YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Downtown has more than a dozen museums and other cultural, educational and recreational destinations, and an initiative being piloted this summer aims to increase their traffic. 

A group of partners led by Economic Action Group will launch YoPass, a digital passport program, during a kickoff event at 10 a.m. Saturday at Youngstown State University’s McDonough Museum of Art. The online platform will connect visitors to the participating institutions. 

The concept for what became YoPass was brought to EAG by Janet Yaniglos, who served as a mentor for EAG’s 2025 Civic Innovation Transforming Youngstown summer internship program, according to Kennedy Kish, marketing manager for EAG. The CITY program focuses incoming and current college students on pressing challenges in Youngstown. 

Yaniglos, a member of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society Board of Directors, presented the idea to EAG in response to a request for proposals from community organizations to pitch project ideas, Kish said. She wanted to come up with a way to increase visitation for local museums and other arts and cultural organizations, specifically by families.   

People can sign up for YoPass at the program’s website. Using the smartphone-accessible passport, visitors can check in at the 14 participating sites, which are in or near downtown. In addition to the McDonough, participating venues include: 

  • Mahoning Valley Historical Society’s Arms Family Museum and Tyler History Center.
  • Clarence R. Smith Mineral Museum.
  • Mill Creek MetroParks’ Ford Nature Center, Fellows Riverside Gardens and Lanterman’s Mill.
  • Oh Wow! The Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science & Technology.
  • Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County – Main Library.
  • Rose Melnick Medical Museum.
  • Students Motivated by the Arts.
  • The Butler Institute of American Art.
  • YSU’s Ward Beecher Planetarium.
  • Youngstown Historical Center of Industry & Labor.

Bringing all of these sites together is a great opportunity to promote the different venues, especially smaller ones that don’t get as many visitors as other, more prominent local institutions, Kish said. 

“It was just a perfect kind of partnership, mutually beneficial between families, the students and all of the different sites involved,” she added.

One of the venues that YoPass is expected to help draw wider attention to is the Melnick Medical Museum. Opening at YSU in 2001, the museum has been housed in Cushwa Hall since 2022, said Lisa Garofali, archives and records management specialist at the university’s Maag Library. 

Composed of medical equipment dating back more than a century collected by Youngstown radiologist Dr. John C. Melnick, the museum’s purpose is “to document the medical history in Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley,” she said. The collection includes historical medical and dental equipment, including early X-ray machines and an original iron lung, such as those used to treat polio, as well as a replica.    

The museum’s current patrons include students on school field trips and visitors to the Smith Mineral Museum in adjacent Moser Hall, Garofali said. More than 100 visitors went through when it was open during YSU’s 2025 Summer Festival of the Arts.  

In addition, the museum does outreach to schools with its “suitcase tour,” which offers smaller instruments such as the amputation kit, said Ana Torres, co-director and head of library services and operations at Maag. 

The various participating venues will offer activities for visitors to take part in, Kish said. Smarts will provide an art activity; Oh Wow is going to have something involving one of its exhibits; and many of the museums are going to have activities such as scavenger hunts to encourage visitors to read about the artifacts and history they focus on. 

“As they visit more sites, we’re going to have a few different prizes,” Kish said. 

“Any program or enticement that gets people to come to our sites and experience our exhibits and hands-on programs, we’re there – we definitely want to be part of that,” said Bill Lawson, MVHS executive director. “Because there’s such a wealth of cultural institutions and collections and museums within a 2-mile radius of Central Square, this is something natural.”

MVHS experiences about 80% or more of its traffic during November and December, when the historical society’s popular Memories of Christmas Past exhibit is on display at the Arms Museum, according to Lawson. 

“We want traffic year-round, and we want to offer programs and incentives for people to come year-round,” he remarked. 

While the program as initially conceived would have offered both digital and physical passports, it was decided ultimately just to go with a digital one, Kish said. 

“We’re planning on running through the end of October, early November” and will look to see whether “any tweaks need to be made to the system,” she said. 

There have been passport programs in the past that have run for a while and then fallen off, Lawson said. He sees this one as different from past initiatives because of the institutions involved “and the fact that EAG and the YSU students have really taken us on and gone in directions we couldn’t imagine a couple of years ago,” he said. 

Pictured at top: From left, Lisa Garofali, Ana Torres and Kennedy Kish stand in front of historical X-ray equipment at the Rose Melnick Medical Museum at Youngstown State University.