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Young, talented and smart, this next generation still believes in Syracuse
When Ithaca elected its youngest mayor ever on Nov. 8, it got us thinking about ripping off the 40 Below model of highlighting younger Syracusans who are working to create a city of which they can be proud. All of 24, Mayor Svante Myrick has big plans for the college town to the south of us, and his election caused many of us to reconsider what we achieved in our 20s.
The same holds true for the four profiled here: all 40 or under, and all with impressive credentials thus far in their young lives. These are folks who could have chosen to leave town, who moved back home or who elected to settle here from elsewhere. Their dedication and love for this city are impressive and palpable, and by reading about how they work to effect change here, we hope you’ll feel inspired, in the New Year, to do your part.
They are: Hanah Ehrenreich, a project manager at CNY Works; Khalid Bey, newly installed Syracuse common councilor; Paul Mercurio, transportation planner/bike lane czar for the city of Syracuse; and Dominic Robinson, founder of Northside UP.
Hanah Ehrenreich:
Work Force
While many believe that labeling Syracuse “The Emerald City” is just
PR bluster, Hanah Ehrenreich took notice of this area’s potential,
realized there’s no place like home, and then moved back. Interestingly,
her job at CNY Works codifies that “emerald” reputation as she helps
move the underemployed to jobs in the green sector, specifically energy
and environmental systems. Part of her motivation for moving back was
the Come Home to Syracuse initiative; the other was her parents.
“Come Home to Syracuse was really exciting for me,” she says of the program devised in 1997 by then-state Assemblyman Jeff Brown before he ceded it to the Metropolitan Development Association. “The idea that we had enough umph in 2007-2008 to have companies say to people who had grown up here, ‘If you want to come back home, we have jobs for you,’ that is something that nobody had said to us before. I had never gotten the message that I should come back home to Syracuse, except from my parents.”
“I really like being a cheerleader for Syracuse:” Hanah Ehrenreich pays a visit to Syracuse Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore for recycled building materials, and while she’s there, she chats with Greg Wright, interfaith relations coordinator for Syracuse Habitat.
A self-proclaimed child of the Westcott Nation, Ehrenreich, 30, is the daughter of Ron Ehrenreich, treasurer/CEO at Cooperative Federal Credit Union, and Sondra Roth, who recently retired from the Syracuse City School District where she had worked for 35 years as a psychologist. Her brother Sam Ehrenreich works at Empire Brewing Company and is writing a novel. Her education in city schools—Ed Smith Elementary, Levy Middle School and then Nottingham High School, including attending the gifted and talented program—led to a bachelor’s degree in government from Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and then the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) for a master’s in violence conflict and development studies.
“I was always very interested in economic development, and coming from the Westcott Nation, environmentalism and social justice were always part of my world view,” she notes. “When I went to Smith I wanted to expand my experience in the world, so I did a study abroad in Northern Ireland and traveled around Europe. That really set the stage for asking a lot of questions about economic development: How does growth happen? How does everyone benefit from economic policies that are also sensible environmentally?”
After working and interning for 2 1/2 years in Washington, D.C., Ehrenreich felt her education was still incomplete, so she applied to SOAS. “There I studied theories of violence, conflict and warfare in the context of deeply divided societies, but also focused on economic development and international aid.” She spent a year on a kibbutz in Israel, studying Hebrew, and worked for a group called the Center for Jewish and Arab Economic Development. Ehrenreich describes it as a micro-finance organization and tech incubator similar to local models at the Syracuse Technology Garden and Syracuse Center of Excellence.
Ultimately realizing that London is an expensive place to live and tiring of bartending to pay the bills, in 2007 Ehrenreich returned to Syracuse. “SOAS helped me understand the world better,” she says. “We talked about community-led development, communities that were defying the histories that had been written for them already: rust belt cities, resource-poor regions that were exploited by government or substandard economic methodology. So I moved back home, and here I am in my own rust belt community, which is experiencing a major sea change.”
After two more internships at the city’s Department of Economic Development, Ehrenreich found a job in December 2007 at CNY Works, based in Franklin Square. “We had just received a five-county grant to do talent development in green areas; energy and environmental systems was our industry cluster,” she explains. This complex grant, issued through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (known as “the stimulus”), and funded by the state and federal departments of Labor, is one of 30 nationwide.
CNY Works’ success has been staggering. “Our grant has employed more than 300 people, which is radical,” Ehrenreich explains. “We are serving the poorest of the poor and the highest poverty level Census tracts in the city. They are our neighbors on the South Side, our new immigrants on the Near West and North sides, they are families in distress across the city. And we are kicking ass in employment.
“We have more than 90 people employed in green jobs, 88 more employed in local businesses based in their communities. Out of 300, 30 have lost their jobs, which is unheard of; we expected to lose half the people. And almost half of those who lost their jobs have been re-employed. I don’t know where we cracked the code, but we did; nobody has had this success rate with this population.”
Helping the indigent escape the cycle of poverty has always been a tricky business, and Ehrenreich proudly points to the success at CNY Works as proof that it is possible. “Getting people out of poverty requires a ladder approach,” she says. “They need to be able to reach that next rung. You can’t just pull them out.” Likewise, it’s not as simple as training someone, helping them score an interview and then assisting them when they do find work. When asked to explain CNY Works’ success, Ehrenreich reflects.
“I think it goes back to understanding the needs of the population that we’re serving,” she says. “This population needs specific things that aren’t necessarily in line with traditional services provided to middle-class families that know how to use the system. We provide counseling and hand-holding in the early stages. But we also provide assistance with some of the major obstacles to getting employment, things as simple as IDs, accessing a birth certificate.”
Further, the reality of working with clients who have a criminal background isn’t as easy as being upfront with a prospective employer and then securing the client employment. The Center for Community Alternatives, 115 E. Jefferson St., whose mission is to “promote reintegrative justice and a reduced reliance on incarceration through advocacy, services and public policy development in pursuit of civil and human rights,” has been a great help in this process, Ehrenreich points out.
“We’re working with the CCA, providing criminal background, legal counseling and assistance, getting mistakes cleared off people’s records,” she says. “CCA has let us help 160 people, who now know exactly what their criminal history is about and how to present it to employers. They have served their time, they’re out, they now want to be productive members of society. And that’s amazing, particularly for young black men, that’s a huge thing.”
As for defining a green job, according to the CNY Works website, they could be in weatherization, green construction and infrastructure, even wind turbine installation. “We have strong green-training providers that are able to offer training to people who are ready, willing and able to build a workforce,” Ehrenreich says. Even though the $3.7 million ARRA grant expires in January, Ehrenreich notes that CNY Works has applied for an extension.
At the same, she admits it’s nerve-wracking working for an organization so dependent on public funding. However, under the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, each county in New York state is required to have a career development plan, and CNY Works’ efforts fill that mandate.
When not at work, Ehrenreich sits on the board of the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency, a 2010 appointee of Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner, volunteers with the Westcott Street Cultural Festival, builds community on her Fellows Avenue block—residents just started a neighborhood watch—and enjoys watching her hometown get it together.
“The pace of change lately really makes me happy,” she says. “Every time I see a new bike lane and hear about a new public arts project, every time I go ice skating around Clinton Square or go to a restaurant that serves locally sourced food, it makes me happy. I really like being a cheerleader for Syracuse. People have no idea how good we have it here. I’m excited that there’s such a confluence of energy, really energetic, amazing people that are working toward solving our problems, and we do have problems. But you see people coming together, really motivated to change.”
—Molly English-Bowers
Paul Mercurio:
Spokes Person
On a late September afternoon a construction crew rumbled down a freshly paved stretch of Euclid Avenue. The work trucks beeped and flashed lights, the crew’s orange safety vests and cones bright against the slick asphalt as they progressed eastward. Left behind were thick white stripes along the road and fat bars marking crosswalks at several intersections.
“That’s something I take a little pride in,” Mercurio says. “You get a 37 percent crash reduction between pedestrians and cars when you have an enhanced crosswalk.”
Mercurio sounds nearly robotic when he cites memorized traffic safety data. Yet he sounds quite pedestrian when describing the road-striping crew. “It was a big truck with a spray thing. That was the extent of my understanding of what I was looking at,” he says with a smile.
The native of Piermont, in Rockland County, jumped at the chance to work as Syracuse’s transportation planner. Mercurio, 31, worked for the city as a neighborhood planner under former Mayor Matt Driscoll’s administration with focus on the West and Near West sides. His planning skills got him a job at the regional level, but he kept his zeal for transportation at the city level. Co-workers and peers noticed his passion and in 2010, Mayor Stephanie Miner carved out a space for him in the Department of Public Works.
Before coming to the department, Mercurio says he saw DPW staff as those who build and maintain urban infrastructure projects. In other cities his position would be under the engineering or planning department umbrellas, but Mercurio sees his placement within the DPW as a vital connection to those who actually implement his plans. He used his undergraduate thesis at Boston University to explore aspects of traffic engineering and landscape architecture before settling on the latter. He also studied at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
“It was more holistic. It looked at communities, it looked at ecologies, it looked at aesthetics and psychology in addition to the transportation network itself,” he says of the thesis.
Aware that he has to model the behavior, Mercurio bikes to work when his schedule and weather permit, but he sometimes has to drive. Doing both offers him the chance to interact with traffic patterns from both perspectives. Almost four miles of urban roadway received a facelift this summer, including two-thirds of a mile of new bike lanes on North Geddes Street, and the Euclid restriping project which included a half-mile of sharrows (shared-lane markings) and bike lanes.
Inside the DPW on Canal Street, his spartan office is filled with binders, plans and boxes of files. Four maps hang on a wall. He sits behind a generic metal desk with a laminate wood-patterned surface, with a computer and two monitors taking up one side. This is his “war room.” In here he can speak the jargon of his profession.
“Some people, their eyes glaze over when I talk about this, but there’s a statistical term called fundamental attribution error,” which Mercurio translates to mean people may see behavior without the underlying factors that shape the behavior. He observes it when residents often dismiss transportation changes with excuses like the weather or the existing culture. “We have made intentional infrastructure choices and that affects what is a rational choice for the average citizen.”
He knows the public he serves does not care about the academics: They want visible and often instant results. “The public kind of gets weirded out when I say things like, ‘Well if you plant street trees then it will slow down cars—in five to 10 years,’” Mercurio says. “Maybe that’s part of the fact that I studied geology I tend to think more long term.”
If the devil is in the details for a transportation planner, selling the big picture of a more pedestrian and bike-friendly city is hell. Mercurio did not work on the first phase of the Connective Corridor now under construction along University Avenue, but the community response to narrowing roads, adding trees and a bike path is familiar to him. Once completed in the spring, the project will unveil several design features new to the city. Getting people to see riding a bike as more than a recreational activity is still his hardest sell.
Jim Hicks, a manager at J. Michael Shoes on Marshall Street, says the construction is only a minor annoyance but worries about the loss of roughly 100 metered parking spaces the project represents. “I see more BMWs than bikes around here,” he says, shrugging. “But I’m not the expert.”
Local developer Rick Destito is involved with several community groups and has worked with Mercurio since he was a neighborhood planner. “The No. 1 reason that more people don’t ride bikes and commute is because they’re definitely afraid for their lives,” he says, making the argument bounced around city meetings for years.
Destito thinks Syracuse has become more open-minded to transit design changes, but insists it has farther to go. Ideas like the pay station parking took time for the public to adjust to, and Destito sees a new resistance to reverse-diagonal parking, like that found on North Salina Street and Erie Boulevard East, that Mercurio advocates. “It really freaks a lot of people out, but I don’t see how it’s any different, it’s like half the steps of parallel parking and it fits more cars.”
From a planning perspective, best practices are developed around human behavior. So when someone asks for local evidence to support an initiative that has no local equivalent, Mercurio admits frustration. “It makes me bang my head against the wall. People are people, it’s not like people in Syracuse are somehow a different species,” Mercurio says. “But it’s a good political thing to have that local data under my belt.”
In January, Mercurio will start attending Tomorrow’s Neighborhoods Today meetings to hear and present ideas for the upcoming year. A meeting schedule will be posted on the city’s Bike Plan link from syracuse.ny.us as soon as they’re set.
Mercurio’s plans must be approved at a higher level than the DPW and he understands the current fiscal climate requires him, like other city departments, to do more with less. Still, he has plenty of ideas, and works with the public to find consensual solutions, but Syracuse is a notoriously skeptical place. He knows it’s up to the city government to decide how it will proceed, and if the public chooses to tap into his knowledge of transportation, he’s ready for them. “It’s the pretty girl that doesn’t know she’s pretty standing on the side of the high school prom, and I don’t know who’s going to pull her onto the dance floor, but I’m trying.”
—M.T. Elliott
Khalid Bey:
Uncommon Councilor
When Khalid Bey takes the oath of office as the 4th District common councilor on Dec. 30, he does so as a 40-year-old. A Syracuse native, born and raised in Central Village, Bey is the author of four books, was a frequent contributor to the monthly newspaper CNY Vision, and has spent time recently touring universities across the Northeast promoting his ideas on civic and individual empowerment as outlined in his latest, self-published tome The Key to Character.
“All my books are about self-help,” says Bey, who now lives in a home on West Kennedy Street that he bought a year ago from Home Headquarters. “I really got interested in education after I graduated from high school, and I developed a passion for the idea of empowerment. This latest book is about understanding the difference between personality and character. It is about achieving freedom from self-doubt, and reawakening in people the idea that they can do anything.”
Bey hopes to apply that notion of empowerment to a city that he sees as waiting to fulfill its potential. “Our city has psychological problems as an entity. We have struggled for so long; we need to regain our drive and determination. Syracuse can be as exciting or vibrant as any other city. You go to Jersey City, to Atlanta, to Manhattan {where Bey recently heard Mary J. Blige sing at Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s birthday party}, and honestly you get a little jealous. We can do those things here, too. And I want to do what I can to contribute.”
He sums up his empowerment philosophy in one phrase: “The only savior of me is me.” Both individuals and municipalities, he warns, can lose out when they become dependent on others for help. “Some services that government provides can be supportive but are crippling at the same time. Look at our city and its dependence on the state. If we had an effort to raise 51 percent of our revenues locally, then when cuts came down we wouldn’t be so vulnerable.”
Bey took over the 4th District seat from Tom Seals, a retired Syracuse Police officer who served two terms on the Common Council, the mandated limit; he ran against Seals in 2005, and in 2009 sought a Councilor-at-Large seat. In 2011, the new councilor defeated Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins in a race closer than you would expect for a Democratic candidate in an overwhelmingly Democratic district. Bey, who has most recently served the party as a liaison for the Democratic Conference in the state Senate, does not sound like someone prepared to follow a party line.
“Remaining a skeptic,” he says, “is one of the things I value.” The Corcoran High School graduate studied at both Virginia State, where he played fullback on a football scholarship, and Empire State College, but he attributes most of his world view to reading he has done on his own. “My house is filled with, like, 500 books.” He ran track at Corcoran, excelling in the long jump and triple jump. “Ninety percent of my time growing up was spent with football and making music in my room,” says Bey, who once dreamt of playing in the NFL.
He joins the Common Council at a time when the city’s legislative body, now all Democratic, has been tangling with Democratic Mayor Stephanie Miner on a number of issues. He plans to hold on to his own views and to work with his colleagues. “One of the things that I’ve been talking about is that it doesn’t have to be so hard-nosed. The key thing when you’re facing two extremes is to find the truth in the middle. It is realistic to think that you can come to a compromise and make decisions with little or no casualties. We each have to take responsibility, we have to be courteous, and we have to realize that with every decision you make, you’re affecting someone.”
Aware of pressing budget problems facing municipalities, he considers himself something of a fiscal conservative. “I’m very big on efficiency. We can do more with less is my personal philosophy.” At the same time he would like to see the city work more on empowering people by attempting to hire more local people, and making sure that job-training programs provide the skills that the market is calling for.
So why did he want to get into politics at such a challenging time? “Honestly, I didn’t want to,” he explains. “When people first came to talk to me about running I wasn’t sure the time was right. Then I saw that this was an opportunity to empower people from a more influential position.”
—Ed Griffin-Nolan
Dominic Robinson:
Northern Light
In 2005, Syracuse University hired coach Greg Robinson in an effort to revitalize its struggling football program. While SU fans know how that turned out, most are unfamiliar with the tale of his son. Dominic Robinson followed his father to Syracuse as an assistant coach, but left the team after two years to pursue a revitalization project of his own: the city’s North Side.
Robinson is the founder and director of Northside UP, a non-for-profit community development project headquartered at 800 N. Salina St. Northside UP (originally called the Northside Collaboratory) began as a two-man operation with Robinson and his friend Maarten Jacobs in 2006. The organization’s goal is to improve the overall quality of life on the city’s North Side through community and cultural initiatives as well as economic progress.
Before coming to Syracuse, Robinson taught and coached football at a high school in Chicago while taking graduate courses at Loyola University. He was 26 years old when his father was hired at SU. “My dad invited me here to coach with him,” Robinson says. “Before I knew it, I was taking classes at the School of Education and was a grad assistant with the team.”
Despite an imposing physique, Robinson defies the stereotypical image of a football coach. Those accustomed to watching his father shouting at players and barking orders to subordinates on the SU sidelines would be surprised to meet the quiet, humble 32-year-old. “It’s easy to let your work become an ego-driven thing,” notes Jacobs, who has known Robinson since he moved here in 2005. “But he’s been able to do amazing work and not let it go to his head.”
Shortly after moving to Syracuse, Robinson met the Rev. Canice Connor, director of the Franciscan Northside Ministries. Despite a 50-year age gap, the two became fast friends, regularly discussing philosophy and urban development. It was Connor who gave Robinson the opportunity to start a new career.
“He said he could pay me enough to live on if I wanted to put my ideas into action,” Robinson remembers. “While I loved football and coaching, I was ready for something that didn’t require me to work 100 hours a week.”
The two men worked out a budget that allowed Robinson to hire one employee. He called Jacobs, who has a background in community organizing, and offered him the job. “Dom and I were neighbors when he first moved here and we spent a lot of time talking about what this city needs,” Jacobs says. “So when he called and offered me a position, I quit my job and he and I started at Northside UP.”
Today, Northside UP is a seven-person outfit and boasts impressive partners ranging from St. Joseph’s Hospital to Catholic Charities to CenterState CEO. As the program’s primary financier, CenterState CEO is, technically, Robinson’s employer. In addition to his work with Northside UP, Robinson serves as deputy director of urban initiatives at the chamber of commerce-type organization. His duties in that role, he says, typically overlap with those at Northside UP.
Jacobs has since taken a position as director of a similar project—the Near West Side Initiative—but he and Robinson collaborate and share ideas frequently. “It was a tough decision to leave,” Jacobs says. “But it’s given us an opportunity to bring Northside UP programs to the Near West Side.”
One such program is Green Train, an educational program that teaches environmentally friendly construction practices to residents. On the North Side, the program has trained more than 100 neighbors, and nearly 90 of them now work full time, Robinson says, making Green Train one of his most successful projects.
While Northside UP is involved in various community projects, their main focus is economic development. “The only way to permanently increase quality of life is by changing an area’s economic conditions,” Robinson says. “The greatest challenge we face here is poverty.”
Robinson began combating this challenge by partnering with Cooperative Federal Credit Union, which opened a branch in December 2008 in the same building as Northside UP. The credit union provides services and education regarding loans and mortgages for its members.
Next, Robinson and Co. began renovating buildings in the area and working with entrepreneurs to bring businesses to the small commercial district. Northside UP has worked with Wild Flour Bakery and the recently opened Craft Chemistry, an art gallery, helping secure grants and retail space for the burgeoning businesses.
In addition to the economic projects, Northside UP has funded public arts projects and community gardens. The result of these combined efforts is a blossoming sense of community on the North Side, the portion of the city that has historically welcomed the first waves of immigrants, whether they were Italian, Somali or Hmong. “We’re adding a sense of excitement in the neighborhood and getting people to feel connected to the place where they’re living and working,” Robinson says.
As he nears seven years in Syracuse, Robinson admits that this is the longest he’s spent in one place. The son of a football coach, he has lived in a half-dozen cities. It was in Syracuse, however, that he met his wife, Jonnell, and found work that he truly loves.
“We have a lot of work left to do here and I completely intend on doing it,” he says. “A lot of people place their trust in what we’re doing here and I, for one, am extremely excited about it.”
—Chris Baker
One of the things I love about CNY is people willing to work hard and make things better, especially young folks