Durant Sustainability Coalition has plans to move forward this year with improving the quality of life in Durant.
Mark Mesiti-Miller, secretary of the board and past chair, said DSC is focusing on events to educate and energize the community around sustainability issues.
“We are also focusing on growing our organization,” Mesiti-Miller said. “We have recognized that the amount of work and things that are worth doing in our community has grown and the number of people who are interested in working with us has grown.”
DSC has outlined a program to engage with volunteers and those who want to volunteer and they will be having their annual Earth Day from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Saturday, April 26 at Carl Albert Park.
DSC was formed in 2022 and its goals are educating and energizing the community to sustain the region’s environmental richness, natural resources and beauty.
“That’s our mission,” Mesiti- Miller said. “The improving quality of life is the inevitable result of focusing on sustaining our region’s richness, natural beauty. If you were going to sum up our mission, our mission is to improve the quality of life.”
Mesiti-Miller spoke of DSC’s accomplishments last year.
“We have done an amazing amount of work to raise the awareness of Durant, the grass-roots knowledge and awareness of the community,” he said. “So many people have helped. The Earth Day celebration last year blew all of our expectations out of the water. I think we had 23 vendors who made it on that rainy day and we had really unbelievable support, much more financial support than we had thought, and so we exceeded our wildest expectations.”
During a board retreat last fall, DSC posted all of the flyers from events that year and board members were amazed. Mesiti-Miller said there is a desire to see the sustainability and quality of life improve in Durant that is from all ages and social classes.
“They all want to be a part of making the community better,” he said. “There’s a huge desire in our community to really improve the quality of life. I think maybe there’s been a vacuum in the community in leadership in driving and improving the quality of life here. It seems there’s a real opportunity here to make some big differences over the next 10 to 20 years.”
Projects DSC has been involved with include improving Fifth and Sixth avenues for pedestrians and bicyclists and the “pop-up” on the 300 block of West Main Street.
“The community response to that was overwhelmingly positive,” Mesiti-Miller said. “The original genesis of that project was our Main Street workshop that we did with the Durant Trails & Open Space group last spring. The results of that have been published and been forwarded to the city council for their consideration.”
Mesiti-Miller said that after the idea for the pop-up was presented on social media channels, Andrew Howard of Team Better Block, reached out and spoke of a Smart Growth grant through the National Association of Realtors. Texoma Board of Realtors applied for and received the grant.
“They offer a grant to any community that wants to do temporary pop-up and how to improve the community in a way that’s pedestrian friendly, improves walk-ability and things like that,” Mesiti-Miller said.
The pop-up was temporary and gave a visual representation of what wider sidewalks and a more pedestrian-friendly Main Street would look like.
“One of the ideas that came out of our Main Street workshop was this idea of Main Street really should be a more pedestrian-friendly environment,” Mesiti-Miller said. “That’s who shops in the stores, that’s who dines in the restaurants. You go to any successful thriving community, you will always see emphasis on people.
“The idea (for the pop-up) is you quickly do something,” Mesiti-Miller said. “You pop it up so people can go see it and then you close it down and that gives everyone a taste for what you could do. Instead of spending millions of dollars to revamp Main Street, we spent $15,000. It was a way of seeing what’s possible.”
To make the sidewalks wider, diagonal parking was replaced with parallel parking and there was only a loss of two parking spaces, according to Mesiti-Miller.
“So, that’s a big issue,” he said. “Parking is a very important thing and part of that was to understand how that would impact things and whether people would prefer that or not prefer that. So, that’s part of our survey is testing that theory. Where would the extra-wide sidewalks come from, how would we achieve that within the confines of Main Street.”
DSC will continue picking up trash in the community, something the organization started last year and the Earth Day is their big project.
“We’re focusing on growth, so we’re looking at what other people in the community might want to do,” Mesiti-Miller said. “We want to bring back the walkabouts in the community. We did three of those in 2023 and one in 2024 and are going to do more.”
He said the next focus will be the Fifth-Sixth avenues corridor and that the city council approved funding to improve it, so DSC will be focusing on that project this year.
“DSC facilitated a lot of cooperative projects,” Mesiti-Miller said. “We call ourselves a coalition and we are intentional about being a coalition. We really don’t like doing things by ourselves. We really like doing things with other people and engaging different groups in the community to come together around a common cause and the cause is improving the quality of life, creating a more sustainable community.”
On March 13, it was announced that DSC received a $35,000 grant from the TMobile Hometown Grants program to plant trees along three commercial corridors, Durant Main Street, University Boulevard and North First Avenue.
DSC will work with local businesses, the City of Durant, residents and other organizations for this project.
“One tree can make a beautiful difference,” DSC said, in a social media post.