Community Visioning

This week we participated in a webinar by the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship focused on a community visioning process they have been working on in two beta communities: Brookfield Missouri and Garden County, Nebraska both of which have been struggling with depopulation over the past couple of decades.

The community visioning process included looking at standard metrics like income, sales, students, tax base, workers, and health care patients. The focus was to look at a possible alternate scenario to the trend and to develop a strategy based on the alternate scenario.

The scenario they came up with was to increase youth attractions by 10% and increase business development by 10%. Both communities showed signs of stabilization or growth in the outward years of the 45 year projections.

Data for these reports were provided by Headwaters Economics, which if you haven't checked out their site, we encourage you to do so. They have some pretty extensive profiles for every county in the country and can even generate aggregate county profiles and profiles for cities using a free piece of software. Check out this tool here.

Chris Ramser