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Guest: Deb Brown, rural economic development specialist and co-founder of SaveYour.Town Host: McKenzie Dial-Fritscher, SVP of People, Economic Impact Catalyst
Episode Summary Deb Brown has spent over a decade working with rural communities across the country through keynotes, workshops, and site visits. As a former chamber director in a town of 7,800 in Iowa, she led an empty buildings tour that helped fill vacant downtown buildings in 18 months, and she's since built that experience into SaveYour.Town, a workbook, and network built around the "idea-friendly method." In this conversation, McKenzie and Deb talk about what actually moves the needle in small towns. Not big grants or outside investment, but small, community-owned steps that build trust, ownership, and momentum.
In this episode:
- What "small town" really means, and why Deb lets communities self-identify rather than using population cutoffs
- The five barriers that keep resurfacing across a decade of rural community surveys
- The idea-friendly method: why gathering a willing crowd beats forming a committee
- Reframing setbacks as data instead of failure, with real examples from the field
- Practical ways to build trust with reluctant or resistant building owners
- Why storytelling and self-reliance are the through-line of every successful small-town project
- The empty buildings tour that turned around a town: how it started and what it produced
- AI as a capacity tool for overstretched rural leaders, not another thing to fear
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