In today’s edition of The Winchester Sun you will find the culmination of three months of work by our editorial and advertising staff in the form of our inaugural Progress edition.

The full-color 68-page special section includes more than a dozen features focused entirely on Winchester and Clark County.

It has been said, “If we know where we came from, we may better know where to go. If we know who we came from, we may better understand who we are.”

With that in mind, this year’s Progress theme is “Storied Past, Bright Future,” and the plethora of stories and photographs combine these topics to tell about the community’s remarkable history and robust future.

Work on this publication began in October, when our entire staff — from the pressmen to the mail room, our advertising department to our customer service and our newsroom — met to brainstorm a list of several dozen stories connecting this theme.

The best of these ideas were drafted — literally — by our reporters and we set out to create what is surely our biggest and best special publication of the year.

As a Winchester native and reporter, I am always impressed at the number of stories left untold. I sometimes wonder when we will run out of ideas, but sure enough, around every corner there is another story to be told.

In Progress you will find stories about local people, places and businesses that already exist, but you will also learn about some exciting things on the horizon in our community.

Through the storytelling process, our staff quickly learned how truly dedicated, passionate and visionary our neighbors are. This realization and subsequently this project builds on the momentum we’ve gained in the last year as we push to make The Winchester Sun as hyper-local as we can.

What makes Progress even more special, are the many stories told by you — our readers. Through the “Unsung Heroes” feature, we asked you to submit nominations. More than 30 people were nominated, and each of the letters we received are included in Progress.

As I have said before, and will surely say again, our newspaper can only be as strong as our community. Without your many inspiring stories to tell, our job would much harder. Thank you for the opportunity to share all about where we came from and where we are going.

I hope you will enjoy reading Progress 2017 as much as our staff has enjoyed producing it. We look forward to opportunity to continue putting together this special project each year. As always, we welcome your suggestions and comments.

Whitney Leggett is managing editor of The Winchester Sun and Winchester Living Magazine. She can be reached at 759-0049 or whitney.leggett@winchestersun.com.