By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News
A new era of nonprofits is emerging in Helper. The City will soon see the merging of two nonprofit organizations – the Arts Festival and Main Street organizations – which will combine into a single coalition. Helper City Mayor Lenise Peterman joined the KOAL newsroom to discuss this merger and other Helper happenings.
“So this new board will be very community-driven. It’s not a city organization. It’ll be a stand-alone nonprofit but a key city partner,” explained Mayor Peterman. “It’ll be refreshed, redefined. We want to encourage new community participants and collaboration. We want to share resources across organizations and be transparent, informative and accessible to anybody. If they have a question, ‘I want to have an event and close the street. What should I do?’ This would be the group to talk to.”
The City will host an open house in the Helper City auditorium on Tuesday, April 22, to help introduce this new organization to the community.
Looking at the merger from a mayor’s perspective, Peterman shared,” I think what it does is it centralizes many questions from people. So it will build a body of volunteers to help support events and help promote them.” The mayor continued,” It’s going to be kind of a one-stop shop in the way of helping people navigate how to do things in the community that they’d like to do – clean up the river walk, for example – that’d be the place to go.”
Peterman also wanted to focus on other Helper Happenings. First, she discussed the return of Utah State University softball and baseball to the City: “I’m hoping we’re filling the bleachers enough for both teams and that people are enjoying it. I know I see citizens there who maybe don’t have young adults playing, which makes me feel good. It means Helper’s really embracing it.” Peterman added,” We’re thrilled to have USU Eastern playing and excited for the next couple of years. There’s still a lot of work we want to do, so you’re just going to see year-over-year improvements there.”
The final topic covered by Peterman was her recent visit with West Jordan Mayor Dirk Burton,” he was actually biking from West Jordan to the Utah League of Cities and Towns conference, which is taking place midweek this week in St. George. And he just stopped by City Hall and said, ‘Where’s your mayor?’ And we got connected and had a great discussion. The problems we have in rural areas are really very similar to what they’re experiencing up on the Wasatch Front. It’s about water. It’s about infrastructure. It’s about affordable housing. So it was nice to hear that they don’t have all those answers, just like we don’t.”
In closing, Peterman said,” Please come out on April 22. I will also point out that we’ll have all of this information up on the Helper City website as well. You can access the PowerPoint, the job responsibilities, and the application. So if you can’t make it, it will be on the Helper City website.”
To stay updated with Helper City, visit helpercity.gov or follow the City on Facebook.