Our Mission, Our Vision

The Orton Family Foundation helps small cities and towns describe, apply and uphold their heart and soul so that they can adapt to change while maintaining or enhancing the things they value most.

Every town has authenticity, character, spirit—its own heart and soul. One-size-fits-all development means that many towns in America are losing what makes them unique, those special qualities and distinctive characteristics that keep a place from becoming Anywhere, USA.

Land use planning in America has yet to engage a broad base of local citizens to define and shape the future of their communities. Attempts to involve people in community planning often fall short because the process doesn’t convey how citizens’ day-to-day lives and livelihoods will be affected. Meanwhile, incremental change occurs, yet its cumulative effects are hard to imagine or predict. Growth and change creep up on a community, and the consequences are born by future generations.

The Orton Family Foundation works with people in small cities and towns to counter such consequences, first, by asking citizens what they value most about their communities and, second, by placing those shared values at the center of the planning process.

Watch a slideshow of the Foundation's Staff and Trustees Retreat.


We are committed to helping towns steer and embrace growth and change while enhancing the cultural, social, environmental and economic qualities that are the essence of what makes a place a valued home to its citizens. The Foundation promotes inclusive, proactive decision-making and land use planning by offering guidance, tools, research, capital and other support to citizens and leaders.

The essence of the Foundation’s Heart & Soul Community Planning process and its outcome can be understood through asking three questions of every citizen:

Why did you come here?

Why are you still here?

What will keep you here?

Heart & Soul Alternative

We believe that engaged citizens drive innovation, take action and create enduring successes—that they are the key to healthy, enduring communities. Through Heart & Soul Community Planning, the Orton Family Foundation encourages broad citizen engagement and offers ways for townspeople to contribute their energy, talents, stories and legacies to planning for their future.

Most people know or sense their community’s heart and soul. It’s why they live there and choose to stay, but the aspects of place that give a community its special character are often absent from the plans, ordinances, regulations and budgets that flow from decisions about change, growth and development.

The Foundation believes that if communities explore and identify their special economic, natural, physical and human attributes—their heart and soul elements—then these clearly articulated elements will guide and sustain them through the difficult processes of decision-making, implementation and monitoring, and will improve their chances of building successful and sustainable futures.

Whom We Serve

  • We direct our efforts toward people of all ages, backgrounds and incomes in small cities, towns and regions and the countryside that surrounds them.
  • We work with communities that want to understand and sustain their heart and soul.
  • We work with communities that invite us in and want to collaborate with us and other partners.
  • We work primarily in the Northeast and Rocky Mountain West.
  • Our work also influences the fields of land use planning and community development nationally.

Benefits We Aim to Achieve in Communities Where We Work

  1. The community is given and uses innovative processes and tools to help attain its values-based vision for a vibrant, enduring future.
  2. There is a measurable increase in the number and diversity of people participating in and influencing the community’s decision-making.
  3. The community explores and describes its heart and soul—those unique physical, economic, social and cultural features that make it unique.
  4. The community considers a variety of growth alternatives along with the positive and negative consequences of those alternatives on its values-based vision.
  5. The community adopts policies, regulations and processes that incorporate, enhance and honor its heart and soul.
  6. The citizens hold themselves accountable for sustaining their community’s heart and soul by ensuring that land use decisions and development activities support and further their expressed vision.

Each of those benefits is part of a continuing, inclusive community process. The benefits describe a community characterized by participation, understanding and collaboration around a commonly held sense of identity or character.  The result is strengthened social fabric and capacity, and the implementation of a plan that lets the community realize its citizens’ vision and promote their shared quality of life into the future.

Results We Aspire to Achieve in the Land Use and Community Planning Fields

  1. Communities, non-profits, citizens and planning practitioners learn about the Heart & Soul approach through the Foundation’s communication efforts.
  2. A movement emerges around values-based planning that: unites the diverse disciplines and efforts of this work, fostering connection and accelerating learning; defines the practices that comprise heart and soul community; identifies and applies ways to achieve and measure success; and promotes heart and soul values in the land use and community planning worlds.
  3. Communities successfully replicate heart and soul planning practices; over time, these practices become the standard to which communities aspire.

Spreading the Word

To achieve its Mission, the Orton Family Foundation partners with communities and organizations across the country to learn about and explore new models for citizen engagement, community visioning, implementation and stewardship. We share our experiences on our website, at COMMUNITYMATTERS® conferences and through publications.