HEARTS Affiliates
HEARTS delivers creative, robust, and results-driven assistance to support the achievement of our Affiliates’ strategic missions and goals.
In May 2024, HEARTS Collaborative Inc. (HEARTS) was granted IRS 501(c)3 status to be a comprehensive umbrella non-profit designed to connect and enhance historic sites and organizations, to preserve and share our region’s history, while encouraging community engagement and facilitating sustainable operations for new and existing historic sites.
HEARTS’ PATH TO SITE SUSTAINABILITY
Step One: Seek to Understand
We take time to understand the uniqueness of the organization and place-based potential. Collecting research and input from stakeholders on their needs, hopes, and dreams for the site.
Step Two: Create the Plan
Develop the vision for future feasibility and sustainability to reach the organization’s goals.
Tap into the power of place
Optimize facilities usage
Partner and collaborate whenever possible
Include proven strategies for operational management and economies of scale for managing staff, volunteers, events, technology, social media, fundraising, and more.
Step Three: Implementation
Implement the plan to reach the plan’s goals.
HEARTS offers customizable services for our Affiliates, (organizations we assist). Affiliate services range from helping with one specific project to full operational management.
Whatever the goals are for the site, we’ll figure out a feasible plan to get there and fill the gap to provide sustainable solutions and services for our HEARTS Affiliates.
HEARTS believes greater historic preservation and safeguarding through financial sustainability is attainable with strategic planning and oversight.
Our region has an incredibly vast and diverse cultural and natural history. This history is made up of many special places - some with stories we know, some with stories lost, and some with stories still being discovered and shared. Many of these historic sites have huge potential to reach much wider audiences to share this history, as well as to support ongoing preservation and public programming. Each of these special places benefits from collaboration to achieve measurable benefits to both the sites and the community.
HEARTS is here to help and extends an invitation to connect. We look forward to hearing from you to help further preserve and share the important history, nature, and art in our region.
Affiliate Examples
Below are two examples of how HEARTS can help non-profits meet their goals with no extra costs to the non-profit. One example is for 100% of operational management, the other is for a specific need or task. Whatever the need might be, HEARTS stands ready to assist. As an umbrella-501c3 nonprofit, the goals of the Affiliate become HEARTS’ goals too. Understanding the needs of the affiliate is the first step to successfully reaching goals together.
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Historic Hugh Torance House and Store
The oldest standing store in NC (c.1779) was lovingly preserved decades ago by the community and has been operated by dedicated volunteers ever since. Struggling to keep the store open and repairs made, HEARTS brought new energy to share the site’s incredible history with more visitors. Through the implementation of HEARTS’ mission and operational management, visitors went from 200 annually to more than 3000 in 2025, with funds raised for ongoing preservation projects at the historic non-profit site.
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Smithville Community Coalition
HEARTS collaborates with the Smithville Community Coalition, the non-profit leading Smithville’s Revitalization efforts to protect and preserve important cultural and architectural history in this historic African American community in Cornelius, NC. HEARTS is working on a new plan for the Smithville Rosenwald School and a new historic landmark within Smithville. More details coming soon!