When you bring together the idea of pop up (temporary) businesses with the tiny house movement, you get tiny business villages. They make great sense for small towns and rural places. Garden Sheds Turned Incubator: Tionesta Market Village Tionesta, Pennsylvania, (population 500) had a lot that was vacant for 10 years after a fire…
Today is National Agriculture Day in the US. I’m proud to be in agriculture as a rancher here in Oklahoma. I’m also proud of the role that agribusiness plays in small towns all over the world. Agriculture is a key part of rural prosperity. Ag-based businesses in the US are almost unbelievably diverse. farms ranches…
Businesspeople want to know why they ought to pay dues to a business association. The association wants to know why businesses that don’t pay should reap any benefits. When an association helps produce events, advertises, puts up signs, produces brochures or maps, all the businesses profit from the betterment of the town whether they…
The number one complaint I hear about small town businesses is limited shopping hours. In our busy world, people want to shop in evenings and on weekends, but small town businesses tend to be closed then. When we talked about this in my newsletter group, Nora wrote back with an important stumbling block: it’s…
How can a community transform a dilapidated property with an $8000 assessed value to a new home that will return many times more value to the city? How can a community potentially bring a new family to town to live and work here? How can local investors create greater wealth for our community school,…
InnovationLab helps rural businesses in Sonora, CA Guest post by Greg Falken Tuolumne General Hospital opened its doors in 1849, serving miners in the gold fields of California. By some accounts, the town of Sonora – now the county seat – was founded to address the miners’ urgent need for health care. TGH had six…
A news story from Garland, Texas, got me thinking about what you can do with a roofless building. We came up with a lot of ideas for empty buildings, so I knew we could do something with roofless buildings, too. You probably have one in your downtown. Maybe a building burned, or maybe the roof…
Cities and towns, urban and rural, face a lot of the same challenges. We share the same basic issues in trying to build prosperity: support businesses, maintain infrastructure, provide basic services, improve the quality of life, build a sense of place, support the arts, promote health, and all the other to-do items you can…
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