Community Heart & Soul offers opportunities for everyone in the community to contribute their skills and voice in some way. In this video, part of our Volunteer Voices series, volunteers reflect on why their involvement with Community Heart & Soul was a good fit for their time, talents, and interests.

“I am a very task-oriented person, so for me to be able to actively have a task and complete that task and start to see positive changes and positive interactions, that makes Community Heart & Soul a good fit for me. --Lauren Aaron, Upper Chichester, Pennsylvania

“I was happy to use my talents in any way possible that would help out the Heart & Soul effort. I helped design the logo for Thomaston-Upson Community Heart & Soul. I was very happy to offer up my studio for meetings and brainstorming sessions.” --Fawn DeRosia, artist, Thomaston, Georgia

“I like to solve problems and I recognize that every community has a series of problems. What the Heart & Soul process was doing was saying that the people who live in the community know the solutions to those problems, and if we simply talk to those people, organize those people, and get them involved in the decision making, we can solve those problems together. We don’t have to bring in some sort of outside person to solve them for us. We can do it--we have everything we need to do it. That was really exciting to me.” --Lee Scandinaro, Meadville, Pennsylvania

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.