Go Local Park Hill: Park Hill’s Locally-Grown Website
By Erin Vanderberg, Editor
A website to get you in the Park Hill neighborhood know, designed by husband and wife team Greg and Melissa Davis, will celebrate its first anniversary this May. Golocalparkhill.com is Greg’s brainchild and Melissa’s labor of love. They do it to give back to the community, to make it easier to shop local, and so they won’t miss one more Blessed Sacrament summer pig roast.
“There were a lot of times we didn’t know about events,” said Greg. “Also, there are a lot of businesses in Park Hill that, unless you knew they were there, you wouldn’t go there.”
Go Local Park Hill aims to fix that, not just for the Davis family, but for everyone interested in what there is to eat, do and buy in Park Hill. The easy-to-navigate website offers listings of events, restaurants, retail, culture, gyms, programs and churches. Melissa also maintains a news feed on the site, and frequently posts on Facebook and Twitter.
The Davis family moved to Park Hill eight years ago, from Five Points, and, years before that, Wisconsin where Greg and Melissa met at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse. Greg works at the EPA and Melissa left her job at the Mile High Down Syndrome Association last year to stay at home with their nine- and five-year-old daughters.
Greg and Melissa’s experiences in the environmental sciences and public policy fields taught them that the biggest impact a consumer makes are with everyday purchases. Since settling down in Park Hill, the Davises have made a conscious effort to make the mainstay of their purchases locally, to integrate themselves into the community and to be a little self-sufficient, too – they keep a beehive at their home, and whip up batches of homebrew and kefir on a regular basis.
“The more you search out the goal of (buying local), the more you find,” said Greg.
Greg cites a few businesses they’ve discovered in the process: the Rocky Mountain Guitar Repair shop, which fixed his broken old guitar; the different Ethiopian restaurants on Colfax – Abyssinia, Habesha, Africana Café, to name a few – that have become family favorites; and the Cheyenne Fencing Society, where Greg got to bout against Olympic fencers during his month-long training.
“Those 15-year-old girls schooled you,” quipped Melissa about the fencing lesson.
Now, they’ve started thinking about food. In addition to their cold frame garden growing out front, they’ve got a plot at the Park Hill School garden and an organic food share from the Granata Farms NSA.
For Melissa, the real joy of the Go Local Park Hill project is connecting with so many neighbors – different generations, different ethnic backgrounds – who share the common values associated with living in an urban setting. Through the process, she said, she’s tapped into the community voice. Like the hum of their bees, it resonates with the Davises, and makes them confident that their project to amplify the Park Hill voice, which they’ve committed to without a profit goal, is the right way to give back to the community where they see themselves living out the rest of their days.
To get in the know, visit the site at golocalparkhill.com, like Go Local Park Hill on Facebook, and follow @golocalparkhill on Twitter.