Mayor of Muncie Dennis Tyler spoke Thursday to Ball State students and Muncie residents about civic engagement, and he said community involvement says a lot about that community.
The methods that Muncie’s volunteer network implements can hint at what the Muncie community is about.
Tyler said the Ball State community has put in around 100,000 hours of volunteer hours per year into the Muncie community, a number that John Fallon, associate vice president of economic development and community engagement at Ball State, said wouldn’t surprise him. The time put into those projects is tracked by the professors and organizers involved.
Even with all of those hours put into those different initiatives around the city, there is still a question of whether that is the most efficient way to go about change. Fallon said it is not uncommon for class projects or departmental activities to go directly to a community organization and offer help.
The help to these projects spreads across sporadic, informal and independent agreements, illustrating a vast, but thinly-spread, network of manpower — a distribution method that parallels the city’s redevelopment efforts.
“The city has two plans,” Fallon said. “I think that we would do well by concentrating our efforts more effectively on those two plans. Both of those plans have been formalized and involve lots of people and have taken months to put together.”
The plans that Fallon referred to were the Vision 2016 plan, created by the Muncie Economic Development Alliance, and the Muncie Action Plan, a plan developed by ACP Vision+Planning.
Both plans include policies to attract and retain businesses as well as refresh the image of Muncie and Delaware County.
“There are no communication links that all of these things that are going on can roll up to, so it’s difficult to gather the information on the sum of all of these and then communicate it,” Fallon said. “So that’s one thing that we could certainly do better.”
Independent initiatives and their isolation from each other is matched by the Ball State student body’s disenfranchisement from the Muncie community. Alienation of different parts of the city in the minds of students creates a prejudice that further disenfranchises the two communities.
A Muncie local and a student told Caleb Livesay, a junior psychology major, that the southern portion of Muncie was “extremely bad.”
Yet Samantha Blankenship, junior photojournalism major and resident of the south side, said otherwise.
“Most people who say the south side is bad have either never been around that part of town and it’s just hearsay, or they just happened to find one of those few neighborhoods,” Blankenship said.
Fallon is also involved in the Building Better Communities Fellows immersive learning projects that partner with local businesses and community leaders to develop solutions to real-world issues.
“We’ve done training programs for companies and nonprofit organizations and immersive learning programs,” he said. But the informal initiatives number in the hundreds, he added.
Still, the rumors, whether untrue or not, can be a big hindrance to the city’s progression, Tyler said.
“The stereotyping that I heard about the south side just wasn’t true,” Tyler said. “That’s the type of stereotyping that we don’t need. I don’t think that does our community any good.”
