In January 2026, the Wayne County Community Foundation announced that Honesdale had been selected for Community Heart & Soul, a two-year resident engagement and planning initiative run through PA Humanities, the PA Route 6 Alliance, and the national Community Heart & Soul organization. More than $72,500 would flow to WCCF: $22,500 from PA Humanities through a DCNR Community Conservation Partnerships Program grant, $30,000 from the William E. Chatlos Foundation, and approximately $20,000 in coaching from the national Heart & Soul staff.
In the press release, Mayor Derek Williams said: “I encourage anyone interested in Honesdale Heart & Soul to contact me or the Wayne County Community Foundation about how they can be more involved.”
The word “or” implies two separate contact points. But Williams is the Community Engagement Manager at the Wayne County Community Foundation. His employer is the organization receiving the money. “Contact me or the Wayne County Community Foundation” is one phone call, not two. His WCCF title doesn’t appear anywhere in the announcement. He’s identified only as mayor.
The competitive process that wasn’t
When the Route 6 Alliance first brought Heart & Soul to Pennsylvania in 2020 and 2021, four communities received a combined $600,000 in funding, training, and support. The Route 6 Alliance’s own website describes how those communities were chosen: “Selected through a competitive grant application process.”
For Honesdale, that language disappears. No press release, no Route 6 announcement, no River Reporter article mentions a competitive application. The phrasing is passive: “PA Humanities has partnered with the Route 6 Alliance and Community Heart & Soul to select Honesdale.” Selected by whom, from what pool, against what criteria — none of this appears in any public document the Pocono Review has been able to locate.
The pipeline
In September 2022, Williams’s domestic partner Lisa Glover received the Route 6 Alliance’s Heritage Leadership Award at the annual meeting in Mansfield. The PA Wilds Center’s coverage credited Glover with service on the Honesdale Borough Parks and Recreation Commission, support of the Wayne County Arts Alliance, and leading a mural project in a Wayne County-owned tunnel along Route 6.
In October 2023, Honesdale won the Route 6 Heritage Community of the Year Award, represented by Sandi Levens and Kim Fisch of the Greater Honesdale Partnership. Under Route 6 tradition, the Heritage Community of the Year hosts the following year’s annual meeting.
So in October 2024, Honesdale hosted. The Route 6 Alliance board that oversees this process includes Randy Heller, Wayne County’s Solid Waste and Recycling Coordinator, as treasurer. The PA Wilds Center’s coverage of that meeting noted that “Representatives from PA Humanities demonstrated the unique method of community engagement that the Community Heart & Soul program and the resident storytelling that it bolsters.” Heart & Soul was pitched to the entire Route 6 corridor at a meeting Honesdale was hosting. Three months later, WCCF was named Honesdale’s Heart & Soul facilitator.
Three hats, one man
A December 2025 HealthWorks podcast introduced Williams as: “mayor of Honesdale, chair of the Wayne Tomorrow! Transportation Task Force, and community engagement manager for the Wayne County Community Foundation.”
Heart & Soul sits in the exact center of all three roles. It’s a community engagement initiative (his WCCF job title), run by a foundation where he draws a paycheck (WCCF), for a borough where he is the chief elected official (mayor), aligned with the county-wide planning framework he helps lead (Wayne Tomorrow!).
Heart & Soul’s model, as described by the Legacy Foundation’s implementation in Lake County, Indiana, requires “a partnership between residents, a local nonprofit organization, and the selected community’s municipal government.” The design assumes independent partners who check each other’s work. In Honesdale, the nonprofit partner and the municipal government share a staff member.
The placemaking thread
In July 2025, WCAA and Known Grove Sacred Land Stewardship partnered for a chainsaw sculpture art project on tree stumps in Central Park. The mayor’s domestic partner Glover, identified in the Tri-County Independent as “a member of both the WCAA and Known Grove boards,” described the project as “placemaking,” inviting the public “to have a meaningful say in their public spaces.” The stumps were near the playground on the north end of the park.
That word isn’t casual vocabulary for Glover. As Pocono Review has previously reported, between 2022 and 2024 she worked as a Placemaking Fellow at Rural Innovation Strategies, Inc., the consulting arm of the Center on Rural Innovation, a national nonprofit founded by a former Google executive. CORI received a USDA Rural Placemaking Innovation Challenge grant. Glover was deployed to three rural towns to execute what CORI calls “lighter, quicker, cheaper” placemaking: crosswalks, murals, community art, small projects designed to build resident buy-in before larger interventions. CORI’s stated purpose was not parks or public art. It was developing “downtown innovation districts that can attract and retain tech workers and entrepreneurs.”
Heart & Soul produces exactly the kind of deliverable that model needs: a two-year process that ends with a formal community plan. Glover was trained in the method. Williams’s employer is running the program. Nobody selecting Honesdale has disclosed that the mayor’s domestic partner spent two years executing the same methodology under a federal grant whose goal was preparing rural towns for the tech economy.
The money circulates
The Heart & Soul funding originates with DCNR’s Community Conservation Partnerships Program, which awarded the Route 6 Alliance $462,300 for FY2026. Part of that flows through PA Humanities to WCCF. DCNR also administers the Local Share Account grant program, through which Honesdale has a pending $92,558.15 playground application.
Known Grove Sacred Land Stewardship, previously reported as a WCCF fiscal sponsorship fund rather than an independent 501(c)(3), also appears on the other side of the ledger. When WCCF announced its Creative Communities Art Trail in October 2025, the press release credited the project’s supporters: “The Wayne County Community Foundation, PMVB, and Known Grove SLS.” Known Grove receives fiscal services from WCCF and provides support back to a WCCF-administered program.
On WCCF’s IRS 990 filings, the foundation has answered “No” every year on Part VI, Line 2, the question asking whether any officers, directors, trustees, or key employees have a family or business relationship with each other. As Pocono Review has previously documented, that answer is contradicted by multiple relationships in the public record.
What the record doesn’t say
The Route 6 Alliance’s executive director, Candace Hillyard, is quoted in every WCCF Heart & Soul press release. Nobody quotes anyone who wasn’t already in the room.
Heart & Soul will produce a community plan for Honesdale. That document will carry the weight of public legitimacy, cited in future grant applications, zoning decisions, and development proposals. It will have been managed, from selection to delivery, by a foundation whose Community Engagement Manager is the mayor, whose domestic partner was trained in placemaking methodology designed to prepare rural towns for tech-sector investment, and whose board relationships have never once been disclosed on a federal tax filing.
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