In the second of a series of meetings this spring on how to boost rural communities, Reimagining Rural held a meeting to share the improvements in the town of Ekalaka, Mont., as well as ideas from the “SaveYour.Town” program.
Reimagining Rural is a community development program led by Montana State University that is designed to increase volunteer engagement in local communities. The program hosts virtual meetings where various community groups can meet, share developments, and hear about community opportunities.
During a meeting on Feb. 12, the Reimagining Rural group heard about improvement work being done in the town of Ekalaka (pop. 404).
Sabre Moore, executive director of the Carter County Museum, said the town has made progress in developing a master plan that includes ideas on how to beautify the town and expand offerings for tourists.
“There is only one highway leading to Ekalaka, and that was not paved until 2010,” she said. “We started the work to improve the town in 2021 when we applied for the Main Street grant program and began developing a master plan. The plan was just passed in 2023.”
To put the plan together, Ekalaka hired High Plains Architects in Billings who generated a variety of ideas for town improvement, including adding street trees and lights, filling the gaps between buildings, and an expansion of the Carter County Museum. The plan calls for doubling the size of the museum and also has some ideas for projects to address housing shortages and increase economic development.
“The plan is really more a set of guidelines, but someone has to champion the ideas to make them happen,” Moore said. “The museum expansion idea is being championed by the Carter County Geological Society, which is the museum’s fundraising arm.”
Promoting and implementing good ideas can be a challenge for rural areas, especially when old ways of approaching community improvement are used, according to the “SaveYour.Town” organization.
Deb Brown and Becky McCray make up the group that promotes an “idea-friendly way” towards community enhancement.
People are also reading…
“The old way of doing things is to hold a meeting, write a plan, and keep meeting until you get it nailed down and everyone agrees,” McCray said. “But the new way is to take small steps and to find the world’s tiniest way to test an idea.”
Taking small steps prevents ideas from being stopped due to a community fear of failure.
“One of the brick walls against an idea is to tell someone, ‘We tried that once’ or ‘That’s not how we do things here’ or ‘That’s never going to work.’ When people say these things, they are trying to prevent the fear of failure and it prevents learning,” McCray said. “The people who are the most negative think they are helping prevent us from failing, but it’s like Will Rodgers said, ‘Even in you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.’”
Brown and McCray advocate for taking small steps to help people test ideas.
One example was a community that put in a dozen tiny homes on an empty lot and then held an open-air market in the central space. People with a business idea could “test” the idea by renting a tent or table at the market and then, if successful, graduate up to a tiny shop and eventually up to a full-size shop in town.
“There are lots of good ideas that are going to fail and that’s why we take small steps,” McCray said. “It’s the way we reduce the cost of failure to practically nothing.”
Helping people to take action on their ideas is important, McCray noted.
“We don’t have to spend a lot of time judging an idea when we can test it out right now,” McCray related. “As long as you are stuck in a meeting room, no one can see what you are doing, but when people can see the progress you are making, they are drawn to you.”
Brown and McCray recommend starting with a big idea and having a meeting to create a network of people who would be interested in the idea. Once some details and momentum are built up in the core group, that is the time to approach something more official like a city council or a school board or a county.
“The old way is to present to the board who will send it to a subcommittee that will maybe add the idea later to a five-year plan,” McCray said. “But if you gather your crowd who can help you build connections, then you can go to the board with a groundswell of support.”
For more information, visit saveyour.town.