Creating opportunities to share space and connect with the local landscape.

What We’re About

Connecting people and ideas to place, throughout the local landscape, by engaging in collaborative cultural activities. That’s pretty much what we’re up to. It sounds like a mission statement and it probably is, we’re just not concerned with labels.

As a ship without a port or a stage without a theater, we've made connections with friends, family, and inter-dimensional, neighborly travel that allow passage to creative opportunities via the maximization of existing resources and the shared efforts of partners. Was that a little over the top? Welcome to the Canaltown website.

Over time, we’ve explored roles employing cartography, cinema, design, festival, organizing, and planning in the community. We do this work for fun. Directionally, we like to create things from the citizen soil up to maintain accessibility and transparency across our projects; open sourcing and sharing everything we can.

We're looking to cultivate and support a festivaltown environment… where the boundary between festival and town becomes blurred and the roots of a place meet the people of the same… where presentations and spaces can be turned into anything else… where shared neighborhood ownership leads to a collectively decentralized platform for positive transition and evolution of people and place. Still a little over the top? Welcome to Canaltown.

Are we technically a business? Sure. Does this all sound like one? Nah; but what we lack in clarity we make up for in inspirational drive. If an economic flag must be waved, it’s in the spirit of the gift. Canaltown is mainly the things it creates, the people we create things with, and the community we’re a part of. That’s plenty for us.

Meet The Instigators

Derek (above, with vest, on the phone) is a planner, cartographer, and festival maker in Honesdale who enjoys exploring the minutiae of neighborhood connections in a journey to better understand place. He been working as a land use planning professional since 2007 and became a mayor in 2022. He also likes movies and chips. Official Title: Festivalogist/Citizen Planner/Cartographer.

Lisa (above, crouched, holding dust pan) is a maker extraordinaire and master designer who landed in Honesdale by way of sharing origami dinosaurs and other creations with the people. Among other things, she tempers the Cartographer’s wordiness and gets at the heart of things via placemaking initiatives with neighbors. Official Title: Currently Being Self-Titled.

Alicia (not shown but was doing something else cool at the time) starts nesting and cooing when she visits kitchens and farm fields and if you were to look for her now, she’d probably be on a farm or in a kitchen helping connect healthy soil, good food, and happy mouths. Official Title: Strategist and Implementarian. ** NOTE: Alicia moved on from C’town to play an educator role within the greater community. We'll miss her many contributions but other places and projects are lucky to have her. Alicia's title has been officially retired b/c it's important to give thanks. She made up the title for herself anyway.

Other (several shown standing, above, in various postures) creators of Canaltown have official or unofficial titles and roles of their own design and are all awesome. Maybe you're one of them. If ever in doubt, fire us a message to confirm affiliation.