Author: Becky McCray

10 happiness-makers to take advantage of in your own town: Have a picnic in the park. Watch a school sports game.  Sit outside at night and look up at the stars. Catch a school play or concert. Attend an auction or fundraiser just to people watch. Drop into the public library and ask a question. …

One of your fellow readers, Trace Frahm, has a serious question. “Great articles and keep them coming! We are in a small town whose government school mob has decided we don’t meet their minimums and is leaving town in the summer of 2016. The prevailing premise is that once a small town loses its public…

If you drew a line that represented the history of your town, what would it look like? Don’t just think about population, but the overall prosperity and liveliness of your town.  Mostly up: /Mostly down:Peaked and fell: ^Pretty flat: –Never grew: _ Up and down and up: ~Backtracked: &Hard to say: ?  You’re not limited to…

Not every small town is going to prosper. Some small towns won’t survive in ten years. The question is, can you do anything to influence whether your town survives and prospers?  The future of your town is up to you.  You decide if you’ll start your own small business. You decide whether you’ll say yes…

We have had a lot of productive discussions here lately.  Your ideas on lights for dark downtowns are here, including some hard numbers on costs from Cecil Carter.   Turning a dilapidated property into a shiny new spec house using local investors: it’s like a trifecta of small town improvements! Our friend Gary Van Meter shared…

When you do business from a small town, that town becomes part of your extended family. Whether your business is primarily online or offline, you have a vested interest in your town. You need a place to shop, a place to get your hair cut and a place to eat. You’d like for your town…

Remember we talked about stores being open later and how important that is? Well, Nora wrote back with an important stumbling block: it’s dark. Really dark. Nora owns a store, the anchor for their three-block downtown area. She closes at 5 pm because there are no streetlights. Without streetlights, it’s much too dark for customers to…

My friend Donna Maria asked me why I’m so personal online, why I’m always building personal connections, and how I manage to build connections when I speak and write. It’s because I do business in a small town.  Doing business in a small town, all the people you meet are interconnected. You’re not just my…

Thank you for contributing some great ideas of what to do with a building that has lost its roof. Together, we ended up with 19 ideas for roofless buildings. I imagine a lot of people in small towns all over will do some interesting things with their buildings over the next several years, expanding on…

“Small town thinking” is frequently used to mean an ignorant or limited viewpoint. You might hear it used as, “She moved to the city to get away from the small town thinking.”  It took on this meaning when living in a small town meant being disconnected from the wider world, cut off from news and…

A news story from Garland, Texas, got me thinking about what you can do with a roofless building.  You probably have one in your downtown. Maybe a building burned, or maybe the roof just fell in. These things happen. Now you have an empty space, maybe with walls, or maybe just an open lot. What…

Cities and towns, urban and rural, face a lot of the same challenges. We share the same basic issues in trying to build prosperity: support businesses, maintain infrastructure, provide basic services, improve the quality of life, build a sense of place, support the arts, promote health, and all the other to-do items you can think…