Spirit of collaboration, cooperation take root in PA towns through Heart & Soul

By Karen Price

After the hospital in Tunkhannock, Wyoming County closed and the facility was purchased by a local businessman and his family in 2023, Deb Shurtleff watched a planning process develop that looked familiar. 

Representatives from county and state governments as well as many local nonprofits came together with the new owner to imagine what a new health center could look like, and what needs it could fill in the community in addition to medical services. It was very much like the Community Heart & Soul process that project coordinator Shurtleff and her volunteer team had been practicing in the community for the past couple of years, one that emphasizes involving everyone in shaping the future of the community. Ideas for the new center sprung from the conversations to include broadband access, meeting space and a food pantry in addition to health and medical care. 

For Shurtleff, it was evidence that Heart & Soul had taken root.

“So it’s not just what we thought of (when the team was doing Heart & Soul), it’s not just what we heard, it’s not just what we captured, but it’s Heart & Soul in our community just happening of its own accord,” she said.

Wyoming County is one of 16 communities that have either completed or are currently active in the Community Heart & Soul process in Pennsylvania. This year, PA Humanities is celebrating the 10-year anniversary of working in partnership with Community Heart & Soul, DCED, DCNR, Route 6 Alliance and others to bring the innovative community engagement process to small towns across the state.

Wyoming County, situated along the Route 6 corridor in the northeast part of the state, is one of just a handful of communities to do Heart & Soul as a county rather than a single town. They began their Heart & Soul journey in 2021 and published their action plan in 2024. Action plans are perhaps the most accessible forms of evidence of Heart & Soul outcomes. They’re informed by an extensive effort to gather data through stories and bring residents together in conversation, and lay out actionable ideas for a community to achieve the future it wants together. Those may include easier access to resources for seniors, a community garden, better walking trails, a beautified main street, or more spaces for people to gather. With projects identified, volunteers, businesses, organizations and government can make plans, form groups, apply for grants, and begin the work. 

From an initial list of 264 action items suggested by residents throughout Heart & Soul in Wyoming County, they identified 27 that were both highly feasible and highly impactful. By the time they went to press with the plan, some were already complete, including “allow public access to Miller Mountain,”  “designate a state park in Wyoming County” and “enhance Nicholson Train Station History Center.” Other ideas that were already underway when the plan came out included: install community gardens, hold festivals and picnics to gather with neighbors, create additional walking, hiking and biking trails, provide companionship and technology training for seniors, and create an information network to find rural county resources.

But it’s situations like the hospital closing – which hadn’t happened at the time when the Heart & Soul team was gathering stories from residents about what matters most in their community and their hopes and concerns – that demonstrate how Heart & Soul creates a model for working together.

“It really becomes a question of who else do we need to hear from about this, and I don’t know that our county was always aware that the interested parties would come to the table, or that others would come to the table,” Wyoming County Chamber of Commerce president and Heart & Soul team member Gina Suydam said. “I think we showed through this Heart & Soul model that we can all be at the same table and have a voice, and let that voice be present and carry through.”

On the western side of Pennsylvania, the town of Ambridge came together as a Heart & Soul community around the same time as Wyoming County and also entered into the final phase of the process in 2024. 

One of the first action items to come as a result of Heart & Soul story gathering and talking to residents of the town of about 6,800 people 20 miles northwest of Pittsburgh was a public art project that began in 2022 with the painting of six crosswalks throughout town.

“That was our first introduction to public art in the community, and that has now gained momentum,” Heart & Soul team member and Ambridge borough manager Mario Leone said. “And now we have an amazing mural at our 5th Street park that was part of our bicentennial project, and we have another art mural project going on at Henning Park, and, this is hot off the press, but we were just one of four communities in the Commonwealth to be awarded a grant through PA Creative Arts so we’re going to have four more projects coming out of that. There’s going to be a lot more art in Ambridge, and the initiation of all of that came from some of the work of Heart & Soul.”

Members of the team are currently organizing a volunteer fair for later this spring to help connect people to organizations and to generate interest and mobilization around more of the action plan ideas.

Perhaps the biggest action item on Ambridge’s list, a hope expressed time and again by residents, is the return of Nationality Days. The popular community festival, founded by local ethnic churches to celebrate their different heritages, was held every May for over 50 years up until 2016. Bringing it back is a big undertaking, but one for which the wheels are in motion, Leone said.

In addition to impact on the community, members of the Ambridge team said the process has also made a difference in their own work. Leone said it’s influenced the borough to dig deeper and think a little harder about some issues.

“And one of the biggest things, I think, just comes from the rise in diversity that we were encountering,” he said. “We tried to reach out to those individuals in different populations and demographics of the community and make sure we were hearing them, as well.”

Sarah Buffington is the curator at the Old Economy Village museum in Ambridge. 

“We’ve always talked about who we want to get in to see the museum, but we never really got out to go to talk to people,” she said. “Now we have the tools for how to go out and reach the people that we want to bring in.”

Fellow team member Julie Mulcahy, who is the director of Laughlin Memorial Library in Ambridge, learned tools that not only help her to listen better but also to ask more questions to get to the heart of what people are saying.

“And to learn to not put words in peoples’ mouths,” she said. “I know sometimes when we were interviewing people it was hard to not lead them to say something that maybe the interviewer wanted to hear, but to let them fully explore whatever topic it was.”

In Wyoming County, they continue to feel the influence of collaboration and bringing diverse groups together. As a result of the hospital’s closure, the county is now grappling with a decrease in emergency services for its rural population. There are currently 40 to 50 people gathering regularly, Shurtleff said, to discuss how to make sure that rural residents have adequate access to emergency care.

“And there are local nonprofits and, again, municipal governments, our county government, all coming together and participating in asking, ‘How do we make this happen?’” she said. “How do we perhaps provide incentives to get new volunteers to our rural ambulance companies? How do we pull in grant funding for supporting this? It’s a lot of countywide conversation and brainstorming … So not only does the collaborative model work in visioning out, it also works in problem solving.”

PA Heart & Soul is made possible by generous funding from Community Heart & Soul, the PA Department of Community & Economic Development, the PA Department of Conversation and Natural Resources, Route 6 Alliance and the National Endowment for the Humanities.