All Hands on Deck for Rural Vitality
Our Community Heart & Soul Initiative
This story is part of our Transforming Together series, which highlights 20 key moments in our Foundation’s first 20 years. Read more stories in the series.
A few years ago, residents of Monticello voted to approve a school bond issue that bolstered funding for education in this rural Eastern Iowa town of 3,800 people. The measure was significant, and leaders credit the town’s involvement with Community Heart & Soul© for making it possible.
The Community Foundation brought Heart & Soul to Iowa in 2014 with a $160,000 grant from the Orton Family Foundation, which established the program and worked to expand it to rural regions across the country. The goal has been to help small communities shape their futures by reconnecting people with what they love most about their town. Those personal and emotional connections are then translated to a blueprint that serves as the foundation for future community decisions.
“More than 200,000 live in the seven-county Dubuque region, many of them in communities of fewer than 2,000 residents,” says Jason Neises, community development coordinator at the Community Foundation, who facilitates the Heart & Soul initiative. “These small towns are key to creating a strong, interconnected region of high-performing, self-determined communities.”
Since 2014, the Community Foundation has worked with residents of six Iowa communities —Bellevue, Cascade, Madison County, Monticello, Muscatine and Postville — to implement the Heart & Soul process locally. The Foundation also helped implement the process in three nearby Illinois communities: Cambridge and Mercer County.
The process has led to implementation of quality-of-life measures, such as the aforementioned bond issue in Monticello. Through Heart & Soul, Monticello residents identified education as a town priority, which helped quantify the need for the bond issue and lead to its success.
"I already knew that there was a lot of community pride,” says Monticello Heart & Soul core team member Aimee Hospodarsky. “What Community Heart & Soul did was to kind of quantify that and narrow down what exactly is it that makes people proud of our community.”