BEATRICE – A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania consultant says communities need to constantly move toward pride…and action is what counts.


Jeff Ziegler operates a consulting firm called “Revitalize, or Die”…and he spoke about civic pride and civic apathy as the guest speaker at the annual banquet of Gage Area Growth Enterprise, known as NGage.


"What the community looks like apperance-wise, shapes everyone's opinion who ever drives through, of who you are as a people. Worse, it shapes how you think of yourself as a person."


Ziegler says key components of growing pride in a community include having an identity, setting standards, taking ownership, establishing a sense of community and paying attention to appearance. "Our communities exist on a spectrum of pride and apathy, and we need to constantly move towards pride. We should want our residents to be as proud of our community as you can stand...constantly making decisions and thinking about is this project, is this initiative, is this investment going to make our residents more proud....because if not, don't do it."


Ziegler, whose background is in urban planning and downtown development, says moving toward pride isn’t something that happens overnight.


"What really needs to happen is you take every little piece of the community and make it a little bit nicer....and you make the community nicer. One percent every day. If you get one percent better every day, you get 365 percent better. At the end of the year, things start to transform, it compounds. Stop waiting for just the right answer...don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Stop waiting for just the right answer or for the perfect thing to come along. These solutions only come from within. Nobody can fix your community from the outside. It just takes relentless, incremental improvement. That's the only thing that will make your community better...and the sad fact is that it's just gonna take forever. It's a little bit, every day, forever. And that's the only way to solve it and get better."


Ziegler says people who volunteer to serve on boards and commissions need the reward of involvement in actions that make a community better…not just attending meetings or looking at reports. He says residents of most any community have seen their towns gradually decline.  "When it comes to pride and apathy, it really is so much about appearances, aethetics and environment...however you want to call it. Nice things make us feel nice. Pretty things make us feel pretty. We travel to beautiful places. We just don't go to pretty places to look at pretty things. It makes us feel better."

Gage Area Growth Enterprise Annual Banquet
Gage Area Growth Enterprise Annual Banquet  

 
Friday night’s dinner at the 1917 Club at Beatrice Country Club was preceded by the NGage annual meeting, where board members reelected to new terms were Erin Dorn, Andrea Schafer and Traci Garnett-Froscheiser.


NGage Executive Director Rachel Kreikemeier said the organization had a strong past year. "We have a lot of projects in the hopper that, fingers crossed, I can bring some really great news to you in a matter of weeks, not years. So, efforts there that have been years in the making, are very, very close to sealing the deal. And, we wouldn't be able to make some of the decisions and provide some of the incentives for these recruitment projects, without your support and without your investment."

NGage is supported by private membership contributions and budget support from both the City of Beatrice and Gage County government.


2024 saw several projects amounting to investment of just over $39 million….with about $10 million going toward housing. Kreikemeier said there are currently seven active business recruitment projects NGage is working on.