Penn Soil Rc & D Council

Economic development: we accepted new requests for assistance from a volunteer senior citizen group to replace a deteriorating functional greenhouse at the warren state hospital where the volunteers were planting seeds and producing starter vegetables and flower plants for sale to the community to raise funds in support of donations to other community non-profit organizations in warren county. Their lease on the old state-owned facility was terminated due to structural deficiencies and we are now actively developing project narratives and a budget plan to solicit funding to build a new greeenhouse facitlity at a local senior citizen residential facility within the county to enable the group to continue to serve the community needs. We also began a project to provide assistance to the meadville area recreational gardens to create a new urban farming enterprise to grow fresh food within the city of meadville and submitted a federal grant proposal to create an on-the job training program for a new and beginning farmer to provide nutritcious locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables for residents of meadvilles low-income, low access food areas by launching the first urban farming operation within the city. Like many communities, meadville and crawford county need new farmers entering the field producing good fresh produce, and selling through local markets, like the meadville market house, edinboro market, and other regional farmers markets. A committed partner in the project is the meadville market house. The market house serves an estimated population of 85,000 residents of crawford county including 13,000 residents within the city of meadville with 18% of residents below the poverty line. The market house is the oldest, continuously operating farmers market in the state of pennsylvania and connects farmers and growers with the surrounding communities to offer locally produced food products. The market house has committed to serving as an outlet for a new farmer at the marc town farm, offering indoor market space and cold storage as well as space in their weelkly farmers market that runs may-october. As an outlet the accepts supplemental nutritional assistance payments (snap), the outlet that the market house presents will be critical for the distribution of local produts grown by the new farmer at the marc town farm to low-income households in the community to supplement their grocery budget and afford nutritious food essential to good health and well-being. We also served as a fiscal agent for the toy shoppe of warren, pa senior citizen volunteers who produced 1800 handmade wooden toys and distributed them free of charge to disadvantaged families and childrens service providers in our region with funding suppport through grants and donations we received for the project. We also provided $5000 in funding for modernization of the wood shop tools used by the toy shoppe volunteers and purchased materials necessary to create the toys they are providing to underprivileged children and children service providers. We also provided $6500 for site improvements for the annual kinzua heritage festival. The kinzua heritage festival has been registered in pa as a domestic non-profit corporation since 2009 and this festival marked the 19th year of the organization hosting this annual festival that has drawn tens of thousands of public visitors to this unique event in warren county with attendance totals exceeding 3,000 in 2024.

Tourism: to increase tourism opportunities for our region, we co-hosted and planned the 9th annual nature art showcase and sale event, recruiting 76 artists and display 104 art pieces representing the natural and recreational assets of northwestern pa, through diverse media, which were displayed and were available for sale to the public. We also developed and administered the creation of a project to increase visitation to the allegheny national forest in honor of the 100 year history since the creation of the allegheny national forest in 1923. Twenty-eight individual geocaches were developed and placed at specific historic locations within the four counties comprising the allegheny national forest. Pennsoil rc&d created the passport document and made it available for public download from our website. The exact locations were published on the internet and gps coordinates were used for the public to seek out the geocaches. Geocachers would be able to find the geocaches and record the dates they found the specific geocaches on their passport as well as recording their experience and comments online. Geocachers who would find a minimum of 20 out of 28 geocaches would be able to redeem their passport documents for a free souvenir token commemorating the creation of the allegheny national forest. The project began in february of 2023 and will continue to be active through september 30, 2025. Over 1500 individual finds were recorded in 2024. We also did public educational presentations on the use of global positioning systems and the outdoor recreational activity of geocaching. We also partnered with the allegheny outdoor club to reprint interpretive signs in need of repair along self-guided nature trails at timberdoodle flats recreation area in the allegheny national forest and the big bend recreation area at kinzua dam. We also assisted the allegheny national forest chapter of the northern country trail association to relocate a section of the north country trail off a public road onto adjacent forest land in forest county, pa by providing funding for purchases of materials used in the trail relocation project and for creating four interpretive signs to denote significant historical locations along the new trail segment. The north country national scenic trail (ncnst) is the longest in the national trails system, stretching almost 4800 miles across eight staates from north dakota to vermont. In their efforts to provide a premier hiking experience, the north country trail association (ncta) has a goal to get the majority of its trails off roads. As of the end of 2020, two thirds of the ncnst met that goal. The section of the ncnst that the allegheny national forest (anf) chapter maintains has only 3.75 miles or 3.8% of its 95.7 miles of trail on roads. Of that 1.4 miles can be moved off road. The purpose of our work is to utilize available natural and historic resources within our region to improve tourism opportunities, provide outdoor recreation to the public, and improve the local economy.