Twelve-year-old Daniel Tobin was presented with the Chairman’s Award for Youth Involvement at Pennsylvania Downtown Center’s (PDC) annual Townie Awards gala, yesterday evening, June 15. Tobin was selected for the prestigious award based on Frankford Main Street’s endorsement of his efforts, which illustrated his unwavering efforts to help better the Frankford Main Street community.
The Townie Awards are a festive and venerable element of PDC’s annual conference, and are designed to recognize the commonwealth’s core communities for creation and implementation of programming and events that exemplify the goals of PDC’s community revitalization mission. Pennsylvania Downtown Center’s nearly 300 member organizations are eligible for the Townies, making the awards an annually anticipated event.
“It is rare to see someone Daniel’s age who possesses such ardent dedication to his community and exhibits an interest in helping his fellow residents,” said Bill Fontana, PDC’s executive director. “PDC views Daniel’s laudable efforts as a benchmark for his fellow Frankford residents and we look forward to seeing where his dedication to the Frankford community will take him.”
PDC’s statewide conference is held in a different commonwealth community each year in order to highlight the respective city or town’s accomplishments in downtown and neighborhood revitalization. The 2010 conference, held in downtown Lancaster, was attended by more than 400 individuals, including borough and municipal officials, experts in community planning and landscape architecture, and dozens of Main Street and Elm Street managers. Highlights of the conference included nationally-recognized speakers, more than two dozen educational sessions, walking tours in the downtown and mobile workshops to Mount Joy, Manheim, Elizabethtown, Lititz and Ephrata.
For information about Frankford Main Street or Daniel Tobin, contact Main Street coordinator, Theresa Hanas at (215) 743-6580 or mainstreetcoordinator@yahoo.com. For information pertaining to Pennsylvania Downtown Center, contact Norah Griffiths Johnson at (717) 233-4675 or norahgriffiths@padowntown.org.
