THE PARKS PATRON

Katrena Ramsey

Superintendent, Ravenswood Board of Parks & Recreation Commissioners

SUPERPOWER: Bulldog-like persistence

Katrena Ramsey still remembers the disappointment she felt over a decade ago as she and her son, Davy, saw missing swings, broken slides, and discarded needles on the ground at their local playground. “It was so desperately broken,” she says. “I started looking around town, and I started seeing more broken things. I thought, ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?’ But then I thought, ‘Maybe that somebody is me.’”

She started by simply asking for help on Facebook. To her delight, people showed up. One project at a time, locals volunteered to support restoration efforts in Ravenswood. “There was a community drive behind it, that this was something important to us,” Ramsey says. When these projects took off, there was no formal board or supervisor, but the scale kept growing, and Ramsey kept leading the charge. Soon, Mayor Josh Miller invited her to formally take the helm as superintendent of Ravenswood Parks & Recreation.

One of Ramsey’s favorite projects to-date is the restoration of a set of overgrown hiking trails behind her grade school. She remembers the excitement she felt about the installation of the trails by the Jackson County Board of Education when she was in third grade. Over the years, the neglected trails had become unusable, but a group of volunteers cleared the paths, and a set of donations provided funding for new signage. The city Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners now leases the property from the county Board of Education to allow public access along the 7 miles of hiking and biking trails.

Ramsey is also especially proud of the revitalization of the Veterans’ Park, featuring ADA playground equipment that welcomes all ability levels and age groups, and the reopening and full staffing of The Great Bend Museum, which tells the histories of Jackson County and the Ohio River’s Great Bend region. “Every day, I get up in the morning and I say, ‘What can I fix today?’ I want to make it better for our town and our children,” she says. “If I didn’t already live here, I would want to live here.”

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