By Richard L. Gaw
Staff Writer

From the time Mike Bontrager founded Square Roots Collective in 2021, the organization has served as an incubator of placemaking – a Johnny Appleseed-like initiative that has planted the collaborative seeds of community-based projects throughout Kennett Square and beyond.

The Creamery. Voices Underground. The Birch Street Project. The Kennett Trails Alliance. The Artelo Hotel.

Recently, Square Roots Collective (SRC), together with community partners Chatham Financial, Casa Guanajuato, Kennett Collaborative, and Kennett Borough, introduced a new concept – Kennett Decides – that places future community investment directly into the hands of area residents who live in the community, giving everyone an opportunity to propose and vote on projects that improve their towns and neighborhoods. To help them with the project, SRC is working with Civic Trust, a nationwide participatory budgeting company founded in 2019 by Matt Harder that provides technology infrastructure, communications, and process methodology to help residents participate in their governments’ budgeting process. To date, the organization has already helped develop community projects in Denver and Atlanta. Matt’s experience began when he managed New York City’s participatory budgeting program.

“I asked Matt if he could imagine doing something like this for a small town like Kennett Square, and he said that this concept would work well here, for the same reason it works well in a big city,” said SRC Chief of Staff Luke Zubrod. “One of my delights in this project is that our small town gets to do something that is typically only available in big cities.”

“This is an opportunity to raise up the voices of community members and get them involved. Not a lot of people have the time to attend a borough council meeting and make their voice known, but anyone can go on a website and say, ‘I have an idea.’”

From the day the initiative launched on May 1 to the July 18 deadline, Kennett Decides attracted 41 ideas, with 71 percent coming from Kennett Square Borough residents, and 20 percent from those who work in the borough. Concepts ranged from the addition of pedestrian crosswalks and traffic calming concepts to murals, new playground equipment and monarch butterfly gardens. The project has so far focused on gathering ideas. While residents have the opportunity to formally cast votes in the fall, they were invited to “like” ideas that others submitted, offering an informal view into what ideas seem popular, including:

• Converting the Genesis Walkway to an outdoor public dining courtyard featuring public eating areas that will create a new social gathering place just off State Steet;
• Adding mural art to traffic control boxes throughout the Kennett Square Borough, as part of an effort to beautify the borough through artistic expression;
• Creating a versatile and accessible skate park in the Kennett Square Borough that will attract skateboards, scooters and bikes;
• Developing a new pedestrian gateway at the intersection of South and Union streets, that will allow better allow pedestrians to access destinations like the Police station, Borough Hall, the KSQ Farmers Market, and the new home for Kennett Area Community Service, and social events like Winterfest and the Kennett Brewfest; and
• Building a gateway entrance to Anson B. Nixon Park that welcomes visitors entering the park from State Street near the Kennett Y and the Kennett Library – that would serve as a visual and symbolic “front door” to the borough’s largest public green space.

Now that idea collection has closed, a project steering committee from the community will work with the borough to estimate the project costs. That process will lead to the creation of a ballot that will allow residents to choose the winning projects – a voting process that will likely conclude at the end of November. Once the winning initiatives are decided, groundbreaking will hopefully begin in the spring of 2026.

Kennett Decides has a budget of $100,000 and is being funded by SRC and Chatham Financial.

“Multiple ideas can win, and people will have the opportunity to fill in the basket of projects that total $100,000, so it is likely that several projects could be funded,” Zubrod said.

Zubrod said that the Kennett Decides program generously overlaps with SRC’s big-picture mission.

“At the highest level, it comes down to a thriving community, where the people work together toward the greater good, in the sense that everyone has the opportunity to define what ‘the greater good’ looks like,” he said. “Voting on it is indicative of our view that it takes everyone to raise up a community. Our partners in this project are helping to embody that by helping to implement this initiative.”

To learn more about Kennett Decides, visit kennettdecides.com.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].