BELLEFONTE — If there is a hat to be worn in Bellefonte, Vana Dainty has almost certainly tried it on. She’s been a salesperson, a newspaper editor, an accountant and a councilwoman.
Now, she’s acting as Bellefonte’s Keystone Community Development coordinator, and she’s happy to be working in and for a town she loves so much.
“I just love it here,” Dainty told The Centre County Gazette. “It’s a wonderful community to live and work. The people are good here and that’s why I care so much. I don’t think there is another place I’d like to live.”
Dainty came to Centre County in 1989. She and her family had lived in the Florida Keys, but because of the rising drug trade in the southern United States, they decided to pack up and move north, to the Bellefonte area, where Dainty had friends and colleagues.
“I came with a background in accounting,” said Dainty. “As soon as I arrived, I was offered a position at the Bargain Sheet where I eventually became general manager.”
She worked with the publication for about four years before moving on to another publication — Central Pennsylvania Business Central. After a short stint with CPBC, she took a job in sales and purchasing in the computer field.
“Looking back at it now, I sure did skip around a lot,” she said. “But, I think that was good for me because I got to meet a lot of people that opened several doors for me.”
One of those people she met was the owner of the Auto Connection, a lay-down publication dedicated to automobile sales.
“I sold advertisements for awhile for them,” said Dainty. “It really gave me more contacts in the area and allowed me to move into other areas I was interested.”
After a short stint with the Auto Connection, Dainty returned to the Bargain Sheet to sell advertisements, and she kept that position until 2004, when she decided enter the publishing field for herself. The Bellefonte Gazette was born.
“I loved doing that little paper,” remarked Dainty. “I think it was simply because it was about my hometown and all the great people and businesses in it.”
Dainty said she dedicated her life to the paper.
“I had to do it all,” she said. “I wrote, I took photographs, I sold advertising and I designed it every week. I loved every minute of it.”
The newspaper was then bought by Indiana Printing and Publishing, the parent company of Barash Media, and was renamed The Centre County Gazette.
Dainty continued to write about her local community as a freelancer, and was also elected onto Bellefonte Borough council. She resigned from her council seat in 2013 when she accepted the position of Keystone Community Development coordinator.
“It just all fell into place for me,” said Dainty. “The position opened up at the perfect time, and I knew I would be a great candidate for the job. Others must have felt the same way because I was hired and started work in December 2013.”
The Keystone Community Development coordinator position is a compliment to the state’s Main Street programs. Dainty said the difference is that a Main Street manager is fully focused on downtown communities and a KCD coordinator spends about 60 percent of their time on downtown projects and the other 40 percent is used for planning and zoning.
“The first thing I had to do was get the designation of a Keystone Community for Bellefonte,” said Dainty. “This took about a year to do, but it was well worth it. Being designated allows us to enter into state programs and secure grant funding that isn’t available to communities without the designation.”
In 2014, Bellefonte officially became a Keystone Community.
“My first project was to find facade grant money,” said Dainty. “I noticed in our downtown that several building needed new facades, or at least some facade work.”
She said she secured $50,000 in grant funding for the project, and all of it was dispersed. She said $30,000 of that funding has already been reimbursed to property owners.
“It had a wonderful affect on what our community looks like,” she said.
In addition, Dainty works with downtown businesses and other agencies to find other ways to help better the community.
“We have a lot in the works,” she said. “We’re trying to develop a logo for our marketing program and we’d like to establish a few committees to work on specific projects. We’re hoping to get them established here this year.”
She also said she’d like to complete a business inventory and identify the anchor buildings in the community.
“We don’t have anything like that on record, and I think it will be important to have to show potential news businesses and organizations all that Bellefonte has to offer,” she said. “It’s going to take a lot of work, but it will be well worth it.”
She also said she’s like to see the Bellefonte Entrepreneur Center open sometime this summer, which will offer business and industry another option in Centre County.
“I think there’s a lot of great potential in Bellefonte and we’re just scratching the surface of it now,” she said. “We’re going to try to bring younger people back to live and work in our community, and help them be successful. We also want to retain the people and businesses that we already have here. That, too, will be a lot of work; however, we have the people in government supporting our efforts.
“It all won’t be done in a day, but it would never get done if there wasn’t confidence that the Keystone Community program works. It does.”
Dainty can be reached at (814) 355-1501, extension 16, or vdainty@bellefonte.net.
