Granting an opportunity

POLSON — The city of Polson has been named one of five finalists from the Rocky Mountain West region to receive a $100,000 grant from the Orton Family Foundation to help with triggering change within communities.

The Greater Polson Community Foundation (GPCF), which aims to support Polson and its surrounding areas in numerous aspects, spent roughly 50 hours over a three-and-a-half-month span conducting interviews, deciding what to include and piecing together a four-minute video which they sent to the Orton Family Foundation as part of their grant application. The GPCF collaborated with the Envision Polson! steering committee to produce the video which, while optional, may have been the most deciding part in Polson being named a finalist.

“For us, there’s no way the video was optional because you can turn in your required paperwork and answer every question well, but the video was what was going to make the difference for us, especially when you look at how beautiful our area is,” said Darlis Smith, GPCF director.

The video portrayed many of the best features of Polson: the landscape, the businesses and, of course, the people. In short, according to Smith, it featured the specialness of Polson.

“Once you see through the video what a unique and precious place this is, you kind of want to step in and preserve it,” Smith said.

The Orton Family Foundation will see, firsthand, what a special place Polson is when they visit the community during the second week of October. The foundation will visit each of the five finalist cities during the last leg of the process, ultimately deciding on a winner for the grant in early December. Smith hopes the foundation really gets a sense of the Polson community during their visit.

“The people here are one of our great attributes,” Smith said. “I hope we can walk them around, visit different business on Main Street, talk to agriculture people in the community and some of the small businesses and while they’re doing that, they’ll be driving around this beautiful countryside.

I hope it’s a place that they see opportunity and they’ll want to help out.”

The winner of the grant will receive direct assistance from the foundation when it sends out a group to help the winning community put the money to good use.

“Their whole idea is ‘engage your community and get to the heart and soul of it and then plan,’ and that’s what we love,” Smith said. “We were already talking about that kind of thing when we bumped into the grant.”

The GPCF put together Envision Polson! a few years ago to help bring the city’s leaders and organizations together on a similar plan to improve Polson.

“There are people who are interested in doing something, but sometimes are crossing paths and we’re not working together like we should,” Smith said. “So [the GPCF] became a convener for all the people who are interested in doing something to help Polson and we called it Envision Polson!”

Those people included the Polson Chamber of Commerce, city banks and the Lake County Community Development Corporation, among other groups. Envision Polson! has eight goals as part of their vision: prosper in the areas of economic development, tourism, year-round recreation and health and wellbeing, facilitate collaboration of government and community leaders, care for the area’s unique natural resources and focus on Polson’s youth and beautification and infrastructure.

Should Polson win the grant, the city and the GPCF will match the Orton Family Foundation’s $100,000 to help the community prosper in those eight areas.

“The whole community should be really proud of this accomplishment,” Smith said.

Since its inception at the end of 2007, the GPCF has shown what they can accomplish and what Polson has to offer.

But with the $100,000 grant, the GPCF’s vision would be seen even more clearly by the entire Polson community.