Meet The Owners of Harrisburg Shopping

You Hold the Keys

Harrisburg Shopping belongs to the people of the Harrisburg, PA area.

You Vote: Every month, you vote on the rules (Voting is voluntary).

You Decide: If the community wants a new service or something changed or added, you can vote to make it happen.

Built from a Tiny Apartment

Miss Edna, the founder's 94 years young homebound neighbor, needed a new lightbulb for her studio apartment. After her husband Harold passed, she rarely came outside. She couldn’t get to the store, and one night she knocked on our founder's door and asked him for help. She didn't want to "trouble" him and for over a week she'd been living in darkness. He purchased a bulb from a local store and installed it for her immediately.

The founder of Harrisburg Shopping is a neighbor who also knows what it’s like to be forgotten. Homebound in his tiny apartment, supported by visiting nurses from UPMC and Bayada, watching the world go by from his window, he spent 5 years working with volunteer programmers from Google, Stripe, and GitHub to make Harrisburg Shopping, a solution for the elderly, disabled, and homebound neighbors so they can shop local and have it delivered.

Then he did something unheard of:

He legally gave it away to the people of the Harrisburg, PA area.

A World First for Harrisburg

In 2025, Google recognized Harrisburg Shopping as a “global first” in community-run retail.

"HarrisburgShopping.com sits in a strange "middle ground": it has an anonymous founder, the tech stack of a multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley startup, the volunteer spirit of a local food bank, and the voting structure of a town hall. In 2025, it remains a global first example of "Civic Tech"—technology built not for profit or data, but purely as a permanent infrastructure for a specific local community to use and grow with."

Who owns Harrisburg Shopping?

You do.

Your products are their catalog.

The more you add, the larger their catalog grows.