This year’s recipient of the Main Street Business of the Year award is The Happy Pot in Portsmouth.
Cinamon Wellington greets every customer and community member with a smile, as she spreads the love of community and art through her business, The Happy Pot. The pottery business has gone out of its way to show everyone in the community they can create art and that they matter. She goes into every situation with Bob Ross energy and love, treating her business like a cause. She not only takes walk-ins and parties and big business events, but she goes out of her way to accommodate marginalized populations to make them feel welcome in their own community.
She has created techniques to paint and create art with massive physical disabilities, that way people at our local developmental and physical disabilities board can participate. She feels strong in helping those members of the community, Since 2017, Jeff Payne has worked tirelessly over his multiple years running the Downtown Middletown Main Street Program. COVID served a devastating blow to our efforts. Despite it all, and perhaps because of it all, Jeff has risen to the occasion and done the work of three or four staff for the organization. While our volunteers lagged, businesses closed, and events cancelled, Jeff stepped up his efforts to lead the downtown through the storm. Jeff is a consummate professional, interfacing with Heritage Ohio leadership and Main Street America to ensure that best practices are being learned and shared. He attends the conventions, he meets with local leaders and organizations regularly, and does an all-around fantastic job of promoting and sustaining Downtown Middletown, Inc. Jeff has foremost successfully kept a struggling and somewhat fractured downtown business landscape alive and functioning. He has worked thoughtfully and in the weeds with owners who are struggling. In doing that, he has been able to continue to make forward progress with incentive programs, pivoting events, and continuing to find ways to attract people to the downtown. Most notably, he has done all of this with kindness, a big smile, and humility that puts the experiences and the people ahead of himself. Main Street Volunteer of the Year Award because of a tremor she has to work around while creating art herself, due to diabetes; which is another cause for which she raises funds.