- Well, I'm excited to be here,
and I'm excited to introduce our keynoter.
About a year and a half ago,
Gabrielle and I had a lengthy conversation.
We were connected by Greg Hutchins,
and we talked about the Heart & Soul
and the community engagement process.
And it occurred to me
that through that community engagement process
that it was a new mental model or paradigm shift
to engage a community without coming through
a certain window or lens.
Typically, our programs are around...
We bring the lens of health,
or we bring the lens of economics as we engage communities.
And so, again, I was really excited for the conversation.
It shaped the way I thought moving forward.
Now for the formal introduction part.
Gabrielle Ratte Smith,
Senior Associate for Strategic Partnerships.
Gabrielle comes to the Foundation
having served as a founding member
of the Heart & Soul project in Essex Junction, Vermont.
Being immersed in community engagement
and collaboration was a natural for Gabrielle,
who has spent the past several decades
doing just that in small towns and cities
in Vermont and Wisconsin.
After moving to Vermont in 2005,
Gabrielle worked as a prevention and wellness consultant
in the local school districts.
A highlight of her work was helping to initiate
a Farm to School program that provides fresh,
locally-grown food to the districts' 2,800 students.
In addition, she was appointed by the governor
to serve on the Vermont Tobacco Evaluation
and Review Board representing
the K-12 educational community.
Gabrielle established her coalition-building
and community engagement expertise
during her career in Wisconsin,
where she worked for state government
as the Associate Director of the Alliance
for Wisconsin Youth.
She coordinated and supported
more than 100 local member coalitions
to promote positive youth development
and prevent high risk behaviors.
Gabrielle co-founded Little Free Library of Essex
to promote literacy and connect neighbors
by building and installing small libraries
that hold 20-30 books
in yards and businesses throughout Essex.
She lives in Essex Junction, Vermont,
with her husband and twin son and daughter.
Welcome, Gabrielle.
(audience applauding)
- We haven't done a sound check.
Can you all hear me okay?
Good. Thanks.
All right, before I get started,
I'm going to pour myself some water.
Thank you, Dave, for that really kind introduction
and those words that are going to really frame
your conference experience
over these next few days together.
So...
...journeys and destinations.
I'm here to talk to you this morning
about journeys and destinations
and about the journey that you're embarking on together
here in Madison.
Our destination this morning
is a place where each of you leaves feeling inspired
and energized, ready to learn and talk with each other,
to listen and reflect so that you get the most
out of this time together over these next two days.
This is a rare opportunity, every five years I hear,
to come together as your whole
Cooperative Extension community.
So on this part of the journey this morning,
for the next 40 minutes or so, think of me as your bus driver.
I know, I didn't dress the part.
I dressed more the keynote speaker part.
But think of me as you bus driver.
And you're all going to come on my bus,
and we are going to visit three communities.
And you'll hear about our work at the Orton Family Foundation,
our community Heart & Soul process, through those stories.
You'll hear how Heart & Soul transforms
small towns and cities into better versions of themselves,
of who they already are,
honoring the uniqueness of each place.
Guided by what residents tell us matters most.
You'll hear how communities do this work
and how that leads to engagement,
to communities taking ownership and initiative
to bring what matters most to life in their town, right?
Doing that themselves and believing in what's possible
for themselves and for their neighbors in their community.
I'm here to get you thinking, on a bus,
about whys and what-ifs,
about possibility and potential,
and about the power,
the power that you all have, that each one of us has. (mic feedback)
Sorry, a little feedback there.
That each of us has to make a difference,
to take action, and to help others in your work
realize that power that they have,
and that help them exercise that in their communities,
in their workplaces, on their farms, and with their family.
So once you get off my bus in about 40 minutes or so,
you're going to be the driver
of your own conference experience.
You'll decide which sessions you go to,
what you do with your free time,
who you reach out to, what conversations you'll have,
what risks you'll take, and what opportunities you'll seize.
I invite you now, as you settle in on my bus,
to turn off your electronic devices,
put them on vibrate if you need
to have them available to you,
close your tablets up and put those laptops away.
I would like you to be able to look out
the window of my bus.
We're going to visit three really special,
beautiful communities.
And I'd like you to be able to really
see the places that we're visiting.
And if you want to take notes or you're struck by something,
pull out a piece of paper and a pencil.
Start your own scrapbook of this journey together
over these next couple days.
So, first, a little bit about the journey
that brought me here, that brought me home.
Madison to me is home. I lived here for 15 years.
I grew up in upstate New York,
and I moved here to Wisconsin... (mic feedback)
Still feedbacky?
I moved here when I was 17 years old.
I lived in Beloit, and I went to school there,
and then I moved to Madison where I met my husband
and I settled into state service, as you heard.
I even spent a couple of years at UW Madison working for...
What was it?
The university health service there.
And then my journey took me away from here,
and we moved, as you heard, out to Vermont,
to northwestern Vermont just outside Burlington.
So we're going to be heading,
we're going to be heading our bus to Essex, Vermont.
Think of it, my twins are now 14,
but when they were little they used to watch The Magic School Bus.
Anybody know that show? Yeah.
So my bus is like The Magic School Bus.
It flies.
So we're flying to Essex, Vermont, real quick this morning,
and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about,
I think Community Heart & Soul is probably best to begin,
at least to understand what it is, through stories.
So I'm going to tell you through this story...
There we are.
So, we're going to head to Essex, part of it.
So Essex... my husband and I moved there with our kids.
They were four.
And we found a house, as most young families do,
and settled in and began to learn about our new place.
It was beautiful, 36 square miles.
Vermont is, if you've not been there,
as lovely as it sounds and as you've heard.
And there's a rural part of Essex, as you can see here.
Those are the foothills of the Green Mountains in the distance.
In fact, we can see both the Adirondacks
across Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains from Essex.
And there's a spider web of dirt roads.
In fact, 20% of the roads in Vermont are still dirt roads.
And then it begins, you come into the center.
There's suburban developments
that popped up in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
And then you come into the heart
of the Village of Essex Junction,
which, as we learned, is a separate municipality
that overlaps with the Town of Essex Junction.
Now, me, being from upstate New York,
and my husband, being from Edgerton here in Wisconsin,
had never heard of this concept.
It's not unusual in New England.
And we began to learn about this.
The first clue that we got...
This is Essex Junction.
We live not too far from here.
We got two tax bills.
I was very confused by this. I called.
I think there's a problem. There's a mistake.
Why am I getting two tax bills?
And, actually, the answer was not as straightforward
as I would have liked.
It took us quite a while. It was very confusing.
I got a lot of misinformation.
The Town of Essex has been around since the mid-1700s
and the village since the late 1800s,
and that's a whole other story why that is
that I'm not going to get into today.
What I think is important that you begin to think about
why that might be problematic is that,
there are people who are coming into that community
who don't have all that history,
and there are people who have all that history
that have a lot of thoughts about that.
And so you get all this happening in that town,
and they were experiencing divides.
And as newcomers, we had lots of questions.
Right? Where will our kids go to school?
Which parks and rec department
are we supposed to sign our kids up for?
What Little League did they go to?
And even, because there's so many duplicate services,
which library do I sign up to?
Am I supposed to go to the Town of Essex library
or the Village of Essex library?
Or do I get to go to both? Am I paying for both? How does this work?
I'm so confused. Very confused.
So we kind of muddled our way through,
and we were witnessing, my husband and I,
how this was causing our community
to make some decisions
that were really not in their best interest.
The village and town had no common cause,
issues around mistrust and misinformation,
miscommunication, and a lack of really mutual respect
between some residents and the municipal elected
and appointed officials in both places.
I was living in Essex for around five years
when I came across the Orton Family Foundation's work
and Community Heart & Soul, and I was really intrigued.
I...
Both personally and professionally.
So professionally I thought,
I've been doing this work for a long time working in communities,
trying to help them be thriving, healthy places.
And the more I read, the more I thought,
they've got something and I'm equally...
I found myself equally excited and skeptical.
Equally excited and skeptical professionally.
Personally, I thought,
what if this is the way forward for Essex?
They have been so stuck.
For decades they were stuck.
Since the '50s.
I was hearing story after story
about how every 10 years these issues would percolate
and then they'd vote on something,
usually a merger vote,
and then that would just cause further division.
So I thought, what if this was a different path forward?
I approached our municipal managers,
and I said I'm interested, I don't know if you might be interested
but Orton has an opportunity to field test this process
and refine this process with small towns and cities
in a really collaborative partnership way.
I think of it as playing the sandbox together.
We're trying to figure out how this process
can really be its best.
And he said, well, it turns out
a group of folks just met last week.
So I approached this group and I joined them
and I quickly learned that we were in phase one.
So this is an overview of the Heart & Soul process,
and we're offering a workshop this afternoon
that will get in much more detail of it.
But this gives you a nice overview.
There are four phases.
So, in the first phase, we lay the groundwork and we get organized.
So that's what we were doing, our group.
There were about 18 of us.
And then we began to really get to know
our community and create a work plan.
And when we got the grant from the foundation
and then also monies from our municipal leaders
and other sources,
we began to really dig into the process
and take that first step,
which is understanding who lives in Essex.
We had a lot of people on that initial team who said,
"Well, we know who lives in Essex."
We've got demographic information, we collected that.
But what we really needed to do,
and did do with the help of the foundation,
was to do a really extensive
community network mapping exercise
that they called the community network analysis.
And we really dug in deep and asked a lot of questions
and asked more questions and expanded our map.
We looked at people, places, and events.
We could really see how people are connected.
Who connects which groups to who?
How do they get information?
How do they give information?
Asking all those questions.
I got pretty hooked, I'll tell ya.
In fact, my husband called it my second job.
I volunteered an average of about 10 hours a week.
And it did that probably,
again going back to that personal and professional.
Professionally, I thought, how lucky am I?
I get to be on the other side of the table
from what I've been doing.
I used to be the one going into communities
and providing support and tools and resources.
I'm on the other side,
and I'm the resident saying show me what you got.
I want to see if this can help my town.
And then, personally, same thing.
I was on the other side thinking,
can this really be, after decades,
could this be a way forward for us?
So I experienced firsthand what's possible
when you have a great road map
and then the tools and resources
that come from the foundation for this process
to help you guide along the way
and the process that we designed in the community.
This is a flexible framework.
This shows you the road map,
but like you have when you're...
Nowadays we have our GPS to give you alternatives.
Sometimes it'll tell you the fastest route;
sometimes it'll give you alternatives routes,
and you decide which way you go to get to where you're going.
So, after we had really done a lot of work
to identify who lived in our town,
then we began to design a lot of different ways
to reach out to people.
And this is the part...
I'll tell you, this is the most fun part,
I think for most of us, and the hardest part.
A friend of mine said,
"Heart & Soul is a bit like Listerine.
"You know it's working when you feel the burn."
This part is work, but it's so fun
because you're really experimenting,
and you're experimenting with other people with you
and playing in that sandbox
and then you have this road map to guide you.
So we went out, and I can't even think
of how many different ways to engage
so many different people in our town,
from sort of the usual suspects
to people that normally
were not invited into community life.
Some of you may know John McKnight and his work
at Asset-Based Community Development.
It's about bringing people on the fringe into the center.
I want to welcome everyone
into the center in our community life
because everyone has something to offer.
We had over a thousand people
participate in one or more of those activities.
Some of them were light touch things
where they would maybe come to a photo booth.
I saw a photo booth outside, which is great.
We might ask them a question, they'd write their answer and take their picture,
and we'd share that on Facebook and social media.
To over 250 people who participated
in a neighborhood conversation
that was guided by an expert from Everyday Democracy.
So it was a very, very powerful phase for us in Essex
and really critical in our next step, which was phase three.
And I just want to show you some short, quick examples of...
Oh, hang on a second here.
I'm skipping ahead.
So, in this phase, in collecting stories in such,
I would say, really creative and innovative ways
that welcomed people in with beautifully simple questions.
I love the questions we ask in Heart & Soul, like:
If you were to leave Essex and come back in 20 years,
what might be a place or a building
that you'd want to see there still?
Why did you choose to live in Essex?
Stay in Essex? Move back to Essex?
What's your favorite place to go with your family
on a Saturday in nature or in town?
And we had so... I love the look on people's faces
when they'd pause for a second and say,
"Huh, no one's ever asked me what I love about Essex
"before or why I moved here,
"what my kids love, what gets them excited."
We had children.
We asked children from elementary school
to high school and beyond,
what do you love about this town?
You get very interesting answers
from elementary school kids when you ask them:
What's a business you'd like to see in downtown Essex?
We had some which were very doable
and others possibly, like a water park, not so much.
So we took all that information and it gives us data.
It gives us hard data.
We had 34...
For those of you who like hard data.
34,000 pieces of data that were in an Excel spreadsheet,
and thankfully, we had a volunteer
who was an expert in data collection and analysis.
We love this quote from Brene Brown.
You may have seen it before and heard it before.
She's with the University of Houston.
"Maybe stories are just data with a soul."
Data with a soul.
I didn't know what that meant
until I went through the Heart & Soul process.
Stories are data with a soul.
I really believe it now that I've done it.
It's a way to really dig in deep to why for people.
What matters to me?
And rather than come at it from that point or,
as Rick noted, from a certain perspective first.
What do you care about for economic development?
What do you care about for farms in your community?
What do you care about for, you know, food systems?
Some people will look at you like...
I don't have an opinion about that yet.
They will though.
Once they go through the process,
they have an opinion about most of it.
So, we find out all of those things about people.
And that is such powerful data.
And in gathering it,
we really learned a lot about each other,
and we built skills and capacities along the way
to be in conversation with each other,
to be respectful with each other, to learn about each other.
So we are ready for phase three,
which is making decisions.
Here are some scenes around my community.
You get a little sense.
We went out to county fairs and events
and all over the place.
We went into the VFW and the grange
and schools and rotary clubs.
Soccer fields.
I've learned a lot about my community in those two years.
Way more than I had in the previous five.
So in phase three, we're looking at making decisions.
This is a really critical phase.
Heart & Soul is not just about
discovering what matters most to you.
It's the community telling you what does that look like
and how does that help us make decisions.
It's resident-based input into decision-making
in the community.
So we had priorities in six areas in Essex:
local economy, health and recreation, community connections,
education, thoughtful growth, and safety.
And, while this is lovely for a visual,
in terms of making decisions,
that's not going to be terribly helpful information.
We dug in really deep
and came up with some very clear statements
about what that looked like for the people of Essex.
We vetted it with them, asking them are we hearing you well,
reflecting it back, and had that clarity.
We heard from over 20 different diverse groups in our town,
and as I noticed, as I mentioned earlier,
over a thousand people, and then they helped to prioritize
those actions based on feasibility and impact.
So really giving, again, more clarity to decision makers
about what matters most to us.
What do we want you to address first?
What's really important to us?
And in phase four, we take action.
And so we look at really cultivating Heart & Soul,
and there are many ways
to make that visible in your community.
In our case, and in many of our towns,
it's reflected in the master plan or comprehensive plan
that people use to make decisions,
that leadership makes decisions with.
But, in Essex, I think the most powerful part for us was
how it moved us beyond
where we were to where we could be,
to what was possible.
As our third party evaluator
from Wake Forest University described it:
"Heart & Soul is a positive disruptive force
"for small towns and cities."
A positive disruptive force.
That was definitely true in Essex.
It disrupted us from our old way
of talking with each other and making decisions.
We disrupted old patterns and beliefs,
and we're now forging ahead as a more unified community.
We're working together.
We're involving everyone, and we're making better decisions.
I'm going to give you two quick examples of that.
Shortly after I moved to Essex,
I started to go to something called town meeting.
I don't know if any of you have heard of this,
but in many places in New England
they still have direct democracy for certain decisions,
most notably the budget, municipal budget.
So the only way to vote on a municipal budget,
to have any voice,
is to show up at a certain time and place.
You have to be there in person. There's not absentee ballot. There's no voting booth.
You have to be there in person with all your neighbors.
It looks a little bit like this room, actually.
A little bit smaller in some towns, depending on how big they are.
In Essex, there's usually about 350 people who show up,
and they get to decide.
They cast the vote about whether the budget's up or down.
If it's down, they're going to do it all over again,
and they come back and would do another town meeting.
I went to a couple of them. I was a government major in college.
I thought, "This is so great.
"I'm going to get to experience great democracy in action.
"I'm so excited."
Show up at town meeting and I did not like it at all.
I didn't like it at all.
I was intimidated, didn't understand what was going on.
There was a moderator and Robert's Rules,
and there were the Mikes.
Some people knew what they were doing.
They were knitting.
They were voicing up their opinion when they have one,
and I found myself getting more confused
and actually times where I was really intimidated.
I'm not easily intimidated,
but I did not like being in an atmosphere
where people were yelling at each other.
Saying unkind things in public about each other.
So I stopped going.
I stopped casting my vote.
If you don't go, you don't vote.
And through Heart & Soul I went back.
And the first year I didn't really notice
much changes in 2014.
Town meeting is usually in March,
the first Tuesday in March.
I went this year with my husband.
I thought, I'm going to go again.
And the budget was a really far-thinking one
that had been greatly impacted
by our Community Heart & Soul process
based on all of those values that you saw there,
those things that matter most to us.
A select board, kind of like our city council,
went through a process to really hear from everybody.
What do you want for this budget, right?
Is this what that looks like to you?
They went out to 12, they'll tell you, 12 different places,
soccer fields, to the schools, to the senior center,
to the rotary and Kiwanis club, and they talked to people,
and then they modified the budget.
And it was a bold budget.
It was going to really hit at some of these core issues,
like the third rail, that nobody wanted to talk about.
And I thought for sure this budget is going down.
There is no way this community is going to...
Beautiful transparency. So clear.
You could see what they were doing.
I thought, they're never going to go for this.
It wouldn't have made it this far five years ago.
And eight people lined up at the mikes,
just like you see back that you have in these aisles.
And I thought, here we go.
Here we go. Just what I don't like.
All of the yelling is going to start.
And eight people all had concerns about the budget,
and they were telling them why they were going to vote no.
And every last one of them did it respectfully,
cited reasons why they weren't going to vote
that were constructive.
"Next year I might vote an up vote
"if you were to make some of these changes."
And some of them even thanked them
for such a well thought out budget proposal.
They sat down, and then it was time for us all to vote.
It passed overwhelmingly.
Some people were voting to increase their own taxes
because they really believed that this was part of our path
to a stronger Essex and a more thriving community.
There were not angry letters to the editor after the meeting.
People really felt like we had made a decision
that was best for us, that was in our own common good.
And just two weeks ago,
we had a vote to unify our school districts.
Remember I said I didn't know where to send my kids to school?
There are three school districts in my town.
And we voted to...
The vote was to unify them.
And just after I moved to Essex in 2006
there was a vote, and it was soundly defeated.
I mean, they wanted nothing to do with each other.
It was overwhelmingly passed by more than a 10 to one margin,
the school budget, the school unification.
So things are changing.
I hear less them and more us.
I hear less... people used to ask me,
"Do you live in the town or the village?"
And I'd say, "I'm pretty sure I live in both, right?
"Don't I have the tax bill to prove it?"
And they'd say, "No, no, no, if you live in the village, you live in the village;
"and if you live in the town outside the village, you live in the town."
We're using us more,
and we're really living one of our Heart & Soul mottos:
Together we are greater than the sum or our parts.
Together we're greater than the sum of our parts.
We learned and we all celebrated
that we need each other.
Doesn't that mean we're all needed?
Right?
We need each other, and we're all needed.
Isn't that the essence of a strong, thriving community?
A place where everyone has recognized
that in themselves and in their neighbors.
We all have something to offer.
We're all really needed in that place
that's thriving and a healthy place to live.
To me that's just such a sign of respect
from one human being to another,
to recognize that we each had innate power.
We have gifts and talents, our time, our history,
our perspective, our culture,
to contribute to our communities.
Though we've completed those four phases
in our community,
we've reached a destination point, the work continues.
As you can see with that final arrow.
That's very intentional design. It just keeps going.
This is not a...
This community work is not one that has a finite end.
Think of it like parenting.
When are you done? You're not.
You're not done in community work.
We keep going.
As we say now in Essex:
The beat of Heart & Soul goes on.
The beat goes on.
Did what we experience and accomplish in Essex
strike a chord with what you do in your work?
I see lots of overlap,
both from my story in Essex
and what's happening in all of our
Heart & Soul communities across the country.
Cooperative Extension and the Orton Family Foundation
share common mission and principles and values.
At Orton, we focus on empowering communities,
residents in communities to get involved
in shaping the future of their place.
We do that through improved local decision-making,
by creating a shared sense of belonging and place
and ultimately strengthening the social, economic,
and cultural vibrancy of each community.
And we have three principles at the Orton Family Foundation
that guide us in our work
and are at the heart of the Community Heart & Soul model:
Involve everyone, focus on what matters most,
and play the long game.
Those our our three principles.
Elegantly simple, I think, and so true in our work.
So at Cooperative Extension,
your mission is to meet the educational needs
of the people of Wisconsin, wherever they live and work.
You're expanding the walls of the colleges and universities.
You're bringing that out to people
wherever they may be in this state.
All four corners, all 72 counties.
And to engage them in transforming lives
and communities.
To provide education and opportunities
and resources for them to do that.
Your core values are community and discovery,
inclusiveness, relationships, and respect.
I see a lot of overlap between your core values
and our core principles.
So we're going to visit two more places on our bus, as we're leaving Essex now.
We're going to say goodbye to Essex.
And as you listen to those stories,
I'd like you to imagine a small town or city.
At Orton we define that as being smaller than 50,000.
So you may think of that as a neighborhood,
if you're in a much larger city.
Hold that-- I want you to think of this place
that might be divided by an issue or by history,
as we were in Essex,
or a town that's struggling with a sense of loss.
Loss of jobs, of economic development,
strong tax base to help them pay
for all those municipals services
and towns are struggling with that,
loss of young people, of farms,
of businesses, of a historic and treasured downtown
that's kind of emptying out.
Whatever is keeping that town stuck
in what's lacking rather than what's possible.
So I want you to think about that place.
I'm going to give you just a couple seconds.
And I want you to hold that place in your head
and in your heart as you listen to my stories.
Because when you're thinking about that town
in a place where things are lacking
rather than what's possible
if they get engaged around what matters most,
we witness people opening their eyes and their hearts
and their hands to what's possible,
to potential, to positivity, and to hope.
So, for the next few minutes,
we are going to go on our magic school bus
to Biddeford, Maine, on the southern coast of Maine.
This is a picture of Biddeford from the turn of the century.
Biddeford is a city much smaller geographically than Essex.
About the same size population-wise with 20,000 people.
And Biddeford is a mill town.
It's a textile mill town, or it was for well over a century and a half
from the early 1800s through the 1900s.
And it was really prosperous.
And it defined itself by those mills.
That's who they were. Those mills drove everything.
Great jobs.
They could support families on them
and support local businesses and a thriving community life.
And it was a really bustling place
with a proud tradition
until electricity became more widespread
in the United States in the mid-1900s
and New England no longer had the monopoly on hydropower,
which is what ran those mills.
And production shifted for textiles closer to the south
were the cotton was,
and the mills died off across New England.
So communities like Biddeford,
they struggled with job loss and a tax base
and, perhaps most importantly,
their sense of identity was emptying out too.
And by the 1980s, the people of Biddeford were,
I think I could safely say they felt desperate,
and they'll tell you that.
They were desperate for jobs,
they were desperate for tax revenue,
they were desperate for vibrancy in their town.
It was a really rough road to travel for all that time,
to see decade after decade
these mills closing down
that employed thousands of people.
1.6 million square feet in those mills.
And you can see the red buildings there and the clock tower.
Those are the old mills.
And so Biddeford, imagine being in this place as a town.
You may know, work, or live in a town like this.
In the mid-1980s an opportunity came their way.
Somebody wanted to invest in Biddeford.
The Maine Energy Recovery Corporation.
I think that sounds pretty good. Energy recovery.
Maybe that's like green jobs.
Maybe that's like a new,
exciting future for us in Biddeford.
Well, it became clear,
some of you may be able to shout out the answer,
but what is energy recovery?
In this case, it was a euphemism for trash incinerator.
It was a trash burner. So, okay.
We're pretty desperate. How many jobs do we get?
About a hundred? A new tax base?
All right, we'll think about it. Trash burner.
Let's think about that. Well, it gets worse.
Not just a trash burner.
It was going to be sited downtown.
Check it out. Here's a picture of it.
Downtown. Right next to the mills.
Kind of the ultimate humiliation.
Right next to those mills that they love so much.
Well, it gets worse.
They weren't just burning Biddeford's trash.
No.
They were burning other people's trash too.
So how did it get there?
You can see it right there, there's an 18-wheeler.
They trucked it in.
Into downtown Biddeford.
24/7 there were trucks coming in delivering trash and burning it.
It smelled.
Biddeford's new identity among some was trash town,
stink town.
That was their new identity for almost 25 years.
They said yes to that.
It's a hard thing to get rid of once you build it.
87 of their neighbors were employed.
It was the largest taxpayer.
So, when they got the opportunity in 2009
for Community Heart & Soul,
they started a couple years before Essex did,
and they saw the opportunity and they took it.
And they went through their own process.
It was their own unique path.
They followed those four phases.
It looks really different than what we did in Essex.
You can still see it
because we're all following the same road map.
And they went about collecting that information
in their own unique ideas and strategies.
One that I just love is called Heart Spots.
And in Biddeford they had hearts they would put on the buildings
and they had a number,
and then people could call in and tell their story.
How's that for a nice, anonymous,
safe way to share your story about a place in your community.
Some of them were in nature; some of them were in buildings.
And people would just call and tell a story
about what that place meant to them, what memory.
Share a memory they had.
And they worked to talk with each other,
to gather everyone, youth,
every part of their community together, elders.
Such a diverse network of people coming together.
And by 2012, the community had made it clear.
And this is a picture from just about that time,
and you can still see the incinerator
way in the background there.
So you can see that really is right downtown,
that incinerator.
And they had articulated what matters most to Biddeford
and what they wanted for their future.
That incinerator wasn't part of it.
They had tried in the previous years to get rid of it,
but there was just no will,
no political will to make that happen.
City council wouldn't take it on,
and people didn't want to vote for anything
that would get rid of 87 jobs in a town that's struggling.
But through Heart & Soul
they had the political will to do that.
And this is where the story...
Remember I said it gets worse and worse?
Now it gets better and better.
So now this community decided through Heart & Soul
that that had to go, and they also decided,
they also knew that they wanted
to decide their own future.
They didn't want to sell it to somebody else to develop it.
They wanted to buy it.
$6.7 million of local money
went in to buy that and raise it.
Then they got state and federal dollars
to do brownfield development,
and we have that land so they could build on it again.
And that...
That when it's gone,
opened up so much opportunity for the community.
Development started to happen,
and it started to happen fast.
So think about this timeline.
They started their Heart & Soul process in 2009,
they knew what they wanted by 2011...
So 18-24 months. It's a big commitment.
And then they voted in 2012 to get rid of it,
and here we are today, the end of 2015.
So the incinerator is gone.
In its place, believe it or not, there's a boutique hotel
because there's so many new people coming into Biddeford
they needed a hotel to accommodate business travelers
and tourists who were coming to Biddeford.
In the mills, they have rehabbed
quite a bit of that space now.
At the start of 2009 it was 51% empty.
Now it's only 27% vacant.
That means 400,000 square feet of businesses.
And note that I say businesses
because Biddeford knew they wanted
a diverse economic base.
They didn't want to put all their eggs in one basket
like they did with the Energy Recovery Corporation.
And now there's such vibrancy in these mills.
People are moving up from Brooklyn, New York,
to start textile design.
There's a designer,
a couple of designer companies have come up,
and small businesses.
And there's new vibrancy in the community
as people are now having more employment,
and there's so much more happening downtown
because they know that that's something
that's of importance to them.
Having a vibrant downtown that was walkable and livable
was really important to Biddeford.
They articulated that in their Heart & Soul statements.
And knowing that,
they decided that they wanted to take a positive,
a proactive step to help that come to be real for them.
And they're building a $15 million
affordable housing complex downtown.
That's for anyone who wants to be in that,
living and work downtown.
Young professionals, seniors,
young couples who just want to get a foot in the door
so that people who want to live where they work and play
have a place to live that's affordable.
So you can see this is actually, this is like a pocket park now.
It's really vibrant.
They have a lot of activities there on the weekend.
And the people of Biddeford now have moved passed this.
As one developer said,
"If that incinerator was still in Biddeford, I wouldn't be."
I wouldn't be here.
Biddeford has truly transformed itself
into a better version of itself.
Their own unique community.
Their own unique fabric.
They've discovered that they need each other
and that they're all needed.
Heart & Soul provided the road map
so that they could lead themselves
beyond that old slogan of trash town,
and they just released their new official slogan last month:
Biddeford leading the way.
Over $70 million of new investment
has come into Biddeford since that trash incinerator left
in already completed or approved projects.
I'd like you to just take a minute to reflect.
These are two really, I hope,
they are for me, powerful stories.
So, I'd like you to think about
that community I asked you to hold in your head
and your heart a little bit ago
before we arrived in Biddeford.
And as we're traveling to our next location on the bus,
take this opportunity to think of that place again,
and think about how it might be transformed
if it went through a process like this one.
How might your work change
if you were working with communities through that process?
And if they knew what they wanted
and they were already engaged and inspired
and passionate to make it happen,
they had articulated actions for that vision,
for that future that they want for themselves,
how might it affect the way that you support communities?
How might it change those places
into being better versions of themselves?
So we're going to leave the coast of Maine now,
and we're going to travel across the Midwest
and across the Rocky Mountains
to a beautiful community called Polson.
Polson, Montana.
And Polson is a town of about 5,000 people.
And it is located at the tip
of the southern tip of Flathead Lake,
which is the largest lake in the west,
and is surrounded entirely by a Native American reservation
of the Salish and Kootenai tribes and Pend d'Oreille tribe.
It's a really vibrant place,
and the people who live there will tell you that
it's rich in opportunity and the strength of its people,
but they'll also tell you it's not an easy life
for the people who live there year round.
They have a huge tourist population because of the lake.
I like to think of many Wisconsin communities.
The summer is a bustling place.
Second homes, people coming in, motorboats on that lake.
It's a happening place.
It almost doubles in population every summer
to 10,000 people instead of five.
But we all know what happens come September.
They all leave.
And economic disparity is a reality
for those year round residents.
The household income is about $20,000 a year
less than the national median.
And so to tell a Polson story, it'd be a little more condensed,
and just to let you know that there were people
who really believed that they could move beyond that
and move the needle toward a more prosperous community.
So they had their city councilors and leaders,
the local community foundation, tribal leaders,
residents, business leaders, all came together.
And while we were doing our work in Essex,
they were doing their work in Polson,
and we went through the process together.
And in 2011 they began the process,
and by 2014, early 2014,
they had identified eight areas that mattered most to them.
This is just a little word cloud,
but they have some really beautiful,
clear statements about what matters most to them.
Like all of our Heart & Soul towns,
and, in fact, as Dean Klemme mentioned earlier, right,
what is that Venn diagram of yours look like
with those educational priorities?
Touching on those four areas?
Every town, no matter how you sort them,
every town has statements that touch
on all of those four areas.
Towns make their way to that realization
of all of these things make up our thriving community.
I may not have felt connected to the farms and producers,
I may not have cared about historic preservation downtown
or economic development or all the myriad of things
that we learn through the process
we do care about because they're part of our towns.
That's part of our community life.
Those are our neighbors I talk to and listen to
and heard their stories.
And we begin to care, and we really come to a place
where we identify what matters most.
And so in Polson they had their values.
We don't have time to tour all around Polson in our bus,
so I'm just going to take you to one place in particular
and tell you that story.
This is the Polson...
It's called their food hub
and community center and kids hub.
And I don't know if you can see it well in the picture,
but let's see if you can.
So there it says, "Together We All Thrive; Activity Center."
Many of the people from the Salish and Kootenai tribes
help to contribute to the space,
decorating, and, of course,
their own values which were incorporated with people
who lived in Polson coming to life in this activity center.
And a man named Jason
is the founder of this food hub and the kids center.
And if you go onto our website at Orton.org,
you can see a great short video,
like maybe three minutes long.
We'll also be showing it this afternoon our workshop,
And Jason describes so beautifully and eloquently
how this came to be, this place.
And he says, "The food hub idea came out
"of the Heart & Soul process.
"Over a hundred different producers
"from area farms and land
"bring their product to market at the co-op.
"Many of the people volunteering in the Heart & Soul program,
"it was their passion to do something more, to be involved.
"So the hub is a place of activity and events
"and business development.
"We have the kids co-op,
"and it's all about kids coming together."
There you can see, there's their kids co-op.
"And us empowering the youth to get involved
"in new businesses and supporting them
"by educating them with best practices
"and then purchasing what they provide.
"Heart & Soul helped us think about
"how we could work together to accomplish great things
"for our shared community.
"It's taken time and a shift in thinking,
"but things in Polson are changing for the better."
So, our time is coming to an end.
We're coming back to Wisconsin.
I believe this is Barneveld.
I kind of wanted to ground you back home.
Here we are.
In such a beautiful state,
I didn't really know what vista to pick,
so I grabbed onto this one.
And I just wanted to leave you with some closing thoughts.
We've been talking about journeys and destinations,
and you've heard about different road map,
the road map to get you to thriving communities
in three different places.
Any extensive, well-planned,
meaningful journey of discovery and transformation
is part design and part surprise.
Part design and part surprise.
Part of kind of being prepared for unexpected lessons,
opportunities, and learning that happen on a long journey.
The destination you plan for is your anchor.
It's where you want to go
and you want to go there for important reasons.
So you're planning for that destination.
What I learned firsthand in Heart & Soul is
we kept our eye on that prize,
but we're also prepared and looking for the surprises
because they were everywhere.
They just kept popping up because people were so engaged
and were just making things happen
all around us in our community.
So, journeys and destinations...
Well, destination in Heart & Soul is a common,
positive, clear vision for the future
that residents have decided on
and identified actions to realize that future.
The journey is what helps us build on
and strengthen the communities existing assets.
It results in increased leadership and volunteerism
and civic action and people coming together
because through the process,
through the conversations, through the story sharing,
through all the activities that we did together
we connected with each other.
It was no longer us and them.
I knew people in my community.
They got to know each other,
and we heard each other's stories.
It's a journey of inclusion, of adding new voices,
of bringing them in from the fringe,
as John McKnight would say.
The road map helps to make sure that the work isn't random,
that all of your activities
are leading towards that common destination.
It fits within a broad design that's moving your community
along the path that you've chosen.
Cooperative Extension in this state
is a tremendous resource and such value, each one of you.
And I hope to see some of you this afternoon at our workshop,
and I'm so grateful for this time together.
It's been really an honor.
It's been an honor to speak with you this morning.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)