Residents of Duck Hill were given the opportunity to voice their ideas to enhance their community.
Last Wednesday, ASEEDS held the beginning of a two-day meeting with Alex Holland and Libby Crimmings, Community Placemakers with McClure Engineering as well as city and county officials and concerned citizens at the Community House in Duck Hill.
ASEEDS is a partnership created to make life in Duck Hill more sustainable and make it a more thriving community.
McClure is one of the companies working with ASEEDS to bring life back into Duck Hill. Holland said her focus is community place-making, which encompasses population growth, culture and the arts.
“It’s focusing on the next generation, what can keep them in the community and those who have moved what can bring them back with alienating those who’ve lived in the community all their lives,” she said. Holland said McClure takes existing structures and helps communities turn them into mix-use development.
There were two meetings held, one at the Community House with a steering committee and another one at 6 p.m. with the community at-large. The rain may have held many off, but the turnout was still good.
At both meetings, they began with what made Duck Hill unique. Situated between Winona and Grenada on Highway 51, Duck Hill has access to two through-ways because of Highway 51 and Highway 82. Some of the things that citizens said made Duck Hill unique was Chief Duck, the namesake of Duck Hill, the Grassroots Festival, Bogue Creek Festival, small town charm, and the way the community works well with each other.
“We want to get their input -- what are the wants and needs of the community,” Holland said.
They then determined some challenges that faced Duck Hill. A few of the biggest items on the list were: food- nowhere to get groceries; no restaurants; medical- no doctors or nurse practitioners in Duck Hill; transportation- hard for those in the community to get to Grenada and getting to Winona can be expensive; housing- no affordable or adequate housing, no apartments for seniors, bringing in houses that will then generate tax money; recreation- no ballparks, nothing for children and seniors to do, no place to exercise, no sidewalks, no field to host travel ball overflow games; a loss sense of community because of the loss of the school system; and so on.
Holland said she and Crimmings will then go over the list to find commonalities and began the process of developing a plan to help the people of Duck Hill from there.
She said the focus is to find a way to utilize the old Binford High School. Binford could also be considered historical because part of the school was built by N.W. Overstreet, the first architect in the state of Mississippi.
Holland said they will go through the process of conceptualizing what the residents of Duck Hill want to see at Binford High School for three to four months, which will include creating a business plan, finding funding for the project, and presenting the project to the community.
“From there, the project will actually begin and should take between 12 to 18 months,” she said. “If it’s over three, that’s okay.”
She added that the uniqueness of this project is that it’s all done by residents of Duck Hill, from concept to finalization.
“We’re just there for guidance, to help them find who to talk to and what they should do,” Holland said.
Holland said she met Al White and Ramona Taylor-Williams because of her work with Delta Regional Authority. After leaving DRA, she went to work with McClure and connected again with White and Williams.
