Appearances

I just got back from 3 weeks unplugged. I’m exhausted! This week, I wanted to talk about local investing. Small town businesses are starved for capital, at the same time as small town people bank and invest their money with corporate behemoths based on Wall Street. And we don’t notice anything wrong with that. What…

My email last week about banning “shop local” generated a lot of positive reaction. Surprisingly, I didn’t hear from anyone who disagreed with me. Maybe you all were just being polite.  I’m glad it got people talking. What I said about shop local is tied in to a bigger concept. The future of small towns…

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m something of a shop local champion. So why am I ready to get rid of “shop local”?  Because I’m afraid it has lost all its meaning. People have been beat over the head with “shop local” so much, that their heads hurt. They got the “shop local” part,…

You know I have an unashamedly positive view of rural. My small town has a future! Well, I want to introduce you to someone who is even more positive about small towns: Ivan Emke, with the Grenfell Campus of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, in Canada. Emke did a TEDx Talk on How Rural Will…

Volunteers and nonprofits: I’m not sure a small town could even exist without them. A couple of you recently brought up the role of volunteering and nonprofits, and that got me thinking about the common problem, “we can’t find any volunteers!” See, small businesses play a role in supporting nonprofit organizations, and nonprofits are important…

I want to tell you three stories that people told me last week.  Kat Long told me about Ponca City, Oklahoma (population 25,000). They have lots of good news, lots of positive developments, but feel like the national drumbeat of bad news tends to drown it out. To work against that, Kat plans to feature…

In small towns, we’re naturally networked. We know lots of people, we work together on community projects, and we run into each other casually around town. (Ever spend 30 minutes in the grocery store just to get 2 items, because you stopped and talked to 5 people you know?) So you might think that a…

I had one of those “I’ve had enough” moments. And that made it crystal clear what I want to talk with you about.  The trigger was another email lamenting the sad state of rural communities. I get quite a few emails from rural advocacy and action groups. They do great work on a variety of rural…