Moving the needle when it’s made of people and concrete
My life is built around a mission my wife and I set for our family: “Salzbruns Push”. We push ourselves, the work we’re doing, our friends to new places and the communities we serve.
Our family defined this mission by looking at the values we had and the new ground we wanted to take. At the time, we looked back and saw a passion around community. Not so much in the sense of “bringing people together” but the more physical sense of “Shaping the landscape with which people thrived.” There was a divide between what we wanted and what we had. It would take hard work and lots of time to close that divide. So, we pushed.
Over the last eight years, we’ve built a series of ecosystems that have changed the fabric of neighborhoods and cities. Our push has allowed us to move the needle on quality of life.
In a small neighborhood called Pendleton, a team of residents, business owners and community organizers transformed one of the largest open-air heroin markets into one of the best neighborhoods to live in (if you ask local news outlets). Accomplishing this wasn’t the flip of a switch. It took countless hours of us getting to know our neighbors and what they longed for in their community. It meant creating reasons for people to discover Pendleton for the first time through community events. And it also took investment into brick and mortar spaces for people to come together and do life together.
On a larger scale in 2014, the City of Cincinnati was in desperate need of an identity revision. From a burgeoning hub of gentrification, with racial tension in its' DNA, to a city that had hope and a vision for the future. One that included everyone. I spent three years traveling the world looking for answers and working alongside some of the greatest creatives and visionaries to ever set foot in our town. What resulted was the spark to light the fuse of change in our city. That spark was BLINK. The four-day experience was the largest gathering of people in the history of the city and it was a color wheel of humanity. It took three years of pushing, but we began to move the needle.
So what’s next? We continue the push forward toward a Future City. Moving this needle will take years but the challenge will be worth the result. Will you join me?
Finding my personal mission and voice has a lot of parallels to how we serve our clients at AGAR. At the core, we help them arrive at strategic solutions that are aspirational and truly make the work better. This is made possible through direct and fluid communication that is supported by a decade of expertise and the push for more.