Author: Becky McCray

Counting your empty buildings is the first step to filling them. And filling those empty buildings boosts the prosperity of your town: more businesses, more activity downtown, more people with jobs.  So how do you do that in a small rural town? We have a dozen ideas for you, all tested in small rural towns. …

You have this idea for a fun new event. You bring it up in the meeting, you’ve got ideas bouncing around, and people are excited. Then that one person who always likes to burst your bubble says it.  “What about liability?”  It’s like a stick they use to poke holes in all the best ideas. …

In the open discussion session at the RuralX Summit, I put forward the topic of serving multiple small towns. People from extension, regional banks, county-wide organizations and state-wide organizations all sat down to talk about the challenges and to make suggestions of what works when you have a lot of small towns to serve.  Here are…

Your small town is like a website; you may need to clear your cache to see the current version.  Your town is changing all the time. People move out, and people move in. People are born, and people die. Businesses start, and businesses stop. Staff turns over, and new people are working in different jobs….

I got asked to list a belief that holds back growth in rural areas. I said it was the idea that somehow we could go back to the way things used to be. You probably hear some variation of that one about twice a week. “I remember when this town was….” Or “We’ve always done…

Your downtown has an empty lot, right? Or a park where there used to be an empty lot?   I hear about a lot of towns turning old empty lots into small mini-parks or pocket parks. Sometimes, they put in a stage. There’s a tiny one with a tiny stage in my hometown of Alva,…

I saw a note in my notebook about spiral learning that I wanted to talk with you about. My note just said, “spiral learning – we tried that once, and it didn’t work.” I think I was talking with Rob Hatch when I wrote it down, so I probably stole the idea from him. Today…

When you picture rural people, what comes to mind? While the common view of the rural US is basically older white people, the demographics are shifting. Racial and ethnic diversity are increasing in rural America. “Racial and ethnic minorities made up 21 percent of rural residents in 2014….Overall rural population loss (which was -0.2 percent…

I spent a couple of days touring Lake Arrowhead, California, meeting merchants and retailers, talking to residents, and holding a work session with the board of the Village Merchants Association. They have a ton of natural assets, great ideas, but have trouble getting the merchants to come together toward common goals. They’ve struggled to build…

My friend Paul Chaney asked me this, and I thought you might be thinking about it, too.  “Hi, Becky. I’m working with a group here in Natchez that is focused on figuring out ways to make it attractive to location-independent workers (that’s one group anyway; also, artisans, makers, the creative community). Also, interested to know…

The future of your town is in the crowd. You’re crowd-sourcing the kind of town you want to live in. But you can’t crowd-source until you have a crowd. So where does the crowd come from?  You draw a crowd with a big idea. You talk about it, you do things related to it, and…

Quick check: how much time do you spend thinking about the kind of town you’re moving towards, versus how much time you spend thinking about the past?  It’s going to take a crowd of people to build the kind of town you want to live in. The catch is you can’t attract a crowd of…