Harness the Wealth!
There is a growing recognition in Maine that the best approaches to community building are holistic, interdisciplinary, integrated, and locally-controlled. Harness the Wealth builds on that momentum to improve the quality of Maine’s places and communities.
It’s a Program
Harness the Wealth!, MRP’s outreach program, was designed with this in mind. HTW creates intensive, long-term partnerships with individual communities, creating tailored work plans which harness state-wide resources to build long-term, sustainable capacity.
Harness the Wealth demonstrates what can be accomplished when grassroots community building efforts are actively connected to and supported by a burgeoning state-wide network of resources and expertise. Our goal is to provide local leaders with the resources they need to build strategic and sustainable capacity for their communities to determine their own future.
In 2006, MRP entered into multi-year partnerships with the Strong Selectmen and the Washington County Commissioners. Since then, MRP has been working to help these communities be responsive to the needs of all their members — and to develop the leadership capacity to find solutions to these challenges. Ultimately, we are helping these two communities to develop the long-term organizational capacity needed to continue their necessary work without the day-to-day support of MRP staff.
The objective is to create a community building process which marries the best aspects of bottom-up and top-down approaches: an effort which is locally-owned while being informed, as needed, by the best current thinking and supported by the most appropriate resources.
It’s a Philosophy
The Harness the Wealth program takes a holistic view of a community’s challenges, then creates an integrated solution based on local resources and local ownership. This same approach can also be used to accomplish more specific goals in a larger community. In fact, this strategy is the defining characteristic of MRP’s work: we wholeheartedly believe in the principles underlying Harness the Wealth, and we seek to apply them to the diversity of issues now confronting rural Mainers.
Get Involved
The Harness the Wealth! Leadership Team provides guidance and oversight for development of all aspects of the Harness the Wealth! outreach program, including: community planning assistance, Community Exchange Team management, community capacity building, and the implementation of local community investment strategies.
Interested in serving on the Harness the Wealth! Leadership Team? E-mail Mary Ann.