Made In Walker
The Made In Walker Podcast connects you to the people, stories, and ideas shaping our community. From local innovators to everyday change makers, we are diving deep into what makes Walker Michigan a great place to live, work, and grow.
Be sure to "like" and subscribe to Made in Walker so you never miss an episode.
To contact us about this podcast please send an email to Podcast@Walker.City.
Made In Walker
Empowering Walker's Future: The Mayor's Youth Academy and Civic Engagement with Mayor Gary Carey
What if the future of your city depended on high school students? Mayor Gary Carey Jr. is banking on it. Join us as we explore his pioneering approach with the Mayor's Youth Academy, a dynamic initiative aimed at shaping the City of Walker's next generation of leaders. Mayor Carey gives us an insightful glimpse into Walker's evolution from a township to a thriving city, and how he plans to nurture a legacy of informed and passionate civic participants. Through the Youth Academy, students are not just learning about the city's rich history and inner workings of local government but are being equipped to champion the community's progress and quality of life for years to come.
But it's not just about the youth. We dive into the importance of civic engagement and how every resident can leave a positive mark on the City of Walker, Michigan. Hear firsthand from Mayor Carey about innovative efforts to foster community involvement and the avenues available for residents to make a meaningful impact. This episode is a call to action for all who care about the future of their city. We also encourage feedback and suggestions from our listeners, showing our commitment to making this a truly community-driven podcast experience. Tune in and discover how you can get involved and inspire change in your local area.
Welcome to Made in Walker, a podcast that connects you to the people, the stories and the ideas shaping our community, from local innovators to everyday changemakers. We're diving deep into what makes Walker a great place to live, work and grow. Here's your host, nicole DiDonato.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining us in the Made in Walker podcast. I'm Nicole DiDonato, the communications manager here for the city of Walker, and so much is going on in the city. We know that our commissioners, our elected officials they have term limits so they have a timeline of when they need to get things done. So what's important to bring in that next pipeline of people to carry on that mission? Well, I'm here with City of Walker Mayor Gary Carey Jr and he has a solution for that with a program that you've kind of reinstated at the City of Walker, right.
Speaker 3:Sure. No. Thank you Glad to be here again and one of our newest introductions here in an attempt to start to plan for our future succession planning, and it's really critical and I want to give our hats out to our city commission. It is something that we're very attuned to and it's not just we're in there to serve for a term or two and then we're walking out the door. We really do care about what we're building and we want to make sure it's left in good hands out the door. I mean, we really do care about what we're building and we want to make sure it's left in good hands. I've mentioned before I think even on this podcast of not having people come in with hidden agendas and, you know, really disrupt the progress the city's made into the quality of life that we enjoy in Walker. So we want to make sure we develop this pipeline. People understand, too, what it means to govern, what policymaking means, what collaboration, and even though our roles are nonpartisan, some of us have different ideologies and viewpoints, and that's all great we have in our households, with our families. So it's really important that we understand how it is to get to a common ground that is in the best interest of our community. So one of the things we for decades had a group called the Youth Committee I think it became the Youth Commission at one point and really in the vision is, you know, looking forward is how do we develop these kids, you know, at the high school level and I'll say kids, students at the high school level and how do we get them giving some passion, having some working knowledge of local government? So much of what they get out there might be a mainstream news media nowadays and we want to make sure they understand. Understand, because local government is the most important one and that really is the foundation, um, as this country was founded, um, that, uh, you know, our founding fathers, uh, really put that emphasis at the local level of making sure that they, uh, we, just we, that's just how we roll. So, um, when we look at the uh mayor's youth academy, uh, we just started this past fall in 2024.
Speaker 3:Our first session was actually just talking about how did Walker come to be? And, really important for me, it was important to give those kids a foundation of where we started and where we've come from. And one of the things, many of them were astounded to find out that we started as a township 1837. December 30th 1837, our first township hall that we used was the old Baptist Mission Schoolhouse. It was down on the riverbank of the Grand River near where Bridgewater Place and Gerald Ford Museum is.
Speaker 3:At today's age and, for the students to comprehend, that's where City Hall, as they call it, used to be and we took them through that. So everything north and west of the grand river, um, at the time was walker township. So we talked about how that changed over the years and, uh, you know, we talked about the term of annexation and, uh, cities go through that and you know, and, quite frankly, there's the working relationship between the city of grand rapids and the city walker today are just incredible and one of the things I've taken from Mayor Bliss, in addition to being a tremendous mentor for me over the years that we've served in our respective cities together, was the importance of building that pipeline for the future, of at the youth level and as they get into young adults and into adults, that they learn a lot of the fundamental needs that we have to have as elected officials and to set good policy and good governance. So in talking with these students, you explained to them annexation took place when the village of kent, which became the city grand rapids, started to annex land over the years and going back into the 1800s. So in showing them a slide, you know an alpine what is now avistar Park used to be the old General Motors plant and I said that was the flashpoint of how we became a city. We were a township up to that point.
Speaker 3:Explaining them the difference, nuances between townships and cities and how that works, and understanding that cities can't annex land. They can't annex land from townships. What they want from other cities can't from other cities annex land. They can annex land from townships. What they want from other cities can't from other cities. And explaining that to them and showing them that plan and explaining them what a tax base and tax revenue means, um, so walking through all that so they have a better understanding. I already heard from one of the parents of one of the students in the uh, the youth academy about uh. I learned things I had absolutely no idea on and I'm third generation in the city so that was pretty cool to hear that piece of it. But teaching them that first, you know really that baseline and that first monthly meeting we had back in the fall last year.
Speaker 3:And second session that we talked about was governance and policymaking and understanding what it means to come to the table and we might have, you know, we maybe even use some of the examples of favorite flavors of ice cream. Yours might be chocolate, mine's vanilla. How do we get that twist cone together? But there's an art to that. But you have to be very deliberate about doing that and you have to want to do that. And that's where I go back to making sure the people that hold elected office are qualified to do so, because they're doing it for the right reasons. You're not getting rich doing this, definitely not the local level. You're not getting rich doing this. You're doing this because you love doing this and so kind of instilling that. And we're having an impact already. You wouldn't think on young adults as these teenagers they're getting it and it's really cool.
Speaker 3:And you know the the last session we did before we break broke for the holidays was our police department. It's our biggest budget within the city because we've identified public safety as being the most important thing with within our community. And next in the curriculum is the fire department night. That we'll do, but with the department we went through and explained how we, how we staff, how we fund the importance and the investment we make in our people. It was just really neat to see the, the, the, the kids were able to get through things like virtual reality training.
Speaker 3:So everybody got a chance to try some new technology that we had purchased at the city and we're just starting to implement at the time and I had not seen it yet and had not used it, and a lot of our officers most of our officers had not yet. So the kids really got it behind the scenes. You know this is how we use this, so I think they understand that better. And then you know we showed how that we use our drone system. We use it for proactive situations as well as, in that worst case, a reactive situation, and explaining that what they didn't get to see at the time was our police command vehicle and why we made that investment using some of our American Rescue Plan Act money towards that. So the kids are picking up a really good baseline of what it takes to run that city and really the ongoing curriculum is continue to educate them how finances work. You know you can't. You can't borrow your way to prosperity, explaining how we have to make sure that budgets are balanced and and you can't get up to your neck in debt. You can't run credit cards up because it's it's a bad thing as a municipality.
Speaker 3:So there's upcoming sessions we'll do we're going to get into public infrastructure, water and sewer types of discussions. So they're going to get some behind-the-scenes tours of things that people normally don't get to do. And then what we've taken this is because it's been such a success so far, and I'll go back to Mayor Bliss at Grand Rapids. She's done a great job of getting those young adults, that next generation of leaders. So we're going to do that same thing here, starting up in late winter, of leaders. So we're going to do that same thing here, starting up in late winter, and applications will be coming out for that soon and we want to go through an application process and making sure that people are doing this because they're actually interested in serving. They want to learn more whether or not they ever actually decide to serve. But if that, you know, I think is another discussion, but at bare minimum can we get them to join a committee and find out what that's like.
Speaker 3:Not everybody's going to run for elected office, not everybody has the time and not everybody maybe has the stomach sometimes for doing it. So I'm just excited about building that pipeline for the future, you know, and building the, because really you can look at some of our committees that we have right now within the city.
Speaker 2:What are some of those committees?
Speaker 3:You have things like planning, and the Planning Commission and the Zoning Board of Appeals are great foundational resources. When you look at a lot of our city commission past and present foundationally many have served on one or both of those at some point in time. I happen to come up on the Historical Commission. I'm just that history, local history nerd and one of the things that really for us is important is to make sure that you work with other people in a group setting and you have the ability to understand, you set policy, what good and bad looks like and what the impact of the decisions you make now. Something that you might pass might not have an impact for years down the road. And it's understanding that we use the term. You know playing chess, not checkers. We want to make sure that our stand as we're playing a game of chess, that we're making strategic moves for years and maybe decades in the future here and I think that's something that people don't really think about is that you know these are going to affect generations to come.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, when you think of some of the projects, even that we have going on through the city and one of the when we talked about policy and government making when that session it's been a few months since we did that, but when we did that session we showed one of the developments that we're actively looking at right now that's hot in the pipeline, that'll be coming to fruition here pretty quickly, and we went through the twist and turns at this development, proposed developments taking place, and to that point you can use another metaphor there Once you squeeze a toothpaste out of the tube, you can't get it back in. You start breaking ground and building buildings on it. It's not like you knock them down and you put cornfields back where they were. So we have to get it right the first time. So we believe it's very important.
Speaker 3:So this really is a call-out to getting people to join committees If you're not necessarily comfortable wanting to serve on one of those higher-profile committees. There's things like the community engagement. It is a very, very robust and back when that is when it's been around for a few decades it's definitely had some evolutions. It started out as a really as an international relations committee when we were active with our sister city, colac, australia, and is involved to community relations. At some point where they started to give awards out annually for things and really we, coming on as mayor, I'd asked the commission in my first year or so there of this is something I wanted to do to engage the community about it. I want to have relations just with. We wanted to engage them and get them active and volunteer for to work at events or I mean just somehow to get them engaged and more involved.
Speaker 3:And it's just paid dividends beyond what we had hoped for. So it's a very active group, some really good leadership in there right now, with a group of people leading that. But that's something. It's kind of low key, not as high profile as a planning or a zoning board would be, but yet it's just as important because we have to engage with our community. Yeah, so there's a multitude of ways that you're able to within the Walker community to engage in things and, quite frankly, if you're not sure, have a conversation myself, one of your commissioners, one of our city leaders or whatever it may be. Let's find something for you.
Speaker 2:If you want to serve.
Speaker 3:We'll find a room, we'll find a space for you.
Speaker 3:I love that and so if folks are listening and they're interested, what's, what would be a best way for them to kind of look for this information? Great question. So, walkercity, there's a spot for boards and committees and there's an application there and in the dropdown menu it has the different applications. And you know, one of the things that I don't want to say, we take for granted, but maybe I just, for our community, emphasize all of our elected officials in the city of Walker have their cell phone numbers out there, including the mayor, and I don't there's not a lot of mayor to do that, because mayors get a lot, can get a lot of weird phone calls at times and maybe not so good phone calls from, from people with with different motives. What have you? And reach out to one of us. We're very accessible, have a conversation, we will find a home for you and if you know it's something that you're not sure of, we'll have you attend a meeting or two. I mean, be a part of it, and we'll get you to where you need to be.
Speaker 2:I love that you guys make it easy and, again, this is just one way for folks to get that information to them if they have been wondering for a while if there is something that they can impact their community. There are ways and we're glad that there are funnels for that. So thank you so much, mayor, for all of your work in trying to do that and bring that together and we hope that again, maybe something sparked in your mind that you do want to help and step up and work with the City of Walker. We have a place for you. Thank you so much for listening to us.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Made in Walker podcast. If you have comments or questions about this podcast, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, we'd love to hear from you. Please drop us an email at podcast at walkercity. Made in Walker is the official podcast of the city of Walker, Michigan. You can find Made in Walker wherever you get your podcasts.
