Even in a small town, where people tend to know and be known by their neighbors, it’s not unusual for folks to feel alone around the holidays. With that in mind, one Yellow Springs villager is trying to meet that feeling head-on, offering a simple gift: half an hour of conversation.
In this week’s classifieds, readers may notice a small ad from villager Joanne Lakomski. It reads: “Giving thanks to the YS Community — Offering free ‘30-minute conversations/dialogues’ to interested villagers, through December. I am a coach and HR professional, and I am available to fellow villagers looking for a sounding board or wanting to celebrate something or just looking for a good conversation. (Not a therapist — sorry.)”
Lakomski has lived in the village off and on, beginning with her time as an Antioch College student in the 1980s; she departed in the late ’90s and returned in 2015, after which she served for several years as chief human resources officer at her alma mater. She now offers coaching and consulting services.
Her path has also run through the sciences; in speaking with the News this week, she said the biology degree she earned at Antioch helped her not only in her later work as a chemical department manager at YSI — “I could grow fungi on purpose, and that was important for the job,” she said — but with what would become many years of work in human resources.
“It works out, because humans are biological creatures,” she said with a laugh.
She pointed to Malte von Matthiessen as a mentor during her time at YSI, saying she believed his “way of looking at work and organizations was probably different than most CEOs, more humanistic,” and helped her develop a truly human-centered view of human resources, organizations and the people inside them.
“It’s about helping the organization and the people make it work,” she said.
Lakomski said she recently spent time in the Cleveland area with her 93-year-old mother, and that visit planted the seed for this week’s classified ad. Her mother, she said, doesn’t have many people to talk with day to day. Conversation, in that setting, she said, can feel less like small talk and more like care.
“It’s a gift I can give her,” Lakomski said. “And I recognize coaching is a gift I give, and so why don’t I just give the gift of hearing people and listening to people? I don’t have a ton of money, and so it felt like something I could do that would be acceptable in Yellow Springs.”
Lakomski’s classified ad makes it clear that she’s “not a therapist,” and Lakomski said she is careful about that line. Her professional life in HR and coaching has meant years of being a sounding board for people at work, but not in a clinical sense. She talked about different “kinds” of listening: “There’s hearing here, hearing here, hearing here” she said, gesturing toward her ears, her head, her heart, “hearing in your gut and giving people a chance to express and figure it out. And many of us are verbal processors — the more we talk, the more we kind of get it going.”
Part of what she’s offering, then, is space and time, where the point is not to fix anything for the other person, but to let them talk long enough “to hear themselves.” Having studied some of the neuroscience behind coaching, she said, truly engaging with other folks — and new folks — is a good way to “develop new neural pathways.”
“You know how often we have an engagement with someone where we say, ‘Hi, how are you? I’m fine,’” she said. “It’s thoughtless — it’s a script — but when you go in a different direction, then you’re out of your rut. … One of the frames for it is, am I ‘it-ing’ you, or am I ‘thou-ing’ you? In one, you’re a tool, and in the other, you are human.”
Citing the time she spent in the Peace Corps in South Africa before returning to the village a decade ago, she pointed to a common South African Zulu greeting, “sawubona” — very loosely translated as “hello,” but more closely translated as “I see you.” A traditional response to the greeting is “sikhona” — “I am here.”
“I’m heartily aware that we often walk around not really feeling seen,” she said.
The half-hour conversations Lakomski is offering aren’t tightly defined, she said. Someone might want to talk through something that’s on their mind, share good news or simply sit with another person.
“I don’t know how it will go, and they might not either,” Lakomski said. “But if you have your ball and you’re bouncing it against the wall, I can be the wall.”
And she added that though she has years of professional experience in listening, the gift she’s offering this year is something any of us can give, if we so choose.
“You don’t need to have titles or anything to be human,” she said.
See Lakomski’s ad in the “Classifieds” section of the last two weeks’ issues of the News under the “Free Offers” heading.
At their regular meeting Monday, Dec. 15, the Miami Township Trustees approved an amended budget plan for Miami Township Fire-Rescue.
Trustee Marilan Moir and Fire Chief James Cannell emphasized that approving the amended budget plan does not automatically approve every purchase or program within it, but allows MTFR to begin pursuing its planned items, with trustees voting on those items individually as they are priced out in the coming year.
The first item Cannell brought forward for the 2026 budget was the creation of a 40-hour career community paramedic position, which the trustees unanimously approved; they later approved the hiring of Steffinie Brewer to fill the position, effective Dec. 27.
Cannell described community paramedicine as a “medical prevention-type initiative” focused on helping residents on a nonemergency basis by providing in-home preventive care and connecting them to other health and social services. He said the program is part of a broad healthcare effort to reduce hospital readmissions, and as such, community paramedicine also often includes post-doctor follow-up visits and aid with managing chronic conditions.
Similar programs exist or are beginning in nearby municipalities; Cannell noted that Xenia recently began its own community paramedicine program, and in nearby Montgomery County, the Dayton Fire Department has partnered with Premier Health to offer community paramedicine. The program’s website notes that community paramedics help connect residents with “primary care physicians, prenatal care or senior care services,” in addition to helping manage medications, identifying basic household needs in conjunction with a social worker and performing safety checks within the home.
Cannell added that MTFR’s burgeoning program could open doors to partnerships and outside funding. One local partnership will be with the YS Police Department’s community outreach specialists, who provide social services and access to food, transportation and mental health resources. He noted that the community paramedic position and the community outreach specialist positions provide complementary services to the community.
“I think it’s going to be a great partnership,” Cannell said.
Moir noted that beyond prevention-focused outreach, creating the position could also help address staffing needs on the emergency side. A community paramedic, she said, could still be available for emergency calls when needed.
Introducing Brewer, Cannell told trustees that she is involved in regional medical oversight as a a paramedic, serving on the Miami Valley Medical Board that approves emergency medical protocols. Cannell added that, in addition to Brewer’s credentials, her temperament made her, in his view, a strong candidate for the position.
“Part of the challenge of [filling a position] like this is finding a person that’s very compassionate and caring and really wants to make a difference,” he said.
Cannell noted that MTFR had been discussing the idea of adding a community paramedic position to its roster, based mostly on concerns about repeat calls within the department’s broader, ongoing focus on responding to overlapping calls.
When Brewer came in to interview for a paramedic position, Cannell said, her background of experience in community paramedicine helped move the concept into fruition.
“I thought, ‘We’ve got to jump on this opportunity,’ because there are a lot of communities out there seeking to start community paramedic programs,” Cannell said.
As part of the broader budget work underway, Cannell also requested action related to capital planning for to-be-purchased MTFR equipment and future ambulance payments. The trustees approved a separate set of resolutions tied to establishing a capital fund, which they discussed later in the meeting as they continued end-of-year financial housekeeping.
At the meeting’s end, Moir and Mucher gave their thanks to Trustee Don Hollister for his eight years of service as a trustee; Monday’s meeting marked Hollister’s last regular meeting as a trustee. Hollister was elected to his first four-year term as a trustee in 2017; he did not seek a third term of service in this year’s election.
“Thank you for your continued service,” Mucher said, adding that Hollister will still have one special meeting to attend before the end of the year.
“So don’t go away,” Mucher said, with a laugh.
“I’ll be around,” Hollister said, shaking hands with his fellow trustees.
Contact: chuck@ysnews.com
The final school board meeting of the year, held Thursday, Dec. 11, began festively with a performance from the YS High School choir, who sang “White Christmas,” “Chain of Fools” and “Bright Morning Star” under the direction of Lorrie Sparrow-Knapp.
It was a fitting send-off for longtime Mills Lawn music teacher JoFrannye Reichert, whose retirement this month after 21 years with the school district was marked during the meeting. A Yellow Springs graduate, Reichert served the district as a substitute teacher and paraprofessional before being hired as the full-time music teacher for Mills Lawn in 2007.
Assistant Superintendent Megan Winston said during the meeting that Reichert had spent “years making sure the students of Mills Lawn didn’t just learn notes and sounds or just memorize lines for a play.”
“Her students have explored cultures, history, stories from around the world,” Winston said. “One of my favorites is her ability to use a cross-curricular approach to help students see that music can connect to everything.”
Reichert’s time in the district has included years of bringing Mills Lawn students, and their performances, out of the classroom and into the community with “flash mob” choir performances, such as 2014’s “Cuban Shuffle” in front of the Little Art to raise money for the theater. She has also organized, directed, choreographed and sometimes adapted scripts for the well-loved tri-annual all-school musicals, including 2012’s “The Albert Brown Show,” 2015’s “Seussical: The Musical” and 2018’s “Lion King KIDS.”
The latter production was partially reprised in late October this year, when Reichert directed the Mills Lawn choir in a unique abridged performance of the work in a crosswalk near the school, combining the musical numbers with a “flash mob” sensibility. Winston noted that Reichert’s flash mobs have been a personal favorite of hers, as they “surprise us in special ways — and sometimes even surprise the drivers at intersections.”
“While we will miss having her at Mills Lawn each day, we know that her impact will continue for years,” Winston said.
Accepting a plaque from the district, Reichert, citing her maiden name, noted that her retirement will mark the end of “62 years of Robinsons as students, staff or faculty” in the district.
“Though I’m starting a new chapter, I’ve loved every moment I’ve been a music teacher, and every other role I’ve had in Yellow Springs schools,” Reichert said. “I’m very proud and very humbled that you let me play music with your babies every day; I loved it.”
Board passes last resolution
The evening also marked the last meeting for outgoing school board members Dorothée Bouquet, Judith Hempfling and Amy Magnus, whose four-year terms end this year. The school board members were thanked by Winston, Superintendent Terri Holden and Treasurer Jacob McGrath for their years of service.
The board’s final act in its current configuration was to pass a “Resolution Denouncing Harmful Immigration Policies and Affirming Support for All Students.”
The resolution, modeled on a similar one recently passed by Toledo Public School District, cites the decision in the 1982 Supreme Court case Plyler v Doe, which the resolution notes “guarantees that every child has the right to an education, regardless of immigration status.”
The resolution states that the board “condemns immigration policies that harm our students and families”; that all district sites will “remain supportive and secure environments for students and their families to seek help, assistance and information if faced with fear and anxiety about immigration enforcement efforts”; that “student privacy will be protected”; that the district will “help to identify community resources that are available to support families”; and that “staff will be trained to safeguard the rights of all students and appropriately handle enforcement activities.”
For the village’s Haitian neighbors about 15 minutes to the north, in Springfield, Jan. 1 marks not only the start of a new year, but the annual celebration of Haiti’s independence from French rule in 1804.
In 2026, though, a pall threatens to linger over what is typically a celebration of unity within community, as many of these neighbors remain unsure of what their futures will look like within the next few months.
A large number of Springfield’s about 15,000 Haitian residents, as estimated by the Springfield News-Sun, have come to the U.S. via Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, an immigration designation that allows people from countries experiencing political unrest to emigrate to the U.S.
TPS for Haitians is set to be revoked on Feb. 3, 2026.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration elected not to extend TPS for Haitian immigrants, and attempted to revoke the designation early in September, before being blocked by a federal court.
In the meantime, Springfield’s Haitian Support Center, or HSC — which marked its two-year anniversary last week — has mobilized to meet needs for Haitian residents, including partnering with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, or ABLE, to offer legal counsel on seeking asylum; HSC also helps provide access to food and money for housing as ongoing employment becomes unstable.
Needs are already outpacing resources, HSC representatives told the News last week, and those needs are expected to increase as uncertainty builds around what the next months will hold. As HSC co-founder and executive director Viles Dorsainvil said, some Haitian residents were already laid off earlier this year after the Trump administration terminated the humanitarian parole program that provided work permits for thousands who entered the U.S. under that program. After Feb. 3, Haitian residents with TPS are expected to lose their jobs, too.
“And I know that beyond February, we will have more applications coming in,” Dorsainvil said. “But the funds we have for rents have been drained.”
To that end, HSC has established an Emergency Fund, which HSC Board Chair Brian Stevens called an “attempt to, as much as possible, be prepared for what’s coming” when TPS ends.
“Because we know that the clock is ticking,” he said.
He added that HSC raised about $15,000 on Dec. 2, Giving Tuesday, toward the Emergency Fund’s $50,000 goal.
For Yellow Springs Village Council member Carmen Brown, who also spoke with the News last week, the growing urgency has prompted her to want to amplify HSC’s emergency fundraising effort locally; she spoke briefly on the issue at Council’s Dec. 15 meeting, and told the News last week she plans to continue to stoke awareness of the needs of the village’s Haitian neighbors.
“It’s a very unstable, frightening time for a lot of people,” Brown said. “What can we do to leverage that with some monetary support?”
Dorsainvil said that, beyond food and housing needs, some Haitian residents who have applied for asylum still have their applications moving through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which will likely leave them waiting before they are eligible to apply for, and receive, a work permit. Others are still searching for immigration attorneys to help them apply for asylum, and he said that HSC is already seeing some legal appointments with ABLE scheduled beyond February.
On top of that, Dorsainvil added, is the immediate fear of deportation.
“And with that risk, there will be so many families that will be separated from kids or loved ones,” he said.
Part of HSC’s work is long-term community-building within Springfield; Dorsainvil pointed to the organization’s youth club, which aims to build connections for young Haitian residents whose families may not have a strong social network. Some teenagers, he said, can spend months cycling between school, church and home, with little else in their world. HSC’s youth club, he said, tries to widen that world through mental health support, personal development training, collaborative activities and exposure to the wider community.
“We do painting, we read with them,” Dorsainvil said. “We tap into different types of subjects that can help them understand themselves, but also develop their potential.”
Rose-Thamar Joseph, HSC’s co-founder and operations director, said that, because of the organization’s focus on community-building, it has needs outside of the material — mostly in terms of human resources.
“We are still looking for capacity building so we can better serve the community,” she said, adding that HSC is looking for professional training and connections to other organizations.
“And we need space to do more projects,” she said, noting that HSC’s own building is still under renovation, and that the youth club’s burgeoning soccer team needs a regulation-size field on which to play and coaches to aid the young players.
Brown said she hopes Yellow Springs residents will reach out to HSC to make personal connections and offer some of their own resources — monetary, human or both.
“People need to have a point of relation,” she said. “It’s one thing when it’s on a list, on a fundraising site; it’s another when you realize these are children, these are families.”
One thing those Haitian families share, Dorsainvil said, is an understanding that returning to their home country is not a matter of choice. Despite what federal leaders have claimed in order to end TPS status for Haitians, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have both reported within the last year that gang violence remains rampant in the country and that state institutions are largely absent; their conclusions have been that, overall, conditions have continued to deteriorate in Haiti.
In focus groups held by HSC, Dorsainvil said, many Springfield Haitian residents expressed a desire to go back to Haiti if conditions improved.
“It’s not because they are not willing to go back home, but the fear is that they are going back to the same situation that pushed them to leave the country,” he said, adding that the ongoing violence and instability in Haiti are linked to the flow of firearms into the country.
“And the influx of guns mostly comes from the U.S.,” he said.
His assessment is reflected in reporting from Al Jazeera in March last year, in which experts said that, while there is no precise count of weapons in Haiti, most firearms and ammunition trafficked into the country originate in the United States. A 2023 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report cited estimates of up to 500,000 legal and illegal weapons in Haiti, and Al Jazeera reported that more than 80% of weapons seized on their way to Haiti and traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives between 2020 and 2022 were made in or imported to the U.S.
So, Dorsainvil said, many Haitian immigrants want to go home, but can’t trust that home is safe while the forces that fuel instability in Haiti remain in place.
At the same time, he said, Haitian residents in Springfield are aiming not to let fear eclipse their daily lives, even as they remain unable to project more than a month down the road what life will look like.
“Haitian people are resilient,” he said.
And he noted that HSC aims to continue offering help with material needs — rent, food, legal help, tuition for college students — as well as the chance to gather, celebrate, play and learn together amid a political climate that continually denies their humanity.
“We don’t want Haitians, because of this immigration issue, to lose sight of being human,” he said. “They are entitled to live as everybody else.”
To donate to HSC’s Emergency Fund, go to http://www.bit.ly/HSCEmergencyFund. For more information on HSC, or to connect with the organization, go to http://www.haitiansupportcenter.org.
The Yellow Springs Kwanzaa Planning Committee has announced plans for the 2025 celebration, which will take place Saturday, Dec. 27, at the Foundry Theater.
The evening will begin at 6 p.m. with a Kwanzaa Vendors Mart, followed at 7 p.m. by the annual Kwanzaa program. Hosted by Basim Blunt, the program will include readings by young people of the seven Kwanzaa principles, the presentation of the Nguzo Saba award to a Yellow Springs resident and performances by local artists, followed by a potluck meal.
Kwanzaa was developed by activist/educator Maulana Karenga, Ph.D., in the 1960s to introduce and reinforce seven basic values of African culture that contribute to building and reinforcing family, community and culture among African American people as well as Africans throughout the world.
The seven Kwanzaa principles, or Nguzo Saba, are associated with each day of the holiday, which begins Dec. 26 and ends Jan. 1: umoja — unity; kujichagulia — self-determination; ujima — collective work and responsibility; ujamaa — cooperative economics; nia — purpose; kuumba — creativity; and imani — faith.
Donations to support the program may be made by going online at the365projectys.org and clicking the “Kwanzaa” button. For more information, send an email to the365projectys@gmail.com.
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