For organizations that serve multiple communities
Too many good programs, projects and ideas run into brick walls of Old Way thinking and resistance from the towns they are trying to help.
Resistance wastes community potential and costs towns opportunities
Rural people can feel when a program isn’t a good fit. It doesn’t address what they see as their challenges, or it sounds like it was meant for bigger cities.
They’re tired. They’re tired of programs that require new committees, more meetings and more reporting.
A program that your towns resist costs you. You’re spending your own staff time, and spending down the trust you’ve carefully built with them.
Dissolve resistance with the right programs
Jacqualine Fitzgerald
OhioThe Idea Friendly Method shifts people’s mindsets to stop waiting.
The Building Possibility Program taps entrepreneurship to revitalize local economies.
Together, they reshape the future for small towns.
Those methods are the foundation of all SaveYour.Town programs. To help you implement them in your communities, you can use our online toolkits or interactive cohorts.
Online toolkits
- The Idea Friendly Method
- Tour of Empty Buildings
- Revive Your Dead Downtown
Cohort programs
- Collaborations That Last
- Positive Action Groups Change Your Community
- Rural Action Cohort – business and community idea incubator
Our programs are built for what rural people most want help with, based on 2200 responses to our ongoing Survey of Rural Challenges since 2015.
They’re designed for regular people to easily understand and use.
We provide just enough support material to spark immediate action.
These proven programs have been tested over 10 years, in widely different areas across the US, Canada and internationally.
You can trust SaveYour.Town for practical programs for small towns
We’ve struggled with bureaucracy, lived within limited budgets and dealt with local conflicts. That real world experience on community boards and committees helps us understand small towns.
Those Old Way systems? We know how frustrating they are because we learned to work within them. We both have more hours of training and certificates than we even remember at this point. Economic development, workforce, organization development, chamber world, government, leadership, business, quality and more.
That frustration changed how we do everything. No bureaucracy. No jargon. Becky created the Idea Friendly Method in 2015, and Deb immediately started applying and testing it in work her community was already doing. Over the past decade, we’ve been helping individuals save their towns and helping organizations serve people in multiple communities.
Gina Woodward, MBA
Regional Director, America’s SBDC at WTAMU3 Steps to get started
- Schedule a call. Tell us about your goals, and we’ll align our programs with your efforts.
- Recruit your communities. They don’t need a lot to be ready enough.
- Deliver it your way. Use our materials with your staff, or bring us alongside you.
Your communities trust you
You want to help your towns reach their potential, know their own worth and power. Too many programs cling to old bureaucratic models and put more work on the people you’re trying to help. It frustrates everyone, draining your precious capacity. You don’t want your people feeling that somehow it must be their town’s fault that a program just hasn’t worked for them.
You should not have to do the work of adapting and revising programs that don’t fit your towns well. Or creating new programs from scratch when you could be spending your time with the people you serve.
That’s why we listen to hundreds of rural people every other year with our Survey of Rural Challenges, over 2200 in total. They tell us what they most want help with and what assets they rely on. That’s how we know what to create for them and how to make it easy for rural people to use.
We’re bringing these programs to organizations like yours. You add value with your relationships. You know your communities, they trust you, and you have staff who care. We designed our materials to be easy for anyone to understand and use right away, so you can keep your focus on the people.
Start by scheduling a call to share your goals. We’ll help you align our programs with the work you’re already committed to doing. Together, we’ll pick the right programs for your towns.
You can stop spending time on programs that no longer fit who you are as an organization and where your towns are right now. You’ll stop missing those moments when change is most possible and free yourselves and your towns up to work together.
How SaveYour.Town programs are different
Grounded in research, not just experience. Our approach draws on university and industry work in small towns, entrepreneurship development and organizational leadership.
Builds on the expertise you already have. Your organizational knowledge, certifications and experience go further in these accessible programs.
Simple pricing, everything included. Each program comes with all the materials to implement it. No added fees for staff certifications, train-the-trainer or continuing education. You only pay more for our personal involvement when you want it.
Start for free while you build the case. Our newsletters, recorded webinars and Survey of Rural Challenges reports are free and available for you to start now.
Local people work on their own ideas. You don’t have to convince anyone to care about a project they came up with themselves.
Small steps make failure cheap. When each step is small, a setback costs almost nothing and teaches something. People keep going instead of stopping.
Small steps add up. Baker, Montana, learned the Idea Friendly Method in the WeCAN Bootcamp. They turned $500 of seed money into an art walk, an arts council, a sold-out theater production and $21,000, all in less than two years.