Village native and 2011 YSHS graduate Elyse Giardullo is filling the Village’s newest position: project lead. Giardullo’s first job in her new role is to compile a strategic plan for the Village — a forward-facing roadmap for local decision-makers to use for years to come. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Village native Giardullo hired as project lead
- Published: July 24, 2024
The Village of Yellow Springs may have created a new municipal job, but it brought in a familiar face to fill the role.
Village native Elyse Giardullo, 31, was hired last month as the Village project lead — a new job housed in the Village offices, upstairs in the John Bryan Community Center.
It’s a role, Giardullo told the News in an interview last week, whose work will generate local data analytics, research and more that will help the Village manager, Council and other municipal movers and shakers make better, future-oriented decisions for years to come.
“It’s really exciting,” Giardullo said. “Village Manager Johnnie Burns has a vision of where he wants this community to go, and with my background in research and lifelong love for public service, I’m here to bring his ideas to fruition.”
The biggest project on Giardullo’s plate — and the first she’ll tackle — is the creation of a strategic plan for Yellow Springs: a sweeping, forward-thinking “roadmap” for the Village, replete with community and local stakeholder input, surveys, demographics and more. Giardullo said she plans to have this strategic plan done within a year.
“So this is something that would be a three- to five-year vision for the Village — something that outlines strategic initiatives for future housing, economic development and other initiatives, along with ways to measure the progress with our goals,” Giardullo explained.
A comprehensive, Village-run strategic plan would be the first of its kind, though not dissimilar from what’s been written — or, at least, attempted — in the past.
In 2010, the Village partnered with Columbus-based ACP Visioning+Planning to create a 40-page “visioning” document that recommended a variety of actions, including “creating and implementing an economic development plan,” “prepare and implement a joint comprehensive land use plan and long-term utility improvement plan.”
Later, in 2012, The Village’s Economic Sustainability Commission offered a number of development recommendations in its Economic Sustainability Plan.
While the Miami Township Trustees and Village Council continued to occasionally meet jointly through 2015, little came of implementing the actionable items from ACP’s visioning recommendations until 2020, when the Village updated its Comprehensive Land Use Plan, which according to past News reporting, garnered 1,700 “impressions” or interactions from villagers that emphasized the need for a broader economic base, diversity of housing types and prices and municipal broadband, among other priorities.
Additionally, tracking with its decade-based schedule, the James A. McKee Association released its Cost-of-Living Report in 2012, then again in 2022 — a demographic-based study that weighs population fluctuations against tax, utility, housing and other economic costs associated with living in Yellow Springs.
For Giardullo’s part, she hopes to bring all the information outlined in these documents into one, single strategic plan — one created “in house” as she described.
“The costs of hiring consultants — some of whom have been people from out of town, who may not know the village — are huge,” Giardullo said. “They come in, give us something, then leave. Then, what they’ve made becomes just another document on a shelf.”
She continued: “But having a project lead can see these recommendations through.”
Unlike some of these past out-of-town consultants, Giardullo knows Yellow Springs in and out.
She grew up in Yellow Springs and is, as she said, a “proud product of the Yellow Springs school system.” She graduated from Yellow Springs High School in 2011, getting an associate degree from Sinclair Community College at the same time as her high school diploma. Giardullo went on to earn her bachelor’s degree in liberal arts, then later, her Master of Public Administration degree from Wright State.
Not to mention, Giardullo is the child of two lifelong public servants: Her mother, Denise Swinger, retired in 2023 after eight years as the Village’s Planning and Zoning Administrator. Her father, Joseph Giardullo co-founded a local nonprofit with Swinger, STARFISH, which today is known as YS Emergency Assistance.
“It’s in my blood,” she said of public service.
Giardullo also brings to the table a broader perspective than most. As a young adult, she lived in New Zealand — a place of “nearly universal healthcare and paid-for education” — for just shy of seven years. Giardullo hopes to bring a similar sense of progressive liberalism back to her hometown. And on top of that, she brought home a Kiwi husband, who she now lives with in Miami Township, just minutes beyond Yellow Springs.
As she compiles her forthcoming strategic plan, Giardullo said she has a laser focus on incorporating some of the more unsung local voices in her data analyses — specifically those from the millennial and gen-Z age-groups, which, according to the 2022 Cost-of-Living Report, account for upward of 16% of the Yellow Springs population. Conversely, 46.5% of village residents are 55 years or older, according to the McKee report.
“So, my goal is to tap in and hear from these younger perspectives,” Giardullo said. “You hear from less and less of these younger groups at Council meetings or anywhere in town. As a millennial myself, I feel like I can bring that perspective to the table.”
How? Well, Giardullo said a lot of her data-driven work may involve going door-to-door, hosting focus groups, maybe even public forums to collect information for her strategic plan.
“Whatever it takes,” she said.
But it’s not just more younger folks Giardullo hopes to engage and bring into the political process. As she told the News, she expects to attend many future Village Council, school board, Yellow Springs Development Corporation and Miami Township Trustee meetings — perhaps in the village manager’s stead from time to time. Her goal, ultimately, is to play an active role in the community — garnering as many local voices and opinions to inform her plan.
“It all comes back to data-driven and data-informed, evidence-based decision making,” Giardullo said. “I love this town, and as someone who grew up here, I genuinely want what’s best for this town — whatever it may be, and whatever people say it ought to be.”
Giardullo said locals are welcome to come and meet her during normal office hours in her office on the second floor of the Bryan Center — whether to learn more about the new position of project lead, to share ideas or simply to say “hello” to a familiar face.
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