Civic DNA Project Shares Findings

The Signature and Emerging Leaders Class of 2020 worked on a class project to discover Medina County’s Civic DNA to find out what makes Medina County a great place to live, work, and play. They based their project on research done by Leadership Denver. Read about Leadership Denver’s project here. Over two years both classes and the Signature Class of 2021 interviewed 85 community members. They asked them the following questions.

What makes Medina County stand out as a place you wanted to work in? Live in?
What behaviors or attributes have undermined (or continue to undermine) progress and should be avoided in the future?
What do you consider the top three factors leading to and continuing to drive Medina County’s success? Why?
When you think about some of the failures in the county, or things that have delayed progress, what things come to mind that should be avoided moving forward?
In your opinion, what makes Medina County different from other counties in Northeast Ohio and beyond? What makes it stand out?
When you think about the list of major successes in Medina County over the past 5, 10, and 30 years, what were the most important attributes and factors that made those accomplishments happen?

Leadership Medina County collaborated with John Carroll University interns Janan Shouman and Rushil Rana. Over a 5-week micro-internship, they sorted through the interviews to identify and define the most important attributes of Medina County’s Civic DNA. The following slides define what they found. Watch the program here.

Our next steps include sharing this information with community leaders and to incorporate it into our curriculum. In the evaluations from the event, we received a lot of feedback about rewording the 5 attributes. We will continue to work on the wording. Demographics were also requested. See the demographics below compiled by Biz Hive. We welcome your input. Send your input to Colleen Rice at colleen@leadershipmedinacounty.org.