What if your town council, your chamber of commerce, and your school board sat down together for a public meeting just to compare calendars? What if these leaders started talking about possible cooperation, shared projects, or mutual goals? What if more local boards and leaders began to participate, aligning their own goals and efforts with…
The Whiting Cafe gets a makeover,thanks to 100 community volunteers.Photo from Kansas Sampler Foundation. Community volunteers can make a big difference for small town businesses. The first one I heard of was the Whiting Cafe Makeover orchestrated by the Kansas Sampler Foundation. One hundred volunteers descended on a tiny 25 year-old cafe for several days of…
An anonymous reader left this plaintive cry on an old post here: My Arizona small town is a mess. We are going to become a ghost town and/or absorbed into the County if we can’t generate revenue. The Town Council and Chamber are full of power plays, bickering and a Good Ol’ Boy attitude. We…
Long ago, Rebecca Leaman asked me about nonprofits in small towns. Profit/nonprofit partnership is essentialin most small towns. “A lot of your thoughts on small-town and small-biz development seem to apply well to nonprofits, too – certainly to the grassroots groups that keep rural communities (I live in one) rolling. Your thoughts?” At the time,…
[Melyn Johnson is the Main Street Manager in Guymon, Oklahoma. She always amazes me with her innovative projects in tourism and community development. She is also incredibly generous at sharing her knowledge. She wrote this piece for her “On the Bricks” column, in the Guymon Daily Herald. It’s been reprinted in other area papers, and she…
Tourism is a traded business just as much as manufacturing. Tourism is a vital part of the economic development of your town and your region. It brings in outside dollars to be spent locally. It allows businesses to survive that could not make it by relying on local customers. Please don’t take my word for…
[When Mike Rizzo explained the Refresh Kitanning story to me, I knew you would want to learn about it. Here is how people in one small town are taking an active approach to economic and business development. – Becky ] My name is Mike and I created a community website to hopefully inspire growth and…
One of the speakers at the recent Midwest Rural Assembly started off by telling this story about a small town hardware store. (I think he said the story came from Kinky Friedman, when he was Texas Agriculture Secretary.) The hardware store is where when you have a project, they will loan you a tool. They…
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