Director of Community Development, City of Decatur

I'm Melissa Norby. I'm the Director of Community Development for the city of Decatur. Mainly, my job is to be a liaison between the community and the city. If there's resources that our organizations or our volunteers need, to connect them with the city if the city has anything available. I also investigate different grant opportunities or funding opportunities if the city has a project or if any of our local organizations or volunteers have projects they are working on. We're super fortunate in that we have about 20 local organizations that are all volunteer organizations doing great projects on behalf of the city, so it's important that the city keeps in contact with them, know what they're doing, make sure that there's no overlap in services and what everybody's doing so that everybody's volunteer hours and time gets the best impact for our city. We're working on a lot of downtown development right now, which a lot of rural communities in Indiana are doing, and right now we're in the middle of fundraising for a project called the Madison Street Plaza. We have a lot of great downtown events that are happening and right now, they just kind of happen on a block or on a street and there's no rhyme or reason for how they happen. Not a lot of resources to make sure that there is restrooms and a sound system and blocking the street off safely. So we're creating this plaza and you don't feel like you're in Decatur anymore, you feel like you're in this special place, so we're working on creating this plaza for all of our downtown and community events. This project was on the books before I started this job about two and a half years ago, and as different community projects come up and funding is available and not available, these projects kind of are on the schedule but don't always happen as quickly as we would like so we're relieved that this project is gonna be under construction starting next week, they're gonna start moving concrete and dirt next week, and right now we're in the middle of a fundraising campaign that we were able to identify if we raise $50,000 locally, the Indiana Housing and Community Development authority is gonna match us with $50,000. So we're adding $100,000 more to our project, which has helped us get to the point where we're ready to start construction.