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 Fall 2025 & Winter/Spring 2026 online courses
Our online courses cater to small towns, rural communities, and groups that promote local culture, conservation, education, trails, and public lands. They are flexible, affordable, and focused on results. Improve your skills, connect with others, and help your community and organization grow. Free professional learning credits are available. (Our courses provide a virtual experience similar to sitting around a table together.)
On Harbinger’s Bookshelf
Big Island Oral History
Native Hawaiian kūpuna Manuel “Manny” Veincent of the Big Island recounts his life as a paddler, rancher, Marine Corps veteran and firefighter in a new book: Born of Two Oceans: A Memoir.
This book is a labor of love and a work of oral history — a collaboration between 93-year-old “Uncle Manny” and Kim Ann Curtin, who sat and talked story for hours a week over the course of three years to record and share Manny’s experiences, family stories, and perspectives on nine decades of firsthand Hawaiian history.
The monthly newspaper, Ka Wai Ola, says of Manny’s book: “It’s not just the story of one man. It’s a reminder of how things used to be in Hawaiʻi and perhaps how they should still be.”
Free Resource
Download Harbinger’s new guide to conducting and using visitor and recreational research user research. This do-it-yourself guide was produced through a collaborative partnership with the Lower Susquehanna Heritage Greenway, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia, and the Wisconsin Office of Outdoor Recreation. This is a tool to educate, support, build capacity, and encourage data collection, supporting communities and small-to-mid-sized outdoor recreation, heritage and conservation organizations to produce solid research and use it for good.
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
Harbinger collaborates with the Wisconsin Office of Outdoor Recreation on the DIY Economic Impact Program to support outdoor recreation communities and organizations in collecting visitor data and estimating the economic contributions of trails, parks, and specific types of outdoor recreation.
Want to learn more? See our Sept. 2025 American Trails webinar, Helping Communities Tell Their Outdoor Recreation Economic Story. If you’re an American Trails member, you can view the webinar and earn free professional development learning credits. If you’re not a member, the archive of hundreds of webinars alone is worth the membership fee. Or you can browse the related resources on the webinar landing page.
Harbinger is studying the economic impact of the San Antonio Missions World Heritage Site. In the site’s 10th year since it was inscribed to the list of World Heritage Sites in 2015, Harbinger is revisiting the analysis it completed in partnership with the University of Texas San Antonio in 2013, two years prior to designation. See the original report here.
The current analysis is a preliminary review looking, from a variety of angles, at the economic and community impacts of the site—which includes the Alamo and the four Spanish missions that are included in San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.
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.
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.