Becky’s email newsletter

In May, a teen from Kansas will become the first student ever to graduate with a high school diploma and a Harvard bachelor’s degree at the same time. You might have seen the headlines last week. But they missed two important points: the student is from a rural small town, and the Harvard degree came…

To help out a fellow reader, I asked you for examples of local governments that act in an Idea Friendly way. Y’all came through with some good examples and even a list of principles that any local government could use.  If you’re facing some challenges with your local government, you’ll want to read these stories! …

There is no one right answer, no single solution that will “save” all rural places and small towns. That doesn’t mean ignoring rural places is right either. Rural people and places are staggeringly diverse. In the US alone, we’re talking 60 million rural people. Add 9.5 million rural people in the UK, 6.1 million rural…

I want to ask you a favor, for one of your fellow readers. They’re looking for examples of how a local government embraces the Idea Friendly way of thinking. Do you know of any?  Here’s the actual request. I think you can probably relate!  Thank you for such a great video! We are trying to…

The Idea Friendly method came from my own struggles to get things done and the struggles of a lot of people like you who shared with me. It took me 10 years of study to find it, and that was just the beginning.  During my career, I’ve put in a lot of work inside of…

When I visited a high school class in Forest County, Pennsylvania, the students told me what they want in their small town. It was a diverse list, but now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to think about it, there are definite clear themes. And we can use those themes to shape our towns. …

Remember when I asked you to reply a couple of weeks ago? Well, you did, 112 of you.  I read you all, looked up your town and replied to every single one of you. Because you matter and your town matters! I copied all your replies, edited a few down who wrote a LOT, and…

You’ve probably said something like this yourself: “Our town was fine until…” and you finish that sentence with “the factory closed down,” or “the oil boom went bust,” or some regulation hurt your town, or something.  Eileen in Pullman, Washington, pointed out this tendency in a session at the Association of Washington Cities conference this…

When someone asks you, “Where are you from?” how do you answer them? A lot of small town people make the same mistake when they answer that. “Where are you from?” –“Oh, I’m from a little town you’ve never heard of.”–“I live near (Big City).”–“Do you know where (Other City) is? We’re kind of near there.” …

When I visited Colfax, Washington, one of the questions asked at the end was, “What do you think we need as a town?”  See, Deb and I don’t do the thing that you expect most from a “visiting expert”: we don’t tell you what to do. We do help you learn a way to do…

If you want your downtown to look lively and like a good place to be, you need to fill in some of those empty windows. Yes, I mean the windows in those empty buildings, but I’m also talking about the nearly-blank windows you see in your service businesses and utilities. Just because they don’t have…

When I visit small towns like yours, I love to do a walk-through of the downtown. We always come up with better ideas and new ways to try them based on what we see.  A few ideas come up frequently enough that I wanted to share just a few of them with you today.  1….