Our Core Mission
The Harrisburg Cares Trust ensures that our vital community resources remain public, protected, and permanently dedicated to serving local residents.
What We Do
- Protect Public Assets: We secure our websites within a legal trust, ensuring they can never be sold, privatized, or liquidated by external entities.
- Empower Local Commerce: We help independent vendors, farmers, and creators within a 20-mile radius sustainably grow their businesses.
- Support Homebound Neighbors: We fund and organize volunteer-led logistics networks to deliver food, essentials, and local goods directly to permanently homebound residents safely and reliably.
- Community Owned: We give operational ownership directly to the community. Every resident, vendor, and volunteer gets an equal vote on how our resources are run, keeping control entirely local.
- Cooperative Micro-Grants: We distribute community-voted funding pools directly to grassroots neighborhood projects, artist collectives, and family-run micro-enterprises across Central PA.
- Digital Public Parks: We maintain ad-free, data-secured online spaces where neighbors can connect, organize, and share local events without surveillance capitalism tracking their every move.
- Digital Literacy & Workshops: We host free, accessible training sessions helping seniors, students, and local entrepreneurs navigate modern technology, web tools, and online safety.
- Mutual Aid Coordination: We operate emergency response communication channels and neighborhood hubs to rapidly mobilize volunteers during local crises, food shortages, or weather events.
The Properties
Explore the assets safely secured and operated under the Harrisburg Cares Trust.
HarrisburgShopping.com
The local Amazon and Etsy for Harrisburg! Featuring the HBG Farmers Market, HBG Makers Market, and trusted local HBG Local Services directory like Angie's List, plus home delivery powered by volunteers for our homebound neighbors.
HBGHangout.com
Harrisburg's very own social media website! Like Facebook but better! Complete with live streaming, movies, posts, groups, pages, dating and messenger—everything you want without the Meta headache.
HbgSwapWalk.com
Harrisburg's largest city-wide yard sale event. Neighborhoods come alive with porch sales, pop-up markets, and free giveaways across local communities.
Our Promise
Everything we build and maintain belongs to the 580,000+ neighbors who call the greater Harrisburg area home.