Harness the Wealth!

An Experiment in Community Building

There is a growing recognition in Maine that the best approaches to community building are holistic, interdisciplinary, integrated and locally-controlled. 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.

In August of 2006, MRP entered into two-year partnerships with the Strong Selectmen and the Washington County Commissioners. The experiment? To see what can be accomplished if grassroots community building efforts were actively connected to and supported by a burgeoning state-wide network of resources and expertise.

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.

The 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.

To learn more about how HTW works, click here.

Our development of the overall HTW process is guided by a state-wide team of community development leaders. Click here to see a list of HTW Leadership Team members.

Click on the pilot projects to follow the progress in each community:
The Strong Advancement Committee
Washington County: One Community!

Click here for a HTW project timeline.

For more information about Harness the Wealth!, contact: nate@mainerural.org