The best antidote to the forces pulling us apart as communities is local action that brings us together. Local action that brings us together can be as simple as painting something together. When I visited Rosthern, Saskatchewan, I was struck by these colorful murals filled with circles. I saw several mounted to different downtown buildings….
No one creates jobs in a vacuum. To create new jobs, people need to connect to: Innovation works best when people connect with people outside their usual network, people who aren’t exactly like them. That makes it easier to put together pieces of seemingly unrelated ideas to generate a new idea. Your town has different kinds…
Australia, Canada and UK weigh in with assets and challenges Our Survey of Rural Challenges just wrapped up this week, and I want to share the preliminary results with you. This year, international people made almost 4% of all responses, based on what survey-takers volunteered about their locations. There were 13 from Canada, 4 from…
Melody Warnick’s books have been refreshing reads for me in thinking about how people and place interact to create the culture in rural communities. In This Is Where You Belong, Melody talks openly about her own struggle to feel connected when she moved to a new town. In If You Could Live Anywhere she shares…
See our mood board, above? It’s all about how SaveYour.Town is helping you along the way in 2024 and beyond. Deb Brown and I picked that phrase, helping you along the way, because we know that you’re full up on work to do. You’re probably involved in multiple organizations in your community. Certainly you are…
Could you help us spread the word on the Survey of Rural Challenges to as many people as possible? You could repost, add to your newsletter, print it in the local newspaper or share in meetings and presentations now through the end of May. Use this link: SaveYour.Town/survey2024 Thank you! The very first time I…
What’s the best way to get volunteers to take lots of required training or complete an intensive commitment? Help them take small steps. Take a large volunteering goal: Break it into easier subgoals: And make it flexible for them: It’s the same goal! But wording it differently made a big difference in how volunteers reacted…
You’d like to do more for your small town or rural community, but you’re held back by at least a couple of things: You don’t actually need either of those. Small steps can be meaningful and usually don’t require permission. That’s why Deb and I say: 99% of the best things you can do for…
Caldwell, Kansas, has a population of about 1000 people. The city has taken an active role in improving the condition and availability of housing in their town. That’s a LOT for a town of 1,000 people! But the city is not the only group interested in housing. When I visited the town, we made a…
It’s pretty common to hear rural people say something like, “There’s nothing here!” That’s because they aren’t remembering all the new business activity or they maybe aren’t paying attention. Or maybe they’re only thinking of big new employers, the kind that come with visiting dignitaries for the ribbon cutting and announcement. Most small towns don’t…
8 years ago, I asked Deb Brown if she would like to do something together for small towns. Deb was a full time Chamber of Commerce director, and I had my liquor store and cattle ranch. We started by making email courses and picked the name, SaveYour.Town. Fast forward through 8 years of experiments, and…
In our Placemaking Your Parks, Trails and Waters video, we talk about making more of the outdoor spaces you already have. I told how we used a bunch of empty lots in a floodplain to create a whole new park area on the cheap. Carol Peterson shared her own “hidden asset story” with us: Milnor…
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