Author: Becky McCray

I’m not an expert on small towns. I’m an expert for small towns.  Each small town is different. You are the expert on your small town.  I spend a lot of time researching different small towns out there and what works in them. I read a lot of books, articles and studies, always looking for…

Do you keep an inventory of empty buildings in your town? Are you sure you got them all?   Lots of different groups do inventories of empty buildings: bankers, economic developers, chambers of commerce. There’s lots of reasons to do these inventories. It’s not just “move in ready” properties. You also want to keep track of…

Another week, another list of the “6 characteristics of successful small towns.” Seems like these pop up every so often, but I can’t say I like them.  This one had the usual things like a willingness to invest in projects, forward-thinking leaders and a shared vision.  My problem withers lists is that they are about…

George asked me for my top 5 “quick hit” fundraisers for small towns. I asked him what the goal was, because I said if you need to raise money to start a project, you’re probably starting too big.  In one of the small towns that George works with, the concrete planters downtown don’t have any…

One advantage Deb and I have when we tour your town is that we are not from there. We look at your worst long-term problem properties, and we think about how we could use them now. We’re not hung up on what this place used to be, or the environmental issues that keep it from selling,…

Whenever I speak about Idea Friendly, I ask people to write down their big goal or dream for their town. We make it a hashtag, because you might want to start spreading your dream online. So it looks like this: #IFourtown. So “IF” and the name of your town. An audience member in Tennessee said…

A couple of weeks ago, I shared our schedule of webinar topics for the rest of the year and asked for your feedback and stories. The most popular topic you wrote to me about was retaining our young people.  Your answers sort of fell into two categories. On one hand, some of you suggested specific…

Professor Brian Whitacre teaches a class in Rural Economic Development at Oklahoma State University. He assigned his student teams each a county in Oklahoma, had them map the assets, figure location quotients and pull factors and things like that. But he also wanted to get at what would make their assigned small towns better places….

There’s an entire class of consultants out there who will come to your town and tell you what’s wrong with it. They take their template that they apply to every town from 500 to 500,000, and they walk around your town to see where you don’t fit. Then they make a long list of everything…

A couple of times lately people have said something about rural towns needing good leaders that really set me off.  One person (I’ve forgotten who) posted this slide from a presentation they were watching:  It says: “Core belief: The single most important factor in the future of rural communities is the presence of highly-skilled, highly-motivated…

Our current way of working together is what’s killing our efforts. The way we work together in formal committee structures assumes we’re all together on a train. All the influence is up front with the engineers, and everyone else is more or less along for the ride. That’s the way organizations have worked for a…

Back in my workforce development days circa 2003, I used this pair of diagrams with all the partnering organizations to illustrate the value of alignment: The cloud and the big arrow were our workforce system. All the little arrows were organizations, officials, programs and pieces of the workforce system. We were definitely a cloud, not…