Our growing collective of volunteers is evolving our capacity to serve Harrisburg and the greater region in a way that is aligned with the heart of Harrisburg through the Story of Place process. The Harrisburg Story of PlaceTM will help us regenerate our connection to place, drive community-led development efforts, and ultimately evoke a vibrant and positive perception and identity of Harrisburg. At the end of 2020, we started formulating design principles to serve as guides of action. We’re ready to employ these in our projects and programs moving forward but first, we want to take a deeper dive into what it means to be a stakeholder in Harrisburg’s future.
Through this process, we have explored the ecological and social dynamics of Harrisburg using research, interviews, and observations. Our eyes have been opened to the potential of the beautiful connections and infrastructure Harrisburg has to offer and how it serves to enrich our lives culturally and physically. Harrisburg is a place of opportunity with the potential to bridge multiple divides. When we look at Harrisburg as a whole, from a place of potential, the patterns that emerged include:
- Core Process: Harrisburg organizes and renews itself by Crossing Divides.
- Core Purpose: Harrisburg is consistently Enriching itself through Flowing Layers of culture, nutrients, ecological and social systems.
- Core Value: As a deeply connected place, Harrisburg serves the community and greater region through Enabling Opportunities.
At this workshop, we’ll briefly review these patterns as well as the principles that emerged from the last workshop. A fundamental premise of the Story of Place is that successful projects and programs will align with the essence of the place within which they are nested. As stakeholders, we depend upon Harrisburg’s potential to thrive, so how do we work in a way that creates a web of relationships that sustains the whole?