Susan Lessard, Town Manager of Bucksport, Maine shares how Community Heart & Soul guides town decision making.

“That’s one thing that has come out of this and really changed the way the community does business at the local level. We approach everything now from the positive. Heart & Soul taught us that…The result is that we have a lot of more citizen participation in volunteer groups and in local government.”

Susan Lessard was born and raised in Maine and has spent all of her 36+ years of municipal government work in Maine. She has served as the Town Manager of Bucksport since 2015, and previously held a similar position in Hampden for fifteen years, Vinalhaven for seven years, and prior to that in Fayette, and Livermore Falls. In addition to her municipal work, she served on the Board of Environmental Protection from 2007 to 2015, as Chair of the Board from 2008 to 2011, and was reappointed in 2017 for an additional term. She serves at the national level on the Local Government Advisory Committee and the Small Community Advisory Committee to the EPA. She is a past president of the Maine Municipal Association, and also serves as the public member of the State Board of Licensure for Professional Engineers.

About Community Heart & Soul
Founded by Lyman Orton, proprietor of The Vermont Country Store, Community Heart & Soul is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to establish and promote a community practice that engages all residents within a community in determining what matters most to the people who live there and uses their ideas and aspirations as the blueprint for a better future. The Community Heart & Soul model has been field-tested in over 90 communities across the U.S. Orton established Community Heart & Soul after serving on his town’s planning commission and growing frustrated that decisions being made that would shape the town’s future were without guidance from the majority of the residents.