Photo of a watch party courtesy of West Tennessee Industrial Association
Target your challenges. Get answers in our videos and audios.
Each video or audio is less than 30 minutes, designed for you to share in your community and create immediate action.
Recovery Videos: Rebuilding with Resilience
Your town isn't the only one struggling to come back after the past few years. This special collection gives you the best most current advice on restarting your local economy and being more resilient no matter what the world throws at us next.
Addressing hunger, growing prosperity. Part of recovering from any disaster or economic blow to your community is making sure people have enough to eat. Grow more food, harvest more of what is available and share equipment to get more food to the people who need it most.
All towns have too many empty spaces downtown right now. How do we make downtown look full or busy?
1. Fill as many as you can with pop-ups.
2. Decorate the windows of the rest really cheaply.
Disasters of all kinds can strain your community’s social ties, and that can make it harder to recover. This video shares real world examples from small towns that moved forward from tornado, flood, hurricane, drought, economic disaster or pandemic. You’ll learn ways to shift mindsets, look forward and rebuild community ties.
You'll learn how being Idea Friendly makes your local economy more resilient
How you can support lots of people participating in business, not just a fortunate few
How you can grow an interconnected ecosystem, better able to resist shocks
How you can shift to supporting lots of small tests, rather than making a few big bets
You'll learn how to cut time and money off the process of getting into business
How tiny businesses help manage the risk of failure
How temporary businesses provide reliable market research
How putting businesses together increases entrepreneurs' skills, happiness and success
These are the videos to turn to when your downtown needs some help, whether it’s dead in the evenings or just dead! You get ways to bring more life and activity downtown, into the heart of your community.
Empty buildings need to be showcased, not ignored. Learn how Deb’s original Tour of Empty Buildings created new businesses and new energy for a small town. Together, they filled 10 of 12 empty buildings and saved their local movie theater.
The arts share our cultural stories and preserve our history, address our present and create the kind of future we want. Build a stronger community using our Idea Friendly format of Gather Your Crowd, Build Connections and Take Small Steps.
Forget the expensive downtown consultants and their $80,000 masterplans, make your downtown a vibrant place for $100 or less. Get 20 quick ideas you can copy immediately.
Special help for officials and government staff constrained by regulations, where to scrounge for resources and materials on the cheap, plus 10 more bonus ideas, all in this 32 minute video to watch on your schedule
Bring your empty lots back to life! Put them to work enabling commerce, supporting business and adding to prosperity in your small town or rural community. 29 minute video you can share
All towns have too many empty spaces downtown right now. How do we make downtown look full or busy?
1. Fill as many as you can with pop-ups.
2. Decorate the windows of the rest really cheaply.
Each year, another class of seniors graduates high school and most of them move away. Young families move into town, but they’re busy and don’t seem to get involved. How can small towns attract and retain young people? These videos share practical ideas you can put into action right away.
Young people like you CAN make a difference. It starts with seeing the change you want to create, then using the Idea Friendly Method to Gather Your Crowd, Build Connections and Take Small Steps.
We show you examples of photos from other towns, talk about ideas kids like you came up with, and then we’ll share ways to make those ideas happen.
Perfect for kids from middle school to college and anyone who helps them.
Keeping and Attracting Talented People in Rural Places
Melody Warnick, Becky McCray and Deb Brown
Talent attraction, rural workforce development, place attachment
Our businesses need help with marketing and promotion
It’s never been easier to put marketing messages out into the world, but it’s never been more challenging to make marketing work for small town businesses. Learn ways to get the word out effectively so your businesses can prosper.
10 Years of Rural Insights
Wed Feb 26 at 11:30 am Central
Andrew Button, Becky McCray and Deb Brown
Rural entrepreneurship, community challenges and assets
Specific tactics that help local businesses compete locally and globally all at once. Build on your small town strengths, and turn big retailer's tricks against them. 31 minute video to watch on your schedule
Craft entrepreneurship can create prosperity in any community, no matter how small, even if everything else is against you. Even if all you have is the dirt under your feet. These ideas scale up for bigger towns and communities.29 minute recorded video to watch on your scheduleGet immediate access
Too often, the challenge holding us back the most is our own people. Whether they are actively negative or just a little stuck in the past, these videos help you shift some thinking. The trends videos help push people’s thinking forward. Others focus on getting things positive and keeping them there.
5 top topics: small trends and opportunities hidden in challenges many rural communities face. Rather than obvious trends you've heard over and over, these are small town topics that get overlooked. If you're feeling a little uninspired, stale or burned out by the same old things, take a look at these top topics for rural places and small towns.
Take small steps to pull your town together. You build a stronger community through experiences that bring people together from across different groups to each play a meaningful role. 29 minute video to watch on your schedule
Serving as an official or on a board in a small town can be frustrating with all the rules and restrictions, not to mention the limited resources. The Idea Friendly Method gives you practical steps you can put into action right away to approach these problems in a new way, one that makes it possible for your town to prosper.
We need more businesses, more jobs or a new approach to economic development
The way we do business in rural areas is not just a mom and pop model anymore. We’re redefining what a business is and what a job is. That means economic development has to change, too. These videos lay out the Innovative Rural Business Models and Rural Jobs Creation Strategies, and more to create positive developments.
10 Years of Rural Insights
Wed Feb 26 at 11:30 am Central
Andrew Button, Becky McCray and Deb Brown
Rural entrepreneurship, community challenges and assets
Finding good employees is one of the most complex challenges for rural communities, today and for a long time now. While old way thinking, practices and beliefs are still out there, change is moving fast. Some of the old limits don’t have to be limits any more. You’ll also learn how the Idea Friendly Method gives you a do-able, flexible approach to your local workforce challenges.
Join Dell Gines from IEDC International Economic Development Council, and Becky McCray and Deb Brown from SaveYour.Town for a no-charge webinar to help you develop robust networks for targeted purposes
Economic self-defense for small towns, including why local businesses beat recruited businesses. You'll learn 7 places to uncover emerging entrepreneurs to support, plus 6 places to look online; 5 Up-to-date ideas for succession planning.
Deb shares how she improvised an incubator project and filled empty buildings downtown.
Bring your empty lots back to life! Put them to work enabling commerce, supporting business and adding to prosperity in your small town or rural community. 29 minute video you can share
You're hearing more about "equity" in economic development grants and programs, but it's mostly from an urban perspective and hard to adapt for small communities. Luckily, there is a very simple approach you can adapt easily in even small and rural communities: Cut down the barriers to entry. Find out how in this video.
Volunteers are burning out. People just don’t step up for traditional volunteer jobs like they used to. With all the other change in society, volunteering has to change, too. These videos share ways to unleash whole new ranks of people and maybe even change your thinking about the chaos that comes with them.
Get beyond the same ten people. Kill your committees!
The secret to finding volunteers in small towns today is to let go of old ways that no longer serve us. You’ll discover things you don’t have to do anymore, and new Idea Friendly ways that will attract more new volunteers.
You know the old way of planning by heart, but those same-old plans involving the same ten people with the same old goals... Time for an Idea Friendly approach!
Learn 5 alternatives that will reinvigorate your community engagement and overcome the resistance to change.
24 minute video to watch on your schedule
Take small steps to pull your town together. You build a stronger community through experiences that bring people together from across different groups to each play a meaningful role. 29 minute video to watch on your schedule
Organizations like Chambers and Main Streets depend on local businesses for projects and events. But how do you get them to even read your emails let alone be involved and volunteer? This video gives you five principles and 8 practical steps to get past the apathy and get businesses on board.
Serving as an official or on a board in a small town can be frustrating with all the rules and restrictions, not to mention the limited resources. The Idea Friendly Method gives you practical steps you can put into action right away to approach these problems in a new way, one that makes it possible for your town to prosper.