REEDSPORT — Time at Oxford University and critical thinking tools have helped provide Katie Lockard with more means to help revitalize downtown.
Lockard, who graduated from Reedsport High School in 1997, works as this year’s Reedsport Main Street program coordinator.
The Reedsport Main Street Program, also known as RMSP, was established in early December 2014. This is a locally driven process following the national Main Street Approach, a “…comprehensive model capitalizing on a community’s unique assets.”
“Our program focuses on the downtown, midtown and uptown districts in Reedsport (and) our town on the south-central Oregon coast,” according to the website statement. Goals consist of strengthening the economy; improving the city’s aesthetics; preserving and sharing the town’s history; promoting the area’s recreational activities; fostering optimism and pride; and encouraging community participation.
Lockard earned her bachelor of science degree in biology from Seattle Pacific University in 2001 and “then quite a bit later” she went to Portland State University, earning more transfer credits and ended up studying a year of Latin and English plus a “whole lot of other fun things on the side.”
She’s also closely involved through the University of Oregon’s RARE program to participate in Main Street.
RARE stands for Resource Assistance for Rural Environments.
According to the University of Oregon website, RARE is an AmeriCorps program administered through the university’s Community Service Center.
“RARE AmeriCorps has been supported over the years by grants from the Corporation for National & Community Service (AmeriCorps), The Ford Family Foundation, the University of Oregon, the Oregon Food Bank, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and other agencies. In addition, each participating community provides $22,000 of approximately $29,600 needed to place, train, and support a full-time RARE member,” the site statement reads.
This July, Lockard graduated from Oxford with a bachelor of arts degree in classics and English.
Her Oxford professors taught her more about the need to think of the world in critical terms.
“You start to learn to think, how to tread through arguments and see weaknesses in them,” said the Reedsport native, emphasizing that her instructors taught her how to question assumptions.
“I’d work 70-hour weeks just researching, researching, researching,” Lockard said.
Oxford provided her with many contacts.
One day she’d be studying east Indian law, and then another day she might be having conversations regarding Chinese economics with people from all around the world.
“Just the level of engagement. It was the place where the whole world came to interact,” she said.
“It’s hard to encapsulate,” Lockard said of her experience overseas, but she said the Oxford schooling helped her think more critically in terms of how best to aid others in moving along the Main Street revitalization process. She spent three years at the English university.
In September 2014, Lockard decided to get involved based upon conversations with the previous coordinator, Emesha Jackson, and Sheri Stuart, who is the Oregon Main Street coordinator. However, Lockard didn’t decide to apply for the Reedsport position until this spring.
“I kept thinking about what I can give back to it,” she said of what she’s learned at Oxford and how that can help Reedsport.
“I looked at what she (Jackson) was doing and what the program was doing,” she said.
Originally Published in The Umpqua Post
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