Community volunteers can help save rural businesses
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| The Whiting Cafe gets a makeover, thanks to 100 community volunteers. Photo from Kansas Sampler Foundation. |
Community volunteers can make a big difference for small town businesses.
The first one I heard of was the Whiting Cafe Makeover orchestrated by the Kansas Sampler Foundation. One hundred volunteers descended on a tiny 25 year-old cafe for several days of much needed clean up and improvement. Read more about this in the Flyover People’s report, More From Whiting Cafe Makeover.
And I just read about Fitch’s Neighbors, at the Center for Rural Affairs. A group of 40 local volunteers helped update the grocery store inside and out. And they aren’t finished. They plan to make this an ongoing project and are working on the inventory system next.
If you could round up 50 volunteers, what local business would you help out? How could you help them? What if you helped a different local business each year? And what is stopping you?
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
Wow! Quite a challenge: “what is stopping you?”
Well, we all have constraints and limits, Maesz. Sometimes it takes a challenge to make a worthwhile person stand up and get going.
A great idea Marci Penner came up with is called the “We Kan Bank.” You open an “account of need” at an online website – for example you need your exterior painted or could use some architectural advice. A person wanting to volunteer signs up in the “account of giving” as to what his talents or donation could be. Maybe an architect would like to donate a few professional hours or another person has painting experience and so on. This would all be accessible by going to the “Pump House” – you know those old drive in gas stations from the 40’s-50’s that nearly every town has – that has been converted to an information clearing house for the community. There a kiosk is available inside for anyone to input or extract information. A dream to come we hope but I think very doable.
WenDee, I love the idea of banking community needs and community assets!
What a great story! It’s so inspiring to read about businesses that are so well-loved by their communities that they can rally this kind of support. The business owners must have been doing something right for the last 25 years.
Carmen, you’ve hit on it. What makes this work is that the business owners have spent years making deposits in the community bank that WenDee was describing.