Your place has a story.
Understand it. Amplify it. Leverage it. Change it.
Community Life • Outdoor Recreation • History • Culture • Parks • Trails • Wildlife • Conserved Lands
What’s special about your place? No matter where you live, you likely have a good sense of the things that enrich your life, make your surroundings worth exploring, and help your community feel like home. But it can be:
Difficult to identify what these things are really worth to your community and talk about their value.
Hard to leverage them to make an economic difference, create a new future or enhance the quality of life you enjoy.
Challenging to tell your own stories so others notice and want to join in.
Next to impossible to come together when there’s not a crisis.
Put Harbinger’s experience to work for you. For 30 years, we have worked as guides, partners and knowledge builders. Harbinger helps communities, regions and supporting organizations harness, protect and expand the power of their places. For good.
Register for Winter & Spring 2024 online courses
Our online courses are geared toward the unique needs of small towns, rural communities and organizations that support local culture, conservation, education, trails and public lands. Flexible, cost-effective, and results-focused. Advance your skills, connect with and learn from your peers, move your community and organization forward. (Our courses feel like sitting around the table in this photo, but they’re virtual.)
Work with Harbinger to:
Understand your place
Harbinger’s collaborative approach yields results your community trusts and supports using regional economic analysis, impact projections, visitor and resident surveys, outdoor recreation assessments, and peer area reviews.
tell your story
You know your story. Harbinger helps refine it and tell it through clear and compelling economic reports, advocacy support, “grassroots” destination branding and marketing, and travel and recreation websites.
WRITE A NEW CHAPTER
Harbinger works from the roots up to support lasting change through dialogue and community engagement, place-based education, collaborative decision making and action, and community economic development.
Keep your place real
You want your community to be a great place to live and visit. Harbinger’s approach blends assessments, the stakeholder-engaged “Geotourism” approach, custom guidance for trail towns and gateway communities, and targeted support for local businesses and organizations.
Snapshots from harbinger’s work
Working for Montana Agriculture: Economic Benefits of Conservation Easements for Montana’s Farms, Ranches and Communities report released. The idea for this report—produced by the Montana Association of Land Trusts, Natural Resources Conservation Service and Heart of the Rockies—was spawned by a cohort of Montana participants in our Tell the Economic Story of Your Trails and Conserved Lands Without Hiring an Economist course. Harbinger contributed an analysis of the economic impact of easements and was part of the project editorial team. Read more here.
Harbinger works with trail communities across Kansas. From January through April 2022, Harbinger guided participants from 16 Kansas communities through a 14-week program focused on trail user and visitor research, economic impact and community benefits analysis, and how to communicate using data. Harbinger is providing ongoing support for this Trail Champions Cohort, a program of the Sunflower Foundation, a Kansas-based health care foundation. Read more here.
Harbinger analysis shows battlefield tourism on the rise. Weeding out the influence of changes in visitor counting methods and time-bound events such as natural disasters and government shutdowns helped the American Battlefield Trust better understand actual visitation trends at National Park Service battlefield sites. Read more here.
Parks & Protected areas
Learn more about how Harbinger works with and for our treasured natural and heritage areas.
Place-based education
Learn more about Harbinger’s approach to education that works in, with, and for communities.