Vision 2025
From a City in Decline to a National Model for Renewal
$40M
Investment
2,500+ Citizens Engaged
150+ Project Teams
The Challenge: A Crisis of Momentum
In 2015, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a city defined by a decline. Decades of population loss and urban disinvestment had left the downtown hollowed out and the community spirit frayed. A newly created strategic framework from Carnegie Mellon University offered a glimmer of hope, but it faced a familiar threat: with a fractured local leadership and no clear implementation strategy, it was destined to become another well-intentioned plan left to gather dust on a shelf.
The community was stuck in a state of paralysis. They possessed an ambitious map for the future but had no trusted driver to navigate the complex road ahead. The core challenge was not a lack of ideas, but a lack of a single, trusted entity that could build consensus, manage the intricate politics, and turn decades of pent-up hope into real, tangible action.
Our Solution: Coordinating a Community
We were brought in at the project's inception. Our first and most critical move was not to plan, but to listen. We spent months with our boots on the ground, embedding ourselves in the community to build the social capital and trust necessary for a long-term initiative. We met with everyone—elected representatives, downtown business owners, and civic leaders—establishing the Vision 2025 brand as a neutral, ego-less, and authentic partner.
To combat the community's skepticism, we focused on generating immediate, visible momentum. We organized and empowered dozens of grassroots teams to tackle early action projects: planting street trees, building new trails, cleaning vacant storefronts. These small, easy wins were a powerful proof of concept, demonstrating that change was not only possible but already underway.
As the project grew, our role evolved from a direct "doer" to the "human operating system" for the entire initiative. We became the central hub for dozens of partner organizations, mediating competing interests and messy politics, coordinating grant applications and media relations, and keeping every project aligned with the master vision. One by one, investments big and small snowballed as we continued to advance projects across all community sectors.
The culmination of this strategic work came when we zoomed out to the regional scale. We consolidated multiple fragmented grant applications into a unified, powerful narrative and authored a historic $24 million federal RAISE grant application—the largest in the city's history.
“I’ve been going to these for 40 years, and there’s always great talk, and then nothing happens. Now, people feel invested, and they feel empowered.”
Barry Gallagher, Johnstown Planning Commission
(Landscape Architecture Magazine, May 2018)
The Outcomes: Results that Speak for Themselves
Our six years of dedicated, on-the-ground leadership transformed a static planning document into a dynamic, nationally-recognized community success story. We didn't just deliver a plan; we owned the outcome, ensuring the community's vision became a celebrated reality. The results include:
$40,000,000+ in total new investment driven into the community through our strategic fundraising and partnership-building efforts.
$24,000,000 secured in a single, historic federal infrastructure grant that unified multiple, previously disconnected downtown projects.
150+ grassroots project teams organized, empowered, and guided from idea to implementation.
2,500+ community members mobilized as volunteers, creating a powerful culture of ownership and civic pride.
National recognition in media and planning circles for the project's innovative, "boots on the ground" approach to community revitalization.
