MANCHESTER, VT, February 15, 2007 –- William Roper, President and CEO of the Orton Family Foundation, today enthusiastically announced the launch of PlaceMatters, a new, national non-profit organization that will provide a broad array of innovative solutions and approaches to land use planning and sustainable development.

"One of the real pleasures of this job," Roper said, "is finding and nurturing the new tools that can make a difference in people's lives. PlaceMatters will be pioneering the use of emerging information technologies – decision support tools, as they're called – that can democratize local decision-making."

"By piloting tools, techniques, and processes that eventually become self-sustaining resources, the Orton Family Foundation is in many ways the venture capitalist of innovative community planning approaches," said Ken Snyder, who will be leaving the Foundation's Planning Tools Program to head up PlaceMatters.

Over the past two years, the Foundation's Planning Tools Program has achieved national recognition for supporting land use planning and community development with ground-breaking visualization, impact analysis, public participation and scenario planning tools.

PlaceMatters is the third spin-off venture Orton has generated since 2000, following the Vermont Forum on Sprawl, based in Burlington, Vermont, which successfully challenges the statewide drivers of sprawl; and Placeways LLC™, based in Boulder, Colorado, which carries forward the development and support of the Foundation’s CommunityViz planning software.

"We're very proud of our young family of enterprises," said Lyman Orton, Chairman of the Orton Family Foundation." Ken and his team are the latest crop. They've worked very hard in-house, and we look forward with confidence to their further successes."

PlaceMatters will remain strongly affiliated with the Orton Family Foundation, providing tools and technology support for on-going Foundation projects and jointly hosting an annual conference, CommunityMatters.

"Our partnership with PlaceMatters," Roper emphasized, "will help promote the widespread use and continued vitality of planning tools while allowing the Foundation to focus resources on working with communities to identify and strengthen the core characteristics, the heart and soul of each place, that can provide a firm foundation for their futures. We will work with PlaceMatters on projects throughout the Northeast and Rocky Mountain West, our areas of focus."

The Orton Family Foundation, founded in 1995 by Lyman Orton and Noel Fritzinger, is supported by profits from the Orton family business, the Vermont Country Store.

For more information contact:

Bill Roper 
President and CEO, The Orton Family Foundation 
PO Box 295 
Manchester Village, VT 05701 U.S.A. 
Phone: 802.367.6336 
Email: wroper@orton.org 
Web: www.orton.org 

Ken Snyder 
Executive Director, PlaceMatters 
1536 Wynkoop Street, Suite 307 
Denver, CO 80202 U.S.A. 
Phone: 303.964.0904 
Email: communications@placematters.org 
Web: www.placematters.org