day for our region to be its most thriving, everybody needs to be realizing their full potential. Your ability to realize your full potential is directly related to whether you’re realizing maximum well-being.”
