CLINTON COUNTY — Three Clinton County young adults are helping out their community as this year’s Clinton Community Fellows, part of Energize Clinton County.

Megan Borton, Mallory Homan and Hayden Knisley are spending their summer working with parts of the community with their projects and ideas.

Energize Clinton County co-founder Mark Rembert said Clinton County Fellows was started in 2010 as a way for young adults returning from college for summer vacation to contribute to the city, develop professional skills and make community connections.

“At 18 I didn’t know all the professional opportunities here. You don’t really get exposed to that unless your parents worked somewhere,” said Rembert.

Borton is a 2016 Wilmington High School graduate and incoming sophomore at The Ohio State University studying public health with a focus on sociology. Her projects have her working with Health First for Clinton County and Ohio Living Cape May Retirement Village.

With Health First, she’s been developing a health improvement plan for the community to decide where to put funding and spend money to help improve the quality of life in the county.

“I created a survey that we’re advertising on Facebook and with the newspaper. I’ll be using that data along with a 2015 health assessment that was performed in the county to determine where we need to focus our attention”

For Cape May, where she used to work as a culinary server, she’s been working with Brad Reynolds, the executive director, to increase community outreach.

“We’re working to become the number one resource for people with any questions or concerns about maybe their family needs assistance,” said Borton. “In doing that we’re going to try and create an Alzheimer’s support group for caregivers, where they can learn about what they’re taking on and what they need to know and be aware of.”

She’s also working with them to develop some inter-generational relationships with programs she thinks will help. One way is with an art program with the local schools.

“In that program, we’d bring in local art that the students are making and maybe have it in the Cape May facility on a rotating basis, and have the students come in and talk about their art,” she said.

Working with Cape May in a different capacity and seeing a whole new side to it has been interesting, she said.

“Working there in high school I just worked in one department, but now I’m working with the executive director, people in human resources, people in marketing,” she said. “Now I have a good understanding of what it’s like every day in the community.”

Mallory Homan is a 2016 Clinton-Massie graduate who’ll be a sophomore at Ohio University, where she’s majoring in marketing. Her projects are with the Village of Blanchester and the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

With Blanchester, she’s helping them with their efforts in bringing another earnings tax to light.

“They have a lack of communications between the municipal, the council, and their community,” according to Homan. “So I’ve been interviewing business owners, people who live and work in Blanchester, the council, and community members.”

She’s been doing this with a SWOT analysis — she asks about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — and how people get their communication. She then compiles it into a report and gives it to the village administrator, which the village is in the process of hiring.

She’s helping to bring down barriers and advance the village by working on their website.

With the Visitors Bureau, she’s been looking at what tourists are doing when they come to the area. She’s done this by asking visitors of the Roberts Centre and the World Equestrian Center.

“I’m trying to figure out what those tourists are doing and whether they’re utilizing local amenities in Wilmington or throughout the county. I’m doing that, but conducting a survey asking where are they from, their income, what are they doing outside of the event they’ve come to, and what they like about Clinton County,” she said.

Homan likes that, with this job, she does check-ins with her school advisor and keeps her up-to-date on what she’s doing.

“Compared to what other students are doing for their internships, (my advisor) always talks about how much I am applying what I learned in the classroom to real life. It’s great to know eventually I get to put that on my resume.”

Hayden Knisley, who graduated from East Clinton High School in 2013 and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan with a bachelor’s degree in geography, has primarily been working with Rembert in looking at commuter and labor research.

He’s been seeing some interesting trends lately with the county’s workforce.

“Our labor participation, which isn’t the same thing as unemployment, but active total population that’s in the labor market, is rather low compared to surrounding areas,” he said.

According to him, about 60 percent of people who work in Clinton County don’t live here. So he asks why are they working here and not choosing to live here. This is the crux of his project.

This research will give them documentation which helps local officials craft policies that promote local businesses, according to Knisley.

They’re tackling it in different ways, such as quantitative data by looking at what the exact percentages are of where people are coming from. Then qualitative work is done with the hopes of interviewing employees.

“The end goal is hopefully to find out why they chose to work here as oppose to other regions and see if we can attract people to work here.”

With this being his first job outside of college, Knisley says its nice to incorporate what he studied for to what he’s doing now.

“It kind of verifies my decision to go to school.”