This downtown art project comes from my neighbors in Waynoka, Oklahoma, population 927. Far from a dressy, stodgy downtown, they have a casual attitude. It’s a working class town with history as a railroad community. Last year, the downtown utility poles were in bad need of a new coat of paint. You know, that boring…
Katie McCaskey has lived a rural pattern that you’ll recognize. She grew up in a small town, left for education and opportunity, moved back to a different small town later, and started a business. She’s come to see small towns as a center of opportunity, as a place where entrepreneurs can step up and make…
My email last week about banning “shop local” generated a lot of positive reaction. Surprisingly, I didn’t hear from anyone who disagreed with me. Maybe you all were just being polite. I’m glad it got people talking. What I said about shop local is tied in to a bigger concept. The future of small towns…
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m something of a shop local champion. So why am I ready to get rid of “shop local”? Because I’m afraid it has lost all its meaning. People have been beat over the head with “shop local” so much, that their heads hurt. They got the “shop local” part,…
You know I have an unashamedly positive view of rural. My small town has a future! Well, I want to introduce you to someone who is even more positive about small towns: Ivan Emke, with the Grenfell Campus of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, in Canada. Emke did a TEDx Talk on How Rural Will…
Volunteers and nonprofits: I’m not sure a small town could even exist without them. A couple of you recently brought up the role of volunteering and nonprofits, and that got me thinking about the common problem, “we can’t find any volunteers!” See, small businesses play a role in supporting nonprofit organizations, and nonprofits are important…
I want to tell you three stories that people told me last week. Kat Long told me about Ponca City, Oklahoma (population 25,000). They have lots of good news, lots of positive developments, but feel like the national drumbeat of bad news tends to drown it out. To work against that, Kat plans to feature…
Last week, both my friend Rob and I took time out from all that demands our attention to spend time at conferences that energize us. We both work from our homes in small towns, so we both value that in-person time to focus and think. Even though we were at very different events, we got…
Last week, I mentioned Placemaking briefly. Let’s talk about it a bit more. Placemaking is all about the planning, design and management of the public spaces and assets in your town. When done right, placemaking involves asking the people who actually live and work there, who use the public spaces, what they need, and then…
Do you know what the most commonly asked question is at any of my talks? It’s always about dealing with the negative people, the people who say you can’t, the roadblocks. Jack Schultz calls them the CAVE people: the Citizens Against Virtually Everything. I find that encouraging and discouraging all in one. It’s encouraging because…
I bring up tourism and economic development together for good reason. Tourism is a terrific strategy for small towns to stay alive, but people who are working on tourism in small towns tend to get looked down on by the traditional economic developers. “Tourism doesn’t count as economic development. We go after traded businesses,” the…
I got a call from a freelance reporter today. She was assigned to write a positive story about the future of rural. Someone told her she should call me, so she did. It was hard, but I want you to know I showed some restraint, so I only kept her on the line for 30…
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