The Sawyer Community Alliance is celebrating its fifth year of existence in 2014, with plenty of progress to show for it.

The area around Little Trout Lake has been cleaned up and a playground now exists for kids to use. A fishing event takes place there every year, a great way for families to spend the day together.

A neighborhood watch has been established to help cut down on crime, and a community garden is available for those willing to give growing their own food a shot.

For more information on these and other projects, see Jackie Stark’s Page 1A story in Sunday’s edition of The Mining Journal.

In it, we learned about the humble beginnings of the group and how a grass-roots movement has begun to take a defunct United States Air Force Base that was typically seen only for the problems it had and turn it into a place that could soon be seen as a national model for how to grow a community.

Even now, in the middle of Sawyer’s transformation, the work the alliance is doing is garnering national attention, as the National Leadership Academy for the Public’s Health partners with the group, offering its own brand of assistance to help continue to grow a vibrant, strong community from what was essentially a vacant no-man’s land.

Little by little, this group of dedicated community members and volunteers from elsewhere in Marquette County are working to provide a happy ending to this rags to riches story.

We applaud everyone, past, present and future, who are involved in this place-building exercise and we wish them well in their future endeavors.

With every success the Sawyer Community Alliance has, from something as simple as adequate street lighting to as complicated as blight elimination, the residents of that community can look upon their streets with pride.

They know that every good thing happening at Sawyer is because someone stepped up to the plate to make it happen.

And while Sawyer still has a long way to go, it’s residents should be proud of how far it has come.

We encourage anyone interested in becoming a part of this success story to stop by the Heritage Air Museum on the first of the month at 6 p.m. to attend a Sawyer Community Alliance meeting.