Aiken, SC

For the last two years, Kathy Linton has filled her kitchen with a menagerie of critters—a raccoon, a lion, and a bright monarch butterfly, not to mention the box turtle that recently resided there.

She isn’t concocting a zoo or unusual recipe. The animals in the kitchen are actually costumes that Linton, a physical education teacher at East Aiken Elementary School, has made “from scratch” and donned during the school’s monthly character assemblies.

“I’ve been having a riot,” says Linton, who works with various storytellers during the assemblies to teach character traits such as patience, responsibility, and loyalty. “The students love it—they start to identify with these words.”

The character assemblies began in 1999 when Aiken became the first city in South Carolina to adopt the Character First Initiative. After Mayor Fred Cavanaugh attended a 1998 conference sponsored by the Character First Training Institute and the International Association of Character Cities in Indiana, he knew Aiken could participate.

This type of community-based program is not new to Aiken. Residents and schools alike helped Aiken win an All-America City Award in 1997, two years before adopting the Character First Initiative.

The All-America City Award, which includes a $10,000 prize, annually recognizes 10 communities whose citizens are committed to making their communities safe and nurturing. Each year, more than 100 communities submit applications for the competition, a program of the National Civic League.

Aiken touted three community programs to win the All-America City Award: the Show Your Heart Community Task Force, which brought open-heart surgery to Aiken Regional Medical Centers; Stone Soup, a grassroots movement to restore peace and pride in neighborhoods; and Growing Into Life, which helped reduce infant mortality in Aiken County.

“The three programs were successful,” Cavanaugh says. “The heart unit is busier than even anticipated and has saved many hundreds of lives already.”

Melissa Summer, marketing and publishing specialist at Aiken Regional Medical Centers, would agree. In the last four years, Aiken Regional Medical Centers has performed more than 500 open-heart surgeries, she says. For that, the town gives thanks in part to the hundreds of citizens who petitioned to bring the service to Aiken, which at one time was considered too small for such a health care expansion.

With Stone Soup, residents collected winter necessities for elderly neighbors, planted trees, and ensured the installation of more stop signs and speed bumps for safer areas. The program was just a one-year pilot project, but it was so popular that Aiken is in the process of hiring an individual whose duties will include identifying the needs of neighborhoods.

Growing Into Life began in 1989 when the infant mortality rate for Aiken County was 12.1 percent. Through community-based involvement, new parents were educated in the correct sleep positions for babies—which reduce the chance of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The program also addressed such issues as poverty, health care, and teen pregnancy. By the time the program ended in 1999, Growing Into Life had helped reduce Aiken’s infant mortality by 50 percent. The program currently is being studied by the Pew Partnership, a civic research organization that identifies and documents steps taken by strong communities using a combination of citizen involvement, partnerships, and technology.

Take a drive around Aiken, home of the Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame and Aiken’s own Triple Crown horse-racing series, and you’ll find the town certainly looks the part of an All-America City.

In April, the wisteria twines its way in and out of tree branches, adorning the greenery with a purple necklace of jewels. And it’s impossible to ignore the azaleas, dogwoods and flowers blooming in the medians—the result of community improvement grants.

With all it has to offer, Aiken’s population has increased from 19,500 in 1990 to its current 25,530.

Whether a newcomer or lifetime resident of Aiken, everyone benefits from the new Character First Initiative. Blue and white banners on the street remind residents of the character traits that the town largely already possesses—one for each month of the year.

Karan Robinson is a frequent American Profile contributor.

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