Alliance Partners with PHC & Erie Arts to Expand Community Grants

What is Community Heart & Soul™?

Community Heart & Soul™, originally developed by the Orton Family Foundation, is an innovative program that helps a community use humanities-based tools, such as stories and shared values, to cultivate a sense of belonging among residents and engage them in community planning – with the ultimate goal of strengthening the community’s social, cultural and economic vibrancy.

Key to the process is learning what matters most to the community by gathering stories, hopes, and ideas from residents of all generations, backgrounds, and sectors. This becomes the basis for building a community’s shared values, which informs the community’s unique action plan and makes the community more connected, resourceful, and resilient.

During this webinar, participants will:

• Learn about the four-phase Community Heart & Soul™ model.
• Learn how the humanities can be used to engage residents in visioning and planning for a community’s future.
• Hear from Pennsylvania Heart & Soul communities about how the model has been used to spark growth in their towns.

Who Should Attend:

The workshops and grant opportunity are open to organizations, municipalities, civic and economic development groups, downtown revitalization and preservation groups — or any resident or organization that wants to increase community engagement and cultivate a more robust community — within the following counties: Crawford, Erie, Warren, McKean, Potter, Tioga, Bradford, Wyoming, Lackawanna, Wayne, Pike, Venango, Mercer, and Lawrence.

Since 2015, PHC has been the only statewide organization partnering with the Orton Family Foundation to bring Community Heart & Soul™ to towns across Pennsylvania. To learn more about their work and the communities they have supported, visit their website.

Support for these webinars is provided by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, the Federal-State Partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities under a grant from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.