- Hi there, I'm Sthephanie Marie, and you have just tuned into a PBS Western Reserve special series called "City Centric."

That's right.

This is Alliance centric.

Growing up in Youngstown, I knew Alliance was practically a stone's throw away, but I really never knew about all the things that made Alliance special.

If you're like me, you're in for a good time.

In the next half hour, you're going to learn that Alliance is about as small town Americana as you can get.

If Mayberry had a fraternal twin, it would be Alliance.

The downtown is quaint, the people are earnest and sincere, and the companies that have started businesses in Alliance are in it for the long haul.

But don't take my word for it.

Let's hear from an Alliance humanitarian, Chas Mitchell, who says he's just an ordinary person carrying the legacy and generosity that his grandfather started many years ago.

- I'm Chas Mitchell.

I would define a humanitarian as just an ordinary person that wants to see people around them succeed and help people and love people around them.

I've been the president of the Stuckey Interfaith Child Development Center, which is a child development center here in Alliance.

Our capacity is 100 students.

They serve approximately 100 students.

Most are subsidized and low income students that come to daycare to learn and to get developed and ready for school.

That's the big idea.

It's not just a daycare, it's a child development center.

We have curriculum, we feed the students, we have diapers for the students.

We do basically everything for the kids while they're at the center and get them ready to go to school.

So I've been president of that for a few years.

I've been on the board for six.

I've been involved in the YMCA board, and then, obviously, the Greater Alliance Foundation I'm involved in as well.

I was very, very close with my grandfather.

He was one of my best friends, and he would always teach me stuff.

He always gave and never wanted anything in return.

And in our society it's always like "If I'm giving you something, what are you giving me back," right?

He was so generous with his community, with his employees, with his family.

So his generosity really is something that always has spoken to me and just how he interacted with people.

People that were really close to him and he loved and then people that, you know, worked for him, or that he just cared about and that he knew, he still was generous with everyone in his life.

So my grandfather with one of his best friends, Jack Peters, started the Greater Alliance Foundation in 1999.

They had $45,000.

They endowed the foundation as a way to give back to the community that they loved.

They always were very generous in the community doing projects and stuff, but they wanted to formalize that and make an organization that really championed organizations in Alliance doing good things.

So early childhood education's really important.

You know, the food bank's really important.

Educational themed things were very important to them.

The YMCA, the YWCA, Habitat for Humanity, those kind of organizations were really near and dear to their hearts.

So, today it has over $27 million in assets and gives back a million dollars a year back into the community, which is really awesome.

I guess an Alliance-centric person to me means someone who champions our community and wants to see our community thrive in every avenue.

Businesses thrive, nonprofits thrive, the hospital, the college.

All these organizations in our town get championed by that person who is Alliance-centric.

I think anyone can be a humanitarian if they choose that, and they choose to care and love those people around them that they come into contact with every day.

(upbeat music) - Chas said that anyone could be a humanitarian.

Now, he has me thinking about ways that I can be one too.

Chas's story has also made me think about how blessed we are to live in such a bountiful region.

Our everyday lives are filled to the brim with a lot of things.

Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that every structure we live or work in, every tool we use, and every book we read, or every movie we watch, all started with just one person having a thought or idea?

From there a person or a group of people do whatever it takes to make that thought or idea become a reality.

Up next is planning and development director, Joe Mazzola, who marvels at how many things in the world were made right here in small town Alliance, Ohio.

- I'm Joe Mazzola, director of planning and development for the city of Alliance.

My position is the point person for economic development on the government side.

The department itself gets involved in anything that may affect investment in the city of Alliance.

I insist on teamwork.

Nobody does this by themselves.

In order to do my job, I need a citizenry that is engaged, that offers opinions, things I don't necessarily even want to hear.

How are we gonna make things better unless we confront the things we need to take care of?

I didn't know much about Alliance until I got here, but three things happened within six months of starting here that really formulated what I think the city has to offer.

The first was reading about the history of the city, which is fascinating.

The second thing that happened was Carnation Days.

It's a festival that happens annually here.

It was explained to me that this is a pretty big deal, like really, you know?

Major festivals in Cleveland, you know, instead of on a Friday, might start on a Wednesday and go through Sunday and something like that.

"Oh no, Joe, you don't understand.

This thing goes on for two weeks officially and unofficially for three weeks."

But what really did it was the commemoration of the 9/11 memorial at Silver Park.

New York City or an entity involved with the the remains of the Twin Towers sent out word to cities throughout the United States if you want a piece of this to do something special in your city, let us know.

And what happened is the good citizens of Alliance or a committee put something together that just went beyond what people in New York had experienced with its proposal submittals.

So they gave them some special pieces of the the Twin Towers and then it clicked.

If you want an authentic experience of small city America, come to Alliance, it's here.

Government has a unique role in the planning and development of a city, and it's an essential element, but it's not the whole picture.

Because what really drives what happens, and this is America, it's the private sector.

Government doesn't create any jobs.

What we can do, and I hope what we do do is put in place the development framework so that the private sector can succeed or fail on its own merits.

Oftentimes, cities look for something from the outside to come in and help solve their problems.

What I have found in my experiences, and especially in Alliance, that idea of nurturing what you have, allowing them to grow, it really works well.

That entrepreneurial DNA in Alliance has not left.

In other cities, they would talk about, "Oh, we used to have this company here, and it employed a thousand people, but it, you know, died 10 years ago.

We're trying to do this, we're trying to do that."

It never stopped here in Alliance.

Coastal Pet products, Jim Stout and all the wonderful people out there, he started small.

Now there's 500 people working out there.

MAC Trailer, Mike Conny, he started in a garage making truck trailers.

I think he employs over 1200 people in a variety of plants.

But he has two plants here in Alliance, one just north of town and one on the east side.

There's 400 people working there.

Morgan Engineering, an engineering firm that's been around, they celebrated their 150th anniversary just a couple of years ago.

You'd be surprised to find out a segment of Morgan Engineering called Morgan Kinetic and what they have done.

The mechanism that moves Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, Forest Hill, it used to be Forest Hills.

It was developed here.

The mechanism for the Skydome in Toronto, Safeco Field in Seattle.

I mean, that's the kind of reach companies, you know, in Alliance have, and it's still here because those companies started small and have moved up.

There's other companies, you know, that are just on the verge of stepping into, you know, that stratosphere in terms of large companies.

- I don't know about you, but from now on I will never be able to go to a sports arena with a retractable dome without wondering if the mechanism that makes it work was made in Alliance, Ohio.

Speaking of the idea of getting something made, what about the other side of that?

What kind of person decides to breathe that new life into it instead of discarding it or tearing it down?

Up next is Alliance revitalizer, Ed Albert, who believes that money doesn't beat the passion, love, and time it requires to make an old downtown look new again.

- My name is Ed Albert, and I'm a revitalizer of this downtown.

I would define a revitalizer as somebody that you got just gotta put in the time and you gotta have love, passion, and wanna see change.

Change doesn't happen with money.

That's one of the things I told these guys, I said, "One thing that money can't beat is blood, sweat, and tears."

We're down here, and we put in blood, sweat and tears.

We put in the time, we put in the effort, and over that time it'll pay off.

There's an old thing saying that has been told to me many, many times years ago, "How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time."

It's the only way you're gonna get through it.

Alliance started out with two different burbs, suburbs.

You had the Alliance and Mount Union, they've come together as one.

Mount Union is the college in town, but that was also called Mount Union as the area.

And they were like two small towns next to each other.

You have the main thoroughway which is Route 62 that goes through Alliance.

That thoroughway, if you're up by the corner of Sawburg and State, is this busiest intersection in Stark County.

It's unbelievable.

With that kind of traffic that's coming through, that tells you that our State street is a very popular, very busy road that is a connection from Canton to Youngstown, if you wanna call it.

That's the path you normally would take.

The demographics is roughly, I think we're close to 20,000 people.

We're a very diverse community.

Well, because history can be forgotten very easily, and if we don't preserve it, then people will never know how it got here.

They're right now they're digging through the pyramids, they're digging through civilizations from millions and thousands of years ago and finding things.

To be able to find that we find our past and how we got from here to there.

As far as revitalizing, the history is what helps us revitalize what we have lost down here.

A lot of people came up from the river to shop in Alliance because this was a mecca.

It was huge as far as shopping.

I can show you pictures of this downtown where we're shoulder to shoulder lined up in the streets.

We actually had electrical cars that ran up and down the road to drop people off.

If we can revitalize some of that back, then we've revitalized some of the history that has been lost down here.

The beautiful part about Alliances is the cost of living is wonderful here.

My dad was a contractor so he did a little demographic research back in the, I wanna say late '80s, early '90s, the cheapest cost of living in America is Ohio.

The cheapest cost of living in Ohio is Stark County.

The cheapest cost of living in Stark County is Alliance.

So you can come here and buy a house cheaper than most places in America.

You can come here and everything's within distance that you don't have to drive far to get it.

It's a great community to grow up in.

It has a great community because people get along with each other.

For those very reasons, it allows somebody to come here and live a normal life without having to be super wealthy to enjoy it.

(upbeat music) - Can you believe that the busiest intersection in Stark County is located in Alliance?

What an amazing piece of knowledge from Ed.

He also claims that Ohio has one of the lowest cost of living indexes in America and Alliance is one of the most affordable places to live in Ohio.

We looked it up, it's true depending on what year and what index you're referencing.

Speaking of costs, our next story features social entrepreneurs, Ray and Brenda Johnson, who say you become a social entrepreneur for a lot of reasons, but money is not one of them.

- I am Raymont Johnson.

- I'm Brenda Johnson.

- [Both] And we are social entrepreneurs.

So to me, when I hear Alliance-centric, what that means to me is that someone that is focused on Alliance, someone that is focused on adding value to this community.

We are Alliance, alliance is a coming together.

So these are the ones that are not focused on someone else coming to take care of us, but we are focused on taking care of us.

We believe that we have everything that we need to be successful in this city.

And a social entrepreneur is really someone that their interest is in the non-profit arena.

Our mantra in life is to inspire and empower and equip people to walk in their purpose.

Their purpose, their passion, that's what we want to do.

That we view success by changed lives.

If lives aren't changing, we're not being successful.

I was just talking to the mayor recently, and they were counting, and there were over 70 non-profits in Alliance.

So they might not realize it, but they're all social entrepreneurs They're all find what their niche is.

I don't care what it is, they're finding their niche, they're finding their passion, and they're going after it to add value to people's lives.

You don't become a social entrepreneur because you want to get rich.

That's not it.

You become a social entrepreneur because you see a need, and you wanna make a difference in people's lives.

We like to say here that we service from the womb to the tomb.

So we have every program for everyone from babies to we're getting ready to do senior citizen computer classes.

- We just want everybody to come together, bring their resources, bring their talent, and bring their treasure so that we can come together and make our city better.

- Because a community is only as strong as its weakest link.

And what I've seen in Alliance, what has been the weakest link is minority-owned businesses, and also those that are less fortunate as it were.

So that's who we target.

The city does a great job of attracting major businesses, but we gotta make sure that we fix that weak link.

So it's important that everyone plays a part in growing the economy here.

And so I don't think for years that there's been anyone to support those that have a vision, support the minority business.

And a lot of people have great ideas, but what they need is someone to coach them through it, someone to help them understand what they need so that they can be successful.

So we wanna help them start their businesses, grow their businesses, then be able to hire others.

That's how we grow the economy.

So we need the minority businesses to participate, and we need everyone right in the arena in order for us to be successful.

(upbeat music) - We have watched almost a half hour's worth of information about Alliance without ever stopping to think that the word alliance literally means bringing people together.

This makes a perfect segue into our next story about Alliance entertainer, John Hampu, who makes people happy through music, but the road he took to get there isn't what you might expect it to be.

- Hello, I'm John Hampu from Alliance, Ohio, and I am an entertainer.

Retired from Alliance City Schools, play in a rock and roll band called the John Hampu Band.

Also continue to work at Robertson Heating Supply, one of our local businesses in the Alliance area.

An entertainer is a person or a group of people that understands that the group that's coming to see you or hear you may have different interests than your interests.

Well, when you're teaching you have to be somewhat of an entertainer in a classroom because if you can't capture the students' attention, you're in trouble, all right?

So luckily I'm pretty skilled with the gift of talking, and because I've been around the block doing a lot of different things in the Alliance area, that's provided me the opportunity to use my skills and to be able to communicate with kids effectively.

I try to teach students today that learn music learn how to sing, learn how to play a musical instrument.

It's a different language.

It's a language that many people don't know, and they don't understand.

It's a way to express yourself.

It's important to find a mentor regardless of what instrument you play or what part you may sing, because you can learn a lot from them.

Well, when I grew up in Alliance as a young kid, I started playing big band music.

When I was in the high school band, there was a big band.

I started playing with the big band.

So the Alliance community forged my life as a musician that way.

Once upon a time when I first started my career as an educator, I was a coach.

I coached for 10 years at B.F. Stanton Middle School.

Any of my former athletes would remember those days well.

They would remember that we did something no other team has ever done, probably no other team will ever do.

In track and field, we won every single track meet that I coached for 10 years in a row.

Every single meet for 10 years.

As an entertainer, you look at the crowd you have, and you know right off the bat, you know, which songs that particular night that you have to coach the band into giving it everything they got because you know that crowd's a little different than the one you played for the night before.

So I think the teaching, learning, coaching process taught me that early on.

Once upon a time when I first started teaching and coaching, I used to believe in my early years that if you were in my class and you had siblings, brothers, and sisters in my class, you'd all be the same.

So I learned very early on that you have to understand those differences and play your cards right toward those differences.

Alliance-centric people that touch the community, they give back in a variety of ways.

They may give back financially, they may give back socially, they may give back athletically, but they touch the town.

They know, they feel the pulse of Alliance.

They know what they can do with their skills to touch the town.

I'm Alliance-centric because I know enough about the Alliance community because I've been here for a long enough period of time, and I've had the opportunity to touch the lives of so many students and their parents, their grandparents, and they've been to see me in a lot of different ways by coming to see the band, or as their teacher, or as their coach.

(upbeat music) - I never really thought about how being a classroom teacher is a lot like being an entertainer, but it makes sense.

Some of the best teachers I had growing up in Youngstown were ones that took command of the classroom.

I guess you can call that stage presence.

I could tell they loved the subject they taught, the energy and excitement that made me love what I learned.

What a wonderful example of life coming full circle.

Speaking of full circle, this last story brings us to the beginning stages of one young man's life, so we can see what the future holds.

Allow me to introduce to you Chad Mercer, who has the greatest outlook on living his best life in Alliance.

- I'm Chad Mercer, and I'm a shoe customizer.

A shoe customizer is an artist that takes a normal shoe and makes it their own and makes it different to make it unique.

So the first thing that you actually want to do is find a design that you like or make a mock-up, which is a photo of the shoe itself, and you already have it like all planned out.

Then you want to take the shoe itself, take like acetone to take the product's finishing coat because each shoe has that.

You see that little like glossy look to each shoe?

It's just to protect the shoe.

And what you wanna do is take that off so you can actually apply paint to the shoe so it adheres.

And then after that, tape any spots that you don't want paint on, and then you're good to go start painting.

And then after you're done with that, you can put the finishing coat on it so it protects your paint also.

So at a young age I was diagnosed with ADHD.

I was very hyper, jumping on the couch and everything.

Uncle and aunt didn't like that so they tried to gimme like different things to do.

I found painting.

It really helps me calm down.

I started in like first maybe even kindergarten, but off from there I got better and better.

Throughout middle school is actually when I got like, yo, I'm pretty good, I should probably like keep on focusing on this.

Yeah, my aunt and uncle was very amazing for just helping me and supporting me throughout my life for real.

They actually helped me buy paint and stuff like that, and actually supported me and I mean gave me compliments on like stuff that didn't actually look good, but like it still raised my soul, you know?

I just started out like with one pair and like brought myself up to like where I'm at now, and I'm going further with what I like to do.

Like, if you find something that you really love, focus on that.

I'm very unique myself, creative.

I feel like the shoes speaks for itself.

I mean, I don't feel like other people do what I do.

Like, things that make me unique is I'm very creative, I'm determined, hardworking.

Like, things people are doing, like I'm not doing, I'm doing my own little thing.

I'm trying to be out there more, you know?

Like, let people see who Chad Mercer is.

I'm proud to be from Alliance because it's a very small community, very nice, everybody's supportive, friendly, and I feel like I really want, like the dream that I want, I'm gonna get it.

I am Chad Mercer, and I am the future.

(upbeat music) - I think Chad has figured out what takes some of us years, if ever, to learn, and that's find something you really love and focus on that.

He is so authentic, honest, and true.

Thank you for being you, Chad.

Thank you for overcoming and learning to turn a negative into a positive.

Also, a big shout out to your aunt and uncle for giving you what you need to find your way and flourish.

My hope is that everyone, just like Chad, pinpoints their passion, finds their purpose, and discovers a way to express their creativity.

What character do you play for the betterment of a place you call home?

Can you find a way to inspire, innovate, and energize?

Are you city-centric?

That's all for now.

I hope you enjoyed Alliance Centric and will join me next time for another episode of "City Centric."

(energetic music) - That was a little bit strong.

Yeah, I felt it.

I felt it.

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