SPIRIT (Strength & Power In Resolving Issues Together) is a new initiative of Hopeful City to build a statewide grassroots congregation-centered organizing project.  Hopeful City has been operating for seven years with a focus on Wheeling and Ohio County.  We have been successful on many local, neighborhood and city-wide issues, but our leaders realize that many of our region's problems are not unique to Wheeling or Ohio County, but rather exist throughout the state and will only be solved through a statewide appproach.   

Hopeful City's leaders of the effective, seven year-old grassroots organization in West Virginia's Northern Panhandle have begun to reach out across the state to build a set of statewide networks of organized residents and their organizations.  Using a nationally proven model of massive grassroots participation through coalitions of congregations, Hopeful City is building SPIRIT as a statewide network of religious leaders and their congregations. 

SPIRIT is intended to reflect the kind of deep, massive and grassroots participation that Hopeful City has enjoyed.  But SPIRIT is merely part of the larger statewide organizing picture, as SPIRIT will be the religious network that will participate as well in the broader network we call MOSAIC.