Becky’s email newsletter

When I visited a high school class in Forest County, Pennsylvania, the students told me what they want in their small town. It was a diverse list, but now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to think about it, there are definite clear themes. And we can use those themes to shape our towns. …

Remember when I asked you to reply a couple of weeks ago? Well, you did, 112 of you.  I read you all, looked up your town and replied to every single one of you. Because you matter and your town matters! I copied all your replies, edited a few down who wrote a LOT, and…

You’ve probably said something like this yourself: “Our town was fine until…” and you finish that sentence with “the factory closed down,” or “the oil boom went bust,” or some regulation hurt your town, or something.  Eileen in Pullman, Washington, pointed out this tendency in a session at the Association of Washington Cities conference this…

When someone asks you, “Where are you from?” how do you answer them? A lot of small town people make the same mistake when they answer that. “Where are you from?” –“Oh, I’m from a little town you’ve never heard of.”–“I live near (Big City).”–“Do you know where (Other City) is? We’re kind of near there.” …

When I visited Colfax, Washington, one of the questions asked at the end was, “What do you think we need as a town?”  See, Deb and I don’t do the thing that you expect most from a “visiting expert”: we don’t tell you what to do. We do help you learn a way to do…

If you want your downtown to look lively and like a good place to be, you need to fill in some of those empty windows. Yes, I mean the windows in those empty buildings, but I’m also talking about the nearly-blank windows you see in your service businesses and utilities. Just because they don’t have…

When I visit small towns like yours, I love to do a walk-through of the downtown. We always come up with better ideas and new ways to try them based on what we see.  A few ideas come up frequently enough that I wanted to share just a few of them with you today.  1….

Usually when I present the Idea Friendly Method, there is someone who thinks it won’t work for their problem or project. Usually, we find a way it can. One time, an audience member brought up housing. It doesn’t seem like our usual pop-up, temporary, experiment ideas would work here. But of course they will. Here’s…

If you’ve ever had to work as staff to a board, you’ll understand this one. A staff member was having trouble getting people to actually attend the board meetings. She wondered if a smaller board would be easier to gather. This was the discussion in a peer group that I was participating in as a…

When I share the Rural Jobs Creation Strategies, I talk about giving lots of awards for business successes and failures. It’s a great way to show that you value entrepreneurship of all kinds.  Not just one or two awards, but lots of awards. You want lots of entrepreneurship, right? You might give awards for…  Business…

In a couple of towns I’ve visited, locals complained to me about businesses that were using ugly hand scrawled promotional signs. Not attractive hand crafted carefully lettered signs, but the kind of temporary un-artistic and frankly ugly signs we sometimes use “just for now” in our business. Except “just for now” becomes “oh yeah, I…

Every town I’ve visited, you tell me you want more places to eat. I understand. We all get tired of our limited local choices.  Maybe this describes how it is in your town:There are only a few places to eat in town. They’ve been basically the same for a long time. They close early in…