Melinda Vonstein leads the Greenways Planning Studio at MORPC, where she plans and expands Central Ohio's network of trails and works to connect communities across the region. Her origin story starts with a broken glass table. When it shattered in her backyard a little over a decade ago, her family dug up the grass instead of cleaning up the mess, built a patio, and never really stopped digging. A casual hobby turned into about an eighth of an acre of intentional ecosystem: grapevines overhead, kiwi berries, gooseberries and other berries with whimsical names, a pond with fish, and enough fruit to make a year of jam for a family of five. One season she raised quail, and a hawk showed up to circle the yard and keep the rabbits out. She does not really call it a garden anymore. She calls it an ecosystem.

That instinct to see everything as connected is the throughline of her whole career. She grew up near a trail network in Dayton, rollerblading everywhere and riding the city bus downtown long before she thought of it as her ticket to freedom. An architecture degree pushed her to think past single buildings toward how people actually move through a place, which led to a master's in city and regional planning, a first job running wayfinding for Ohio State's hospitals, and a role helping COTA relocate thousands of bus stops in the largest transit redesign in its history. Land use, public space, trees, buses, and people are one system to her, the same way her backyard is. It is why she can look at a paved trail and see a living network, and why the work of building Central Ohio's greenways landed so naturally in her hands.

Episode in a glance

00:05 Meet Melinda Vonstein, MORPC's Greenways Lead
03:56 The Year a Hawk Guarded Her Garden
07:54 Rollerblades and the Bus That Set Her Free
10:42 Why Installing a Sign Never Fixes Anything
14:16 The Largest Bus Overhaul in COTA's History"
17:59 400 Miles of Trails, and a Ride From Cleveland to Cincinnati

About Melinda Vonstein

Melinda Vonstein is the Greenways Planning Studio lead at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC), where she works to plan and expand Central Ohio's greenways and strengthen connections between communities across the region. She holds an undergraduate degree in architecture and a master's in city and regional planning. Before MORPC she managed the wayfinding program for the Ohio State University hospitals, and she worked at the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA), where she supported service planning during the largest transit system redesign in the agency's history, relocating thousands of bus stops. At MORPC she leads planning for Central Ohio Greenways, a network of more than 400 miles of trails with a vision for 1,000 miles of connected regional trails across a 15-county region, and she speaks at the annual Summit on Sustainability.

Connect with Melinda Vonstein and her work

• Melinda Vonstein on LinkedIn → linkedin.com/in/melinda-vonstein-986066106
• Central Ohio Greenways → centralohiogreenways.com
• Central Ohio Greenways Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/centralohiogreenways/
• Central Ohio Greenways Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/centralohiogreenways/
• Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission → morpc.org
• Summit on Sustainability (October 28): morpc.org/summitonsustainability

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The EPA can call it a good air quality day while your own street tells a different story. Residents across Franklin County kept saying exactly that, and it is why MORPC built the Community-Led Enhanced Air Quality Network, a set of sensors roughly the size of a baseball that plug into an outlet, find the Wi-Fi, and publish their readings where anyone can look them up. JR Diaz-Hernandez runs that work as MORPC's air quality and sustainability program manager, along with the daily forecasts and the alerts that go out when the air turns orange or worse. He walks through the scale that runs green to maroon, the site that will tell you your ZIP code's air right now, and why any of these rules exist at all, which traces back to Ohio and a river that caught fire.

Three years of block-by-block monitoring produced terabytes of data and one uncomfortable finding. A pocket of Franklin County carries double to quadruple the particulate matter of the rest of the county, and the sensors were barely reaching it. He unpacks what the patterns mean, from the 8am and 6pm traffic peaks to the 3am spikes nobody can explain yet, and why he calls the sensors empowerment tools instead of evidence. MORPC holds no enforcement power, so the whole model runs on putting something in a resident's hands that they can carry to the EPA themselves. The project also produced a step-by-step workbook and a sensor lending library so any community can copy it. Then come the things anyone can do this week: carpool through Gohio Commute, bike the trail system, swap a gas mower for an electric one, weatherize the house. Not the big actions, the little ones. He is also on the roster at this year's Summit on Sustainability, and he closes on the idea his whole career runs on. Look out for yourself, and look out for the people around you.

Episode in a glance

00:05 The Scale That Runs Green to Maroon
05:03 The Day It Hurt to Breathe in Central Ohio
09:49 When the EPA Says Green and Your Block Says Otherwise
15:15 The Pollution Spikes at 3AM Nobody Can Explain
19:13 What One Person Can Actually Do About It
23:05 Look Out for the People Around You

About JR Diaz-Hernandez

Mauro "JR" Diaz-Hernandez is the air quality and sustainability program manager at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC), where he works to protect public health and improve air quality across Central Ohio through daily forecasting and alerts, neighborhood-level air monitoring, and sustainability programming with partners across the region. Born and raised in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, he was the first in his family to go to college, earning degrees in anthropology and sociology from Amherst College and later a master's in public health from the University of Connecticut. Before MORPC he worked with the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program, helped low income and first generation students get into and through college, and served as program administrator for the Center on Climate Change and Health at the Yale School of Public Health. He has volunteered as an EMT with the Mystic River Ambulance Association, worked with therapy horses, and taught at a nature center. He leads MORPC's Community-Led Enhanced Air Quality Network (CLEAN) and speaks at the annual Summit on Sustainability.

Connect with JR Diaz-Hernandez and his work with MORPC

• JR Diaz-Hernandez on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/maurodiazhernandez/
• MORPC air quality programs, including forecasts, alerts, and neighborhood monitoring → morpc.org/airquality
• Email JR directly → airquality@morpc.org
• Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission → morpc.org
• Summit on Sustainability → morpc.org/summit

Send us a message!

JR Diaz-Hernandez goes by the initials of two men. The J is his great-grandfather. The R is Roberto, the grandfather who helped raise him through his first nine years. He is now the air quality and sustainability program manager at MORPC, protecting public health across Central Ohio through forecasting, alerts, and neighborhood-level air monitoring. It started in Oak Cliff, a Dallas neighborhood where everything he needed sat within walking distance, where a Salvadoran family sold pupusas two for a dollar half a block from his elementary school, and where neighbors kept getting priced out one by one. He had no word for walkable yet, and no word for displacement. He just noticed people leaving.

Low income and the first in his family to go to college, he bounced between majors at Amherst until he sat in a library and thought, if only there was a field of study that studied people. Anthropology and environmental sociology handed him the vocabulary for what he had already lived: why the affordable houses in his city sat closest to the airport and the municipal dump, and why fishing families could describe a changing climate long before any report reached them. He spent six years earning a master's in public health while working full time and riding as a volunteer EMT, built guitars and canoes in the gaps, and landed in Ohio because his partner chose Ohio State. Then came the MORPC job that was never advertised. Every turn in the story comes back to people, which is the common thread he names himself, and he carries it to this year's Summit on Sustainability with a PechaKucha talk about something most adults have quietly stopped doing, which is going outside to play. Ask him why any of it matters and he answers with a question of his own. Did you breathe air today?

Episode in a glance

00:05 The Two Grandfathers Behind the Initials
06:57 The Louisiana Site That Vanished Under Water
11:15 Why the Affordable Houses Were Closest to the Dump
14:16 The World's Too Big of a Place to Be Bored
17:59 The Job That Was Never Advertised

About JR Diaz-Hernandez

Mauro "JR" Diaz-Hernandez is the air quality and sustainability program manager at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC), where he works to protect public health and improve air quality across Central Ohio through daily forecasting and alerts, neighborhood-level air monitoring, and sustainability programming with partners across the region. Born and raised in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, he was the first in his family to go to college, earning degrees in anthropology and sociology from Amherst College and later a master's in public health from the University of Connecticut. Before MORPC he worked with the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program, helped low income and first generation students get into and through college, and served as program administrator for the Center on Climate Change and Health at the Yale School of Public Health. He has volunteered as an EMT with the Mystic River Ambulance Association, worked with therapy horses, and taught at a nature center. He leads MORPC's Community-Led Enhanced Air Quality Network (CLEAN) and speaks at the annual Summit on Sustainability.

Connect with JR Diaz-Hernandez and his work with MORPC

• JR Diaz-Hernandez on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/maurodiazhernandez/
• MORPC air quality programs, including forecasts, alerts, and neighborhood monitoring → morpc.org/airquality
• Email JR directly → airquality@morpc.org
• Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission → morpc.org
• Summit on Sustainability → morpc.org/summit

Send us a message!