In the news

Posted on June 14, 2009 12:51 PM
The June Positive People Group Meeting will be on Tuesday, June 16, at the Rosetta Stone Cafe in downtown youngstown. 5pm will be fellowship and dinner with the meeting starting promptly at 6pm. Special guest speaker for this meeting will be Tom Presby, Manager of Business Assistance Projects, for the Youngstown-Warren Regional Chamber. As we end this last month of our focus on Business and Commerce, we welcome Tom and grateful for his time and positivity about business in the Mahoning Valley. Our next quarter's meetings will focus on our 3rd direction we wish to spread positive energy and focus to is Family and Community.

Posted on May 22, 2009 08:44 AM
PPG Meeting: May 19, 2009

Positive Sharing: Roy started with 2 presentations he did last week, one was a women empowerment meeting at the YWCA. He has had issues with neighbors in his area and this “how to get along with people” speech he gave made him appreciate it. He also gave a 6 hour leadership seminar that went well.
Ron shared that he got to meet with Jim tonight and it came at a great time in his business as Ron is looking for help, and Jim is working towards his insurance license. Jim hadn’t been to a meeting in a while, and was drawn to coming back and now it was the perfect time to come back.
Scott talked about the Shine! network filming this weekend it was a great success and we were able to film about “Looks of Love,” a place that makes cancer patients and those with thinning hair, come to get a wig fitted, colored and styled in a positive and affirming location. We also filmed about the low cost biking options, “In Your Backyard”
Sharon talked about her May elections with the income tax she was helping to get passed to help her community, and it actually passed and turned out to be handled positive in the community.
Brad shared about the positive attitude he is seeing transform in Youngstown. He never came to downtown before, because others talked down about it and now he spends time here, has moved to Northside and started a business here.
Jan shared about a leadership conference that Roy had given and she is excited about the positive results she will see in herself for the experience. Got to go in a hot air balloon experience.

Roy talked about Dodge ball philosophy, you want to have the best team in order to win, used analogy to introduce Julie Michael Smith.

Roy gave her intro that is on one of our newsletters. She is the Chief Development Officer of the Youngstown Business Incubator.
Julie Michael Smith said: Exciting to talk about the Incubator…tremendous and positive story. She has seen from the beginning til now, and there is no where to go but up. It started in the late 80’s. State of Ohio supports a network of Incubators, but there was never one in Youngstown until the late 80’s. An Incubator should be a catalyst for economic development. Took 7 years to 1993 by time funding and everything was in place. Doors opened in November of 95 for any type of business. State identified in early 2000 5 areas to grow best, and they were in technology. YBI did same scan and started to change the goal to tech companies and decided upon Information Technologies would be our focus, especially business to business solutions. YBI is unique as they try to seek out new or emerging companies to help them move through the process. They also then grow the companies and keep them there at their various stages to help others that come after them. M-7 Technologies was a 90 year company that came to new life with a new twist on their technologies. Managed clusters forces businesses in the Incubator to collaborate without really competing.