Orton Gets to the Heart of What Matters Most

We recently completed site visits to ten towns in seven states selected as finalists for the second phase of Orton’s $10M Heart & Soul Community Planning initiative. All the finalists did an extraordinary job giving us a feel for their communities and speaking to the opportunities and challenges ahead.

We asked residents to share what they consider to be the treasures of their towns—the core assets they simply couldn’t do without. As in often the case, we heard the same words used to describe different places. Residents in Red Lodge, MT (pop. 5,000) and Essex, VT (pop. 19,000) talked about the importance of “sense of community”. Both Eastport, an island community of about 1,300 people on the Maine-Canada border, and Cortez, a rural southwestern Colorado community of about 8,400 people, spoke to their “small town feel”.

These phrases are catchy, but you have to dig deeper to understand what people actually mean by them. For instance, does “small town feel” relate to the existence of locally owned businesses, the historic nature of a downtown, people knowing their neighbors, or some combination of the above? These distinctions are essential because, while communities face similar challenges—such as the need to reinvent local economies or address the rise in childhood poverty—their unique assets can effectively drive how they take action.

The Foundation’s values-based planning approach helps citizens articulate their community’s character so that planning decisions will enhance instead of erode it and, in turn, make the place stronger in the long run. One Hotchkiss, CO resident described this approach as tending the community “hearths” that warm us and keep us connected. For it’s when we are connected and able to work collaboratively that we make the most progress towards planning for a successful future, economically and otherwise.

In the coming months, we’ll be sharing what we learned in our last round of Heart & Soul demonstration towns through case studies and videos. Then in 2012, we’ll launch the next group of Heart & Soul projects. We look forward to sharing the stories of these places as they work to forge new relationships, clear old hurdles, and blaze the next trails on the planning frontier.