From sticky notes to blueprints, community members have come together after the Dec. 10, 2021 tornado to not only recover what was destroyed but to outline a plan to enhance Mayfield from what it once was. 

Headed by community volunteers, Mayfield Rebuilds assembled in March as a way for the community to have a voice for how they wish to see their community rebuilt and advanced. 

Mayfield Rebuilds works toward recovery centering on seven branches: health and welfare, education, housing, utilities and transportation, business, quality of life and rebuild and design. All branches have respective chairs and are overseen by Jill Celaya, the chair of Mayfield Rebuilds.

Celaya, a Mayfield native, described her involvement with Mayfield Rebuilds as “being in the right place at the right time.” Celaya said she offered to help wherever she was needed early on in the recovery efforts. 

“After the tornado, our mayor and some of the city leaders wanted the community to get together and decide how we wanted to recover from this,” Celaya said. “As awful as this disaster was, we felt like we could take this as a great opportunity to come back better, bigger, stronger.”

 As she became involved with Mayfield Rebuilds, Celaya also enlisted some friends to help her. One of them was Denise Brazzell, who serves as the secretary for Mayfield Rebuilds. 

“I lived a little bit out of city limits, and I wasn’t as affected by the tornado,” Brazzell said. “[Jill] called me a couple weeks later and said, ‘I need you.’ So I just said ‘okay, and here I am.’”

Before the plans could be written, the group went into the community to listen to what residents wanted for the future of Mayfield. The Mayfield Rebuild’s website also had a tab for residents to leave suggestions. 

Their first meeting was coined as “the sticky note meeting” because Mayfield residents submitted their requests on sticky notes, which became the foundation of Mayfield Rebuilds. 

“The sticky notes turned into lists, and the lists turned into committees, and the committees turned into projects,” Brazzell said. “And now…we see a path for a journey, if that makes sense, and that’s what we’re…on, a path on a journey to make Mayfield even more than what it was.”

The sticky notes outlined what citizens needed and led to the creation of the seven branches.

Health and Welfare

The health and welfare branch is responsible for promoting healthy lifestyles, thinking of ways to improve health and welfare for the community and facilitating the community’s beliefs, according to the Mayfield Rebuilds website. 

An important point for Celaya to address in this branch is PTSD.

“I can’t imagine what these people are going to be dealing with in the future,” Celaya said. “I’m sure that it’s just horrendous, the PTSD, the mental problems that we’re going to be dealing with in the [upcoming] years.”

Although Celaya wasn’t outwardly impacted by the tornado, she found herself being mentally affected.

“Since the tornado, I have found that I’m suffering from PTSD, and I wasn’t affected directly,” Celaya said “I was in an airport a few months later, and I got an alert on my phone that there was a tornado warning,” she said. “I almost put a Jill-shaped hole in the wall trying to get into the inside of that building.” 

In the face of PTSD, Celaya said Mayfield needs spaces where people can take time to ground themselves.

Education

The education branch is tasked with promoting and expanding educational opportunities for high school students.

“To have economic development, you need a good workforce, so education is addressing and looking at ways to start vocational education, early career experience,” Celaya said.

The group has put an emphasis on vocational education opportunities. Brazzell said expanding the education provided to students can broaden their work opportunities and the workforce in Mayfield.

Housing

The housing branch is responsible for planning for housing type, location and housing amenities. Housing in Mayfield already posed issues because a majority of the residents are renters, but the tornado bolstered those issues into a crisis. 

Celaya said Mayfield has double the national average of rentals at  64%.

“We lost over 400 homes in the tornado, so what was already a problem has become a crisis,” Celaya said. 

Although 400 homes were uprooted by the tornado, Brazzell recognizes that far more than 400 families lost their homes.. 

“Some of them are multifamily dwellings,” Brazzell said. “They may have been single family homes, but multiple families lived in them. So more than 400 families were affected.

In response to the housing crisis, Brazzell emphasized the importance of building homes amongst a  walkable community. “People could walk to stores and restaurants, all those things that make a thriving community work, and part of what makes it work is making it travelable,” Brazzell said.

Utilities/Transportation

The utilities and transportation branch evaluates existing infrastructure and uses community input to create ideas for necessary improvements throughout the rebuilding process and beyond. 

Celaya spotlighted walkability and social spaces as important to Mayfield’s transportation.

“With funding for transportation, we can do things like improving our streetscape, wide sidewalks, lighting, benches, landscaping,” Celaya said. “We can create just a beautiful commerce area.”

Business

The business committee wants to revive Mayfield and Graves County through attracting and retaining new and existing businesses. 

A prospect that is already gathering funding is a community makerspace. 

“It’s an area that would be great for if you’re a hobbyist and you want to learn how to do ceramics, but you don’t want to buy all this stuff,” Celaya said. “You can go to this place and do that.”

Another sector concerning business development in Mayfield is location. Mayfield Rebuilds is working with an urban planner to make community spaces more accessible. 

Rebuild and Design

After historic downtown Mayfield was destroyed, the rebuild and design committee took on the task of developing a new downtown. Additionally, they are working to redefine Mayfield’s business districts.

Along with transportation, Mayfield’s rebuild and design branch also focus on making travel easy for residents.

“How do you want your downtown to look?” Brazzell said. “We talked about accessibility, livability and low to moderate income housing.”

Rebuild and design also focuses on tourism and aspects that may attract people to Mayfield. 

“How do you make people want to stop when they come to your town?” Brazzell said. “The way you do that is you create something that’s visually stimulating. That’s what we’re looking for in design and rebuild.”

Quality of Life/Arts/Recreation

Nate Cox took the role as the Quality of Life chair, which he describes as a role to help better the lives of Mayfield residents. What started out as a meeting to suggest ideas on sticky notes created a position to improve the lives of residents. 

“When we left the Post-it note meeting, other people had two or three notes on their board, and I had four poster boards full of Post-it notes,” Cox said. “Quality of life has turned into a little bit of everything that you could sit there and say ‘Mayfield needs one of these, and that would help my quality of life.’” 

Cox and the rest of the Mayfield Rebuilds team sifted through all of the sticky notes they received and determined which ones listed feasible ideas. Two of these big projects, Cox said, include a community center and a farmers market. 

While these ideas are further along than other projects, Cox said they are still in the “dream phase,” meaning the plans have been drawn up, and they will soon move to the “funding phase.” 

While it may take several years to complete, Cox is looking forward to the rebuilding of Mayfield. 

“It’s a really long road from here, but I feel like we have the right people in the right places, and we’re heading in the right direction, and only good things are to come,” he said.

Public Relations

Georgann Lookofsky has been a resident of Mayfield for about 30 years and has a background in public relations. Her love for Mayfield as well as her experience in communications led Lookofsky to serve as the communications chair for Mayfield Rebuilds.

Lookofsky described her position as being the liaison between building and creating content for the website and between all the various committee chairs. 

“Eventually, we were able to iron out the structure for the website and then begin to funnel the input from the committees onto the website,” Lookofsky said. “Then also to get that out there with the forms for the community so that people could just click on the website and really easily turn in their idea. The committee decided early on that we needed to seek input from the community.” 

Lookofsky said the most exciting part of the process for her was seeing the committee leaders work together to recreate Mayfield. 

“I’ve seen some really outstanding community leaders,” Lookosky said. “People that I have a lot of respect for come to this process with a really open heart. They were willing to hear the ideas and put their expertise to work for what Mayfield could look like.” 

Mayfield Rebuilds will present their plan for the future of their community at the Dec. 12 Mayfield City Council meeting.

Although Brazzell was unscathed by the tornado, she felt it necessary to lend a hand because her community was hurting.

“The people that live here, love here, and when I say they love here, I mean they love their families here and they love their town here,” Brazzell said. “When you have a strong community identity, which I think Mayfield does, then you have people that will, no matter how busy they are, will step up and say, ‘Okay, where do you want me?’”

Though the experience has made Celaya far more busy, she said she is proud of what she has been able to do for her community.

“Well, you know what they say, ‘If you want something done, you ask a busy person to do it,’” Celaya said. “I never have understood that anywhere near as well as I do now, but I don’t regret one moment of the time that I’ve spent doing this.”

Story by Dionte Berry and Rachel Essner