Narrative challenge: Using stories not just at the beginning of a planning process, but throughout planning, implementation, and stewardship. The larger challenge is turning stories into shared values and practical choices that can shape the future of a place.

Evaluation metrics: Indicators related to participation, capacity, shared values, community vision, action taken, stewardship, and the long-term use of those values in planning and civic life.

Related links:
Community Heart & Soul
Damariscotta, Maine
What Is a Story Circle?
Narrative Arts Story Guide

Damariscotta, Maine, is a coastal town where questions about growth, local identity, and economic pressure become deeply personal. When large-scale retail development threatened to reshape the town, residents found that it was easier to say what they did not want than to say clearly what they did want. That is where Community Heart & Soul becomes powerful. It creates a process for people to tell stories about the places, habits, relationships, and local qualities they care about, and then use those stories to guide planning.

In Damariscotta, residents gathered stories through one-to-one conversations, potluck gatherings, a story booth at the library, and other community activities. Those stories helped surface shared values that could then be translated into planning choices. Current Community Heart & Soul materials report that nearly 1,000 residents participated, that student surveys reached more than half the local high school, and that 95 percent of voters approved the town’s comprehensive plan after the process.

“Some stories are about the past, and some are about the future. We’re interested in exploring how stories can be used to ‘choose your future’—to evaluate alternative visions and choices that will drive community decisions.”

— Betsy Rosenbluth

Storytelling as a planning tool

What makes Community Heart & Soul distinctive is that it treats storytelling as part of planning, not as decoration around planning. Local stories do not sit off to the side as warm anecdotes. They help identify what matters most to residents, build trust across differences, and create a public language for talking about change. That makes the process especially valuable in places where debates about development, preservation, jobs, tourism, housing, or infrastructure can quickly become polarized.

In that sense, Community Heart & Soul belongs in the same conversation as community engagement, place-based storytelling, public dialogue, and values-based planning. It gives towns a structured way to connect lived experience with formal decision-making.

Shared values and community vision

Stories help communities do something that surveys and ordinances alone often cannot do: reveal the meaning people attach to a place. A memory about a river, a downtown storefront, a local meal, or a sense of safety can open up larger conversations about belonging, public life, mobility, and the kind of future residents want to create together.

In Damariscotta, that process led to shared value statements and later influenced the comprehensive plan, planning ordinances, and ongoing community decisions. Recent documentation about the town continues to cite Heart & Soul as a long-term example of how resident stories can shape public planning and stewardship over time. Community participation in small-town planning

Community Heart & Soul is especially useful for small towns and rural communities because it creates multiple entry points for participation. People do not need to arrive as policy experts. They enter through story, memory, and local knowledge. That lowers the barrier to participation and broadens who gets to help shape a town’s future.

For Narrative Arts, this is an important lesson. Storytelling can support planning not only by making meetings more human, but by helping people connect values, relationships, and long-term choices. It can strengthen civic participation while also making planning more democratic and more durable.

Story circles, civic dialogue, and planning

Processes like Community Heart & Soul often rely on forms of group storytelling that resemble story circles: small gatherings where people listen carefully, reflect on lived experience, and discover common themes. That kind of structured listening helps communities move from isolated opinions to shared language and from shared language to collective action.

When storytelling is used this way, it becomes a method of civic dialogue. It helps residents not only describe their town, but imagine its future together.

Community planning, growth, and stewardship

One of the strongest ideas in this model is that storytelling should not end once a plan is drafted. The challenge is to keep stories connected to implementation, stewardship, and accountability. A town’s values matter most when they continue to shape decisions years later, especially when new development pressures, leadership changes, or economic shifts emerge.

Damariscotta is often cited precisely because the process does not stop at a single planning moment. The town continues to be used as an example of how values-based planning can guide action over time, from comprehensive planning to accessibility work and other ongoing public decisions. [oai_citation:3‡ICMA](https://icma.org/blog-posts/working-toward-accessibility-damariscotta-maine?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

Heart & Soul and Narrative Arts

For Narrative Arts, Community Heart & Soul offers a strong example of storytelling used in a practical civic setting. It shows how stories can build trust, surface values, guide planning, and help communities make better choices about growth and identity. It also shows that storytelling is not separate from public systems. It can be part of how communities plan, govern, and sustain what they care about most.

For more on our approach, visit the Storytelling and Social Change Strategy Guide and our page on story circles.

Watch: a short video about Damariscotta’s Community Heart & Soul planning work. The video describes Damariscotta as one of the first pilot towns and highlights the values-based planning approach that shaped the town’s goals for future growth. [oai_citation:4‡Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/33241409?utm_source=chatgpt.com)