Emerging Trend Webinar: Connecting Community Partners March 27, 2024
Building Bridges Instead of Silos On March 27, 2024, at 11 am (Central time) join Dell Gines, the Chief Innovation Officer at the International Economic Development Council, and Becky McCray and Deb Brown from SaveYour.Town for a no-charge webinar about connecting community partners. They will help you understand the power of collaboration when you build…
10 Questions for Rural People
Take the Survey of Rural Challenges. https://saveyour.town/survey2024 These 10 questions will provide information to many organizations and people on what is challenging for rural communities. Are you rural? This survey is for you. Your answers to the Survey of Rural Challenges will: Prepare better services for rural communities: “It gives us great insight as we…
Build a Library of Things
I like the idea of organizations coming together and collaborating, instead of always working in silos. How could you test out this idea in a practical way in your small town? Build a Library of Things. A library of things is a location where things you use rarely can be located, the community donates the…
Build Community
Just what is community? It’s a feeling of fellowship with others, because of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals. It’s a place where we can belong. For me, small-town people are a community. We have many similar interests: knowing our neighbors and looking out for them, shopping at our local businesses to support our friends,…
Blue Collar Career Fair
Creating a new workforce solution You’ve told us you’d like your kids to either stay in the community or come back after being in the world a little bit. Here’s one way to get them interested in your businesses and community. Let them experience your business. Don’t just preach at a one-day event and discuss…
Empty buildings in small towns
Why are these buildings empty and not fixed? People say “Downtown is dead. Why aren’t there more stores?” Take a good look at the empty buildings. If they were maintained and available to use your town would have a better downtown with a place for more businesses. There are many reasons like expensive code-compliance issues…
Attracting Remote Workers
You have what they want As young families come home to small towns, they are often remote workers. Mainstreet.Org says at the end of the day, the strength of this trend will be determined by how communities position themselves to leverage this growing interest in rural and small towns. What can you do to position…
From one boomer to another
I’m a boomer, born between 1946 and 1964. Many of us boomers are past retirement age or close to it. That doesn’t mean we are retiring! Many are still working in some capacity, or active in our communities through volunteering. We’re used to doing things a certain way, following an old hierarchy and bureaucracy that…
Tourism as Economic Development
Tourism as economic development makes sense. Get people from outside of your community to come visit your natural resources, your events, and your community. Have them shop in town, eat at the restaurants, get gas in town, and stay overnight in your hotels, and that will stimulate your economy. We can all see that picture…
We gave up planning the old way for a Brendan Hoffman exhibit and visit
Webster City, Iowa hosted an international photojournalist, Brendan Hoffman, in residency at the Daily Freeman Journal, the local paper. A town of 8,000 people managed to take a 6 week free class on Using Photography to Tell Your Stories, view an exhibition of War In Ukraine, and personally visit with the photojournalist Brendan Hoffman and…