Author: Becky McCray

What brings your community together? What gets people to rally around your town?  What if it was as simple as paint by numbers?  In Webster City, Iowa, four groups (government, business, education and a nonprofit) created a creative placemaking art project that everyone in town could be involved in.  They picked a downtown building with…

Here’s how we picked our name. Deb and I had decided to do a project together to work with small towns. We were trying to decide on a name. Deb was searching for domain names, and found out .town was a thing now. Almost immediately, she came up with SaveYour.Town, and it was available. So…

Small towns run on volunteer energy. In the new Idea Friendly way of volunteering, not everyone has to volunteer in the same way. Even clicking ‘like’ can count as a small but meaningful part of a project. But how do you get people to even click ‘Like’?That was the question in the chat at one…

You’re at a gathering with a group of people. You’re coming up with ideas for things that you could do. Someone is writing them all down. What happens next? In the Old Way, the next step is to vote on the ideas everyone will work on together. Maybe even voting with sticky dots.  In the…

You might have heard me say this:Don’t worry so much about the people who don’t like your idea. They were never going to help you. You can’t lose people who were never yours.  In the chat in one of my recent virtual events, Janet Bartlett replied, “I think that is a bad & toxic way of…

My favorite definition of placemaking comes from Jeremy Zeller with the Oklahoma Main Street program. He says experts tend to name things by putting the words in the wrong order, so placemaking is just making a place. There’s nothing about making a place that says it has to belong just to experts or officials. It’s…

You know that festival or event you have coming up where you want craftspeople to sell in booths? I’d love for you to have more local vendors there. Here’s one thing you could do: For a month before the event, make small work and storage spaces available in an empty building. You have people in…

You wish you could help stabilize your existing businesses that just need a little help right now. And you need to support your newest startups in this tough time to get going: Let’s put them together.  When you put a new startup inside an existing business, the startup brings new energy. They’re actively striving for new…

In Washington, Iowa, (population 7,000) a huge old department store building sat empty for years while the owners struggled to find any tenant that could fill over 15,000 square feet. A few stores came and went over the decades, but by the Great Recession, it seemed impossible to fill.  Then a group of locals came…

While you’re focused on rebuilding your local economy, look one size smaller than you’re used to.  Here’s why: your future entrepreneurs have fewer resources right now. They need smaller opportunities.  If your economic plan says you want 10-employee sized businesses, support self-employed people wanting to make their first hire. If you want more self-employed people,…

While we focus on rebuilding our local economies, we also need healing in our communities.  Each time we run the Survey of Rural Challenges, people mention racism and racial divides in their communities. In 2019, twice as many people said their communities are becoming more diverse than those that said the opposite. Many said they’re…

When Deb and I started working on helping towns to restart local shopping, we knew the usual “shop local” campaigns weren’t going to work this time. We decided to outline how shop local campaigns used to happen. The old way was for a chamber of commerce or other organization to take the lead. They’d pick A…