Nathan Witt is a “people person.” For him, that means he enjoys bringing people, organizations and services together so that everyone has all of the resources they need to succeed. 

And boy, did his “aligning and leveraging (of) resources” pay off this time.

Witt is primarily a board member and co-founder of Flint and Steel/Wood County Walls, a local nonprofit that works to develop a healthy community for underserved youth in the area. He is also the editor-in-chief of Talon Student Media, which is UT Tyler’s student-led media organization.

Of course, he found a way to bring them all together for the general good of all involved.

“The Wood County EDC, through Flint and Steel, has hired the Talon to do…the marketing for Wood County Walls,” Witt said. “Flint and Steel has used part of the grant money from this past grant cycle, and is dedicating the vast majority of this upcoming grant cycle…towards hiring UT Tyler students to market Wood County Walls and also to essentially plan and co-ordinate the Street Art Festival this year.” 

Through this “win-win” partnership, not only do Talon Student Media participants get “real world, real cause-and-effect, real risk-and-reward scenarios,” but Wood County Walls receives marketing, and the Wood County EDC, they hope, will see a boost in tourism. 

The goal of this contracted partnership, Witt says, is to “increase general awareness of what Wood County Walls is,” and to “have more people taking pictures with walls and spending money in local businesses.”

“For us, it’s really exciting,” said Witt. “That’s going to be a big, exciting challenge for this year. We’re going to need a lot of staff to pull that off.”

In fact, if you saw a group of college students recently roaming around Wood County, taking photos of the murals and interacting with local businesses, it was Witt’s team of dedicated, skilled staff on the move.

As part of their new mission to serve Wood County Walls – and thus Wood County – the 10-person team took all day Aug. 13 to experience the Wood County Walls “trail” and to shoot some video so that others can later follow in their footsteps. 

“Its purpose is to be the tutorial, of ‘how do you take the Wood County Walls trail?’” Witt said. “We want to establish very early on, that what it means to ‘take the Wood County Walls trail’ is to not only take your pictures, but it’s to experience your local businesses.”

This means that the team went with Wood County Wall’s slogan – “Explore. Interact. Linger.” 

“We went, we explored the towns, we interacted with the businesses, and we lingered,” he said. “So it was a great time for us – but now we have this road map, we have this video!”

The videos and photos they took will later be put on YouTube, social media platforms, and “cut (up) into shorts” so that the content can be spread to the most people possible.

Of course, promo video is not all that Talon Student Media will do for this partnership. As Witt mentioned, they are also planning a Street Art Festival, which will have more details confirmed later in the fall.

To Witt, it’s all about community helping community. It’s all about the circle of economics. The Wood County EDC helps fund Wood County Walls; Wood County Walls gives a stipend to Talon Student Media in exchange for marketing and tourism deliverables; Talon Student Media journalists get a chance to have real-world examples, and they boost tourism for the Wood County EDC.

“Before we can get people to spend a weekend here, we need them to spend a day here,” said Witt. “So (this is) kind of the first step.”