Overview:

The Well CDC serves residents of Akron's Middlebury neighborhood with three initiatives: housing, creating economy and supporting place.

The Well Community Development Corp., which focuses on multiple initiatives in Akron’s Middlebury neighborhood, received the 2023 Ohio CDC of the Year Award from the Ohio CDC Association. 

Jen Meade, The Well’s development director, said The Well’s director and founder, Zac Kohl, started the agency in 2016 after he recognized that housing was one of the biggest challenges in the neighborhood. The neighborhood housing market didn’t appeal to outside investors, there were a lot of slum landlords, and few of the houses were owner occupied, with about 73% renters overall. 

Shamari Fields, lead barrister at the Compass coffee shop in The Well CDC, grills ingredients for a sandwich in the shop’s kitchen area. Fields is also a kitchen member in the Akron Food Works, one of The Well’s programs that helps support food businesses in all stages of development. Credit: Susan Zake

Kohl grew up going to church in the building that eventually became the CDC’s home on East Market Street, and he did some ministry work in Middlebury as a college student. He asked himself how to bring healthy investment to this disinvested neighborhood to help “keep people in their homes and not taken advantage of.” 

“Housing is really what started everything,” Meade said.

Initiatives at The Well

Julie Davis, owner of FAM, which stands for Food As Medicine, prepares meals in the food prep kitchen at The Well CDC in Akron’s Middlebury neighborhood. The meals will be taken to a weekly distributuion location for pickup. Davis started her business, where she works with several family members, to “go right to the source” of illness and help people to stay healthy by eating well. famkitchenohio.com Credit: Susan Zake

That led to The Well’s other two main initiatives – creating economy and supporting place. That means, in addition to housing, they support the idea that everyone needs access to jobs that pay a livable wage, along with the social cohesion and relationships built in healthy neighborhoods.

The award is a “huge honor” to receive “only seven years into this work, a huge honor for our staff to be able to accept that award on behalf of our neighbors and our residents and everyone that’s really been alongside us for all these years,” Meade said.

In July, The Well received $4 million each from the Knight Foundation and the City of Akron to fund acquisition rehab work that began as a “60 for 60” campaign, with the agency working toward owning 60 houses in 60 days.

The Well CDC is located inside the old Akron Presbyterian Church on East Market Street in Akron’s Middlebury neighborhood.

Currently, Meade said, The Well owns 94 homes and has two prongs to its housing strategy – acquisition rehab and infill development, where they’re trying to fill in vacant lots with new buildings.

The agency gauges housing by whether or not they or their families would want to live there. 

In the coming weeks, we’ll have more about The Well and its programs, including its Akron Hope program, which helps provide services, like classroom tutoring, to Mason and Helen Arnold Community Learning Centers in the Akron Public Schools. Akron Hope was started by Meade when she was a student at the University of Akron. 

Editor’s note: This story was originally published October 20 as part of the Signal Akron newsletter.

Editor-in-Chief (she/her)
Zake has deep roots in Northeast Ohio journalism. She was the managing editor for multimedia and special projects at the Akron Beacon Journal, where she began work as a staff photographer in 1986. Over a 20-year career, Zake worked in a variety of roles across departments that all help inform her current role as Signal Akron's editor in chief. Most recently, she was a journalism professor and student media adviser at Kent State University, where she worked with the next generation of journalists to understand public policy, environmental reporting, data and solutions reporting. Among her accomplishments was the launch of the Kent State NewsLab, an experiential and collaborative news commons that connects student reporters with outside professional partners.