That’s what Meredith Hector thought about people here when she first visited two years ago.
“It was ‘Roll up your sleeves, get things done,’ ” said the Knight Foundation’s Bradenton program director in Miami. “Very, very friendly.”
Deeply attached to the community, too, she might have added.
All those traits helped make Bradenton No. 1 in a Gallup study, “Soul of the Community,” to determine whether the worst economic crisis in decades was a factor in attracting or retaining residents in 26 U.S. communities.


