Leslie Mattie Rich: Community Organizer Extraordinaire
On one of the few non-muggy days this summer, I walked through the bright and bustling streets of Westwood to my neighborhood arcade, Wondercade. It’s a well-worn path. My kids and I make the trip often to this cherished piece of our community. This time, though, I wouldn’t be trying to beat my high score on Pac-Man or Q*bert. I was there to talk with Leslie Mattie Rich, Wondercade owner, life-long Westwood resident, and incredible creator of community. As the sounds of joy spilled in from outside the party room where we sat, Leslie shared her passion, and gift, for making space and place for the people around her.
Interview by Michaela Rawsthorn. Photography by Chelsie Walter.
Tell us, who is Leslie?
I’m a small business owner. I’m a nonprofit founder. I'm a community organizer. I'm a connector. I'm a Westwoodian.
How long have you lived in Westwood?
Almost all of my life except for three years. So, 40 years. To meet my husband, I had to go across the river to ensure that the gene pool was deep because my mom comes from a Westside Catholic family. I still go to things that are not family events and my mom will point to somebody across the room and be like, “Oh, hey, see that person over there. That's your cousin.”
You are heavily invested in Westwood in addition to having a rich history here. Tell us a little bit about Westwood Works that you helped found?
We started as a group of seven neighbors, in 2009, who wanted to bring an ArtWorks mural to Westwood. That mural is now on the side of Henke Winery. That happened because the civic association at the time was racist and classist. They said no three separate times. And so all of us said, well, “Hey, it says an organization, and the seven of us can be an organization.”
And really all we thought we were going to do was that mural. It was dedicated at the first ever Westwood Art Show. At that dedication, a ton of neighbors came out and said, “I've got some other ideas for what could happen,” or “I never thought anything like this was gonna happen in Westwood.” Before that point, I really thought I was going to be here in Westwood for a couple of years and then go back to Clifton or move to Northside.
But then we started having monthly meetings because our business district at that point had a 75% vacancy rate. There was nowhere to meet. So we met in Cheviot. Our group kind of grew because people heard what we were getting together. We started just doing more and more things. As we grew, we saw the need to show people what was possible. And we embraced creative placemaking, to show people the potential in a space that we're not utilizing yet. We've got some empty storefronts, let's give some entrepreneurs a chance to try things out.
In 2015 we received funding from the Haile Foundation to do this summer-long activation called, "Pop Goes Westwood." We programmed the space that now is a patio space, right by the Honda dealership, along with the parking lot across the street. We had programming from Memorial day through Labor Day. Every weekend. That killed us. That's a lot. But it also taught us a lot. We learned to make this more meaningful and not burn out all of us. At that point, most of us were still volunteers. We had a part-time executive director, Kevin Tolan, who was our first executive director. I was the board chair at this point. But, that's where Westwood's Second Saturdays came from.
Then, we took over the art show. We were also building different partnerships in the neighborhood. That's really where we saw our work. Besides the creative placemaking work, we really needed to be approaching our work through an asset lens, and also thinking about racial education and economic justice. That's when we started our mini-grant programs. This past year, those moved into funding exclusively Black-led ideas. And that's also why we gathered the neighborhood to advocate for Gamble Montessori High School to move into the old Mercy High School Building.
What are some of the Westwood Works projects that you're particularly proud of?
I'm really proud of our mini-grant work. We've been able to fund outdoor classroom space in the community garden. We funded a music and arts program for preschoolers at Madcap Education Center, that was a dollar a class. We funded Springfest in East Westwood this year. They painted a mural. They're rebuilding trails because there's part of Mount Airy Forest that is in East Westwood. We're funding popups, and then eventually a food truck with Theresa Devine. And it's gonna be a social enterprise where some days during the week she's going to be selling things at market rate. And then other times she'll be doing pop-ups at Shelterhouse or at Super Laundry which will be free.
Tell us about your work with ioby.
I was on the professional staff of Girl Scouts of Western Ohio which really helped me see the deep level of leadership that we have in Cincinnati but also that resources are an issue. So, ioby is pneumonic which stands for "in our backyards." It's the opposite of not in my backyard or the NIMBY movement.
I stepped away from the Westwood Works Executive Director role in May of this year. Because three jobs is a lot along with a family (laughing). I opened ioby's Cincinnati office when we thought COVID-19 was only going to last a month in April of 2020. Since then we've helped grassroots leaders in Cincinnati raise almost $300,000 for projects in their neighborhoods.
Any leader can build their fundraising site through the ioby platform. We offer free fundraising training because we are told it's not polite to talk about money. We're told that by people who have money and want to keep that money. So really, what we're doing is liberation work because we're giving agency back to neighbors. We're telling them the small donations are gonna get these things done.
Folks build a page that tells their story. It says what project they're working on, how much it's gonna cost, and what the budget is. And then folks can make donations, right on the page with a debit or credit card, or through PayPal. But also folks can take cash donations at events. Theresa, who received a Westwood Works mini-grant, is also running an ioby campaign. She had a taste-test event in June over at My Neighbor's Place where folks just threw in money. She was able to raise money that way. A lot of times we have match funds. That helps folks who might not have a lot who think, “well, my $5 is not going to make a difference. But now, it gets doubled.”
Are there any standout projects that you've come across through ioby?
The nonprofit Action Tank started through an ioby campaign. They run four campaigns with us now. City Council Bootcamp is kind of their most notable project. They've raised money for that. They also raised money for a Civic Health First Aid Kit to help first-time voters and returning citizens understand what to vote for, especially in down-ballot elections because those really affect people.
We also had neighbors in Evanston raise money for a historical marker for the Rankins who were the first African-American State Reps. And it is the first Ohio state marker that is for an African-American person and not like a group of people or a movement.
Then there's Meiser's Fresh Market in Lower Price Hill. We were a part of the funding puzzle to bring a grocery store back to Lower Price Hill.
So, now tell us about Wondercade.
From the time we had the idea to opening was probably four years. A friend of ours had an arcade in Deer Park and they closed. So we picked up four of their games. Those were in my dining room for three months when I said to my husband, “Hey buddy, uh, this need to get out here. We need to open an arcade.” So that's what happened.
We spent the next year and a half driving all over the Midwest picking up games. We went as far west as Kansas, as far north as Michigan, and as far south as Alabama to get games.
But there were so, so many obstacles to get through before we could open. I think for me the biggest learning, in every piece of work I've been involved in, be it the arcade, be it Westwood works, be it ioby, is this idea of hurrying slowly. You're oftentimes doing a lot of things all at once, but you also have to be really patient because some of those things are going to take time to come to fruition.
We were really lucky that we got to test a lot of our idea and our concept at a Second Saturday in one of the vacant storefronts in 2018. And then in 2019, we bought this building. It took us almost a whole year to convince the owners to sell us the building. Then the bank was weird about financing, and so we had to go a different way.
We planned to be open in June of 2020. But you know, at that point, we didn't have vaccines. And it's hard to socially distance in an arcade, and you're touching all the things. It just wasn't responsible for us to open. But the great thing was we were able to do a lot of things before we opened that we probably would've had to do later. We were able to get more games. We were able to build relationships with some of the local gaming community here. We were able to build relationships with the game design programs of local schools.
I really think about this as not just an arcade, but a community hub. That means being really purposeful about the way that we designed our space so that people walked in and saw that they were welcome. That's why our admission is all day, because not only do we want people to come into our space, but we want them to see the whole neighborhood.
Also, we're gonna have our first set of artist-designed shirts. So every quarter we'll have limited-release artist-designed shirts for Wondercade. And then beginning in 2023, we will have game openings. So local game designers will have games that they've designed, and just like you would go to an art opening, you'll go to a game opening. Wondercade is the only place where you can play those games.
I think I've just always approached any project from a multidisciplinary lens. I worked at the Cincinnati Museum Center through college, and designed exhibits and all of the programming for things. That was kind of the first foray into understanding how people interact with a space.
We had a transportation exhibit called A Set of Wheels. On the surface that's something that not everybody's gonna interact with. And so we had to think, “How do you get people to understand or interact with the space?” And so we added a drive-in movie scene where people could see the movies that were popular at the time. We also added an audio tour because not everybody reads. We added interactive things for kids to do and scavenger hunts. And so it's really about thinking through the purpose of what we're doing. What is our intent? Who are the people that we want to bring to a place? How do we want them to feel? What's the environment that we're gonna create to do that?
What is the process for finding all of these old video games?
So there's an undernet with a killer list of video games. People post lists of what they have. They post like, “Hey, I'm looking for this game.” Our Super PAC Man came from the P&G commissary. A friend called and said they were going to get rid of it. We found games in people's living rooms that they don't want anymore. Two of the pinball games were ours before we started even thinking about doing an arcade.
With my background as a historian, you get really good at research. And sometimes it's just knowing who to talk to. Any time that I'm out, my kids joke, “You're just going to break out in conversation with people; it's gonna be forever ‘til we leave.” To that, I say, this is how things happen. You're building relationships. Everybody has something that they're excited about or that they know about. My philosophy is if there's a way that I can connect other people, that one person has this piece and the other person has that, and bring them together for awesomeness, I wanna do that.
Would you say that the power of connection is like your superpower?
I think so. Yeah.
I cut my teeth doing that when I worked at Girl Scouts. I was actually pretty introverted before I worked there and I joked that it turned me into a game show host. Because you have to get kids excited, but then you also have to get adults excited and built up in their leadership.
The first three years I worked at Girl Scouts, I was working to uncover and elevate leadership in public housing complexes. All I did was just listen to what people cared about, what was important to them, what they liked about the community, and also what they hoped for the girls that were living in that community. My job, basically, was to find ‘the grandma’ in the community. The one that every kid went to her porch and hung out and she always had popsicles or just knew what was going on. Then saying, “Hey, you're doing this already. If we give you these things, then you can be doing more.”
How do you build authentic connections, like one that gets that grandma to feel comfortable talking to you?
A lot of it is just listening and earning the right to be heard by doing what you say you're gonna do. Often promises are made to people and they're not kept. When I meet people, I'm always listening way more than I'm talking. It's also observing and seeing the thing that puts the spark in a person's eye. Figuring out this person loves gardening or this person cares about kids or this person knows how to repair cars. Then just getting them connected to resources and building that person up. It's opening their eyes to the fact that they are already amazing and letting them know there are things out there that can make them more amazing.
I always talk about a lot of my work as if it's a meditation between love and fear, and scarcity and abundance. I even take that approach here in the arcade. If we assume the best about a person, and we look at them in the same way as like the person that is most dear to them, they're going to be their best self. But if we're thinking that bad things are going to happen, then we're closing ourselves off. We're closing ourselves off from opportunity and we're limiting what's possible.
What do you say to people who have misconceptions about Westwood?
We need to share what the community has become and what it's becoming. So much of it is storytelling. It's saying, “look at all that we have here.” Second Saturday is more than a party. It is a way for people to see their neighbors and for folks from other neighborhoods to come in and see the changes that have happened in the neighborhood. And then folks who live in the neighborhood who are meeting new neighbors or just folks who are visiting say, "oh, hey, let me tell you why I think Westwood is great.”
It's about getting folks into the neighborhood as often as possible. We're bringing people from as far west as California for events. We just had somebody register in Canada for our Killer Queen tournament. Those are folks who probably have never been in Cincinnati, let alone Westwood, but it's our chance to be ambassadors.
And I think one of the beautiful things about our business community here in Westwood is that so many of the folks that own businesses live in this neighborhood. A lot of the growth and development that hasn't happened again, is because of that perception issue. A lot of the bigger developers are not coming here. All this growth you see now has been done without developers.
There are more places for people to gather, but also it's job creation. Everyone that works at Wondercade lives in Westwood. Our manager bought a house in this neighborhood after he was able to grow his hours and put down roots. We're giving people the ability to live, work, and play in the neighborhood, which is huge. Especially after Mercy Hospital pulled out. They were the major employer in Westwood. That was a big loss to our neighborhood. But we can create jobs in this neighborhood.
It's also about pedestrian safety and building out bike infrastructure. Those are justice issues. We're getting fewer emissions on the road. We're making places safer. My kids can come from our house to meet friends and neighbors. They don't have to hop in a car to do that.
We're giving our neighbors and folks coming in from the outside the chance to build connections, to see the good that's happening and reinvest in the neighborhood. And then, really a lot of that's gonna flow out to our adjoining neighborhoods. It's going to flow out to Fairmount and East Westwood. A lot of that too takes strengthening relationships with those community leaders and not holding on to the knowledge that we have, but really sharing that with other people.
We've talked about what you're doing now. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?
I grew up in Westwood on Harrison Avenue – in the business district. I think that's another reason that I view businesses more than just commerce, but like they’re neighbors. My house was the only residential house on my block. My neighbors were the couple that ran the video store. I was tutored in algebra by one of the clerks at UDF. The couple that owned the Italian carryout made sure that I pronounced my Italian correctly when I would sing my arias. Those were my neighbors in the same sense that now I live on a residential street. My neighbors look out for my kids. It was people working in the businesses that were looking out for me.
My dad ran a barbershop for 60 years right next to our house, so entrepreneurship is really in my blood. I saw what it took for him to build a business. He cared about the little things, like he would always run out to the meter on the street and put a dime in for his customers. He would go to nursing homes and give customers free haircuts when they were shut in. From my dad, I learned a lot about service and how to subtly tell people that they were cared for. And from my mom, I learned to embrace change. My mom was an ER nurse for 45 years. She had to be adaptable. I thrive on change a lot.
My mom was an artist. She graduated from high school and was taking college classes. Her counselor told her, “Well, you have three choices: you could be a nurse, a teacher, or a secretary.” Even though the social constructs of the time limited her, she still embraced beauty and creativity. She pushed my brother and me in that way through learning instruments and singing. My brother is an artist. The arts are where I learned all my leadership. As a seventh grader, I was the section leader of the violin section in the orchestra. I was responsible for 12 other kids getting in their seats on time, knowing their music, and not goofing around. That was my community. That's where I found my place. Everyone is looking for their place. You know, through my involvement at the Museum Center, through working for Girl Scouts, founding Westwood Works, working with ioby, and building Wondercade, there's been a thread of showing people they're welcome – that there's a place for them.
Who is an influential woman in your life and why?
My first boss at Girl Scouts, Laura Ford-Harris. She pushed me in ways that I just would not have gone on my own. Sometimes she made me mad (laughs). I'd be like, “why are you asking me to do these things, Laura?” But she helped me understand that things need to happen by design rather than default. She pushed me to really think about the communities you serve, and design resources around that. She also told me to always expect excellence which means pushing yourself. She also allowed me to be creative. I was able to start a ton of new programs under her guidance.
She saw leadership in me before I saw it. One of the things that I still admire about her is that she's always bringing other women along with her, even when she's experiencing challenges in her life. She's still bringing people along. She's making sure she's elevating people. She's not even in Cincinnati anymore, she's in Minnesota working for the Boys and Girls Club. With any person she encounters, she's looking to make sure that they know their gifts, they know their worth. And at the same time that they're being pushed to be better.
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