Author: Becky McCray

Sarah McKnight just told me all about the progress they’ve made in the past year in Colfax, Washington. Lots of the ideas we talked about in August last year are now reality!  The new Colfax Mercantile Store is a shared building with room for 8 to 10 new vendors. They’re full up and have a…

This story from CityLab is really about Idea Friendly cities, even though they don’t know that. They thought it was about a city that wanted to try something new with their traffic pattern: “Instead of starting with a plan on paper, city officials just went out one week in December and stuck cones along a…

This is something I’ve been thinking through lately: how do you help other people in your town become more Idea Friendly?   You’re already open to new ideas yourself. But you still have to work with people in your town. And they’re not all as open as you are.  You’ve seen this list before, the list…

Don’t tell me that you’re planning to do a mural. Do it now. Start Taking Small Steps. Decorate with chalk. Paint on fabric. Decorate parachute cloth. Paint on paper. Paint on boards. Paint on sheets of aluminum or alumalite. Cut pieces of colorful coroplast and assemble into fun designs. Use shoe polish on glass. Paint a…

Last week I said we’d talk about what to do when you invite people to co-create events with you, and they make mistakes or fail. One of the conversations we had at the RuralX Conference was about what to do about volunteers that don’t meet your standards. When putting together an event, one person had…

When Deb and I were at RuralX Conference, we heard from a leader from a local arts performance group. They are putting on beautiful well-planned performances, but they are struggling with low attendance at their events. I suggested they stop planning it all themselves.  I told her the tale of two concerts: One was fully…

I couldn’t wait to share this, from Alison Jones in the UK:  “Our village is currently buzzing with a new community project called Look for a Book. It’s the simplest but also most satisfying thing: if your children have outgrown a book they loved, they pop it into a ziplock freezer bag with a little…

Tracey shared her story with me, and I could not wait to share it with you. Here it is:  I just wanted to tell you how much your newsletters have inspired me and what I have done with your ideas. I live in a small town of 3500 people about 26 miles west of Tuscaloosa,…

Every town has that thing, that negative thing, that happened. “Everything was fine until….”  Every town has one. It might be from 5 years before, like Deb ran into when she started at Webster City, Iowa. They had lost a factory. It might be from back in the day. The worst recent example was a summary…

Long time small town friend Dave Quinn asked me what my local economic development people could have done to help me as a local business owner. He sorta stumped me on that one. But the longer I thought about it, I came up with two things.  The first thing would be to ask. Just ask….

Whenever you present a new idea, there’s always someone waiting to say it: “We tried that once!”  There are a million variations of how they can say it, and just as many good ways to respond. Here’s my new favorite of the moment: “We obviously survived!” That would be the less polite version of what…

You’ve heard that before: Start with why. Knowing the real goal can help you decide what’s really important.  What’s the real goal of an arts festival? Why do you even have a car show? What is the goal of the city council? What ever the project, who ever the driver, there’s really one essential underlying…