April is traditionally Move Your Money Month in the shop local community. Bank Local and Invest Local are the financial parts of the shop local movement.

In 2023, the timing couldn’t be more noticeable. High profile bank failures, lots of talk about other banks in trouble, and a serious debate about the financial system (AGAIN!) make Moving Your Money to a local bank more attractive than ever.

Local banks still exist in many small towns, and some of you have multiple local bank choices. If you don’t have a locally owned bank, regional banks may be a better bet than the giant banks.

If you have concerns, talk to your local or regional bankers. Some like Jill Castilla of Citizens Bank in Edmond, Oklahoma, (admittedly in a suburb, but still a great role model) go to great lengths to be accessible to their community.

Find your bankers online or at community events. Ask questions about how they manage the kind of risks that brought down big banks recently. See what you think of the answers. (Hint: they’re much more careful.)

Move Your Money

Really, it’s not that hard to move your money to a local bank. You’ll likely get all the important services you’ve come to rely on like mobile deposit and online bill pay. Even the bank in my tiny community of 30 people is online-savvy. (Shout out to Hopeton State Bank: Shaped by the past, Focused on the future.)

Need the how-to-move list? Search or ask your favorite AI for a list of steps to move to a new bank.

Source: People First Economy

Run a Move Your Money campaign in your community

Join the Move Your Money movement at AMIBA (American Independent Business Alliance). They’ll email you with resources throughout April. Check the Top 5 Reasons to Choose a Community Bank.

Get inspired by the resources page from The Local Crowd in Monadnock, NH: Move Your Money

Advocate for change with the policy-level info from the ILSR on Community Banking.

Discover more about local banking and local investing

Beyond shop local is bank local, 2010

Local investing could solve several rural business problems, 2011

Local investing will change the face of small towns, 2012

Small Town banks know lots that big banks don’t, Small Town Rules, 2013

Community banking is critical to small towns, audio, more from Jill Castilla (mentioned above), 2014

Economic self defense for small towns, 2020

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Will you run a Move Your Money campaign? Send us your small town business stories, and let us know what questions you have.

Photo: Randolph, Nebraska, converted a dilapidated property into a new energy-efficient spec home financed by local investors. Photo provided by Gary A. Van Meter, Revitalize Randolph.

By Becky McCray

Small towns need good housing to retain population and to attract new residents, new industries and new entrepreneurs.

There’s growing interest in living in small towns and rural communities, making good rural housing even more important. You might have heard about Zoom Towns, as more people choose remote work and live in small towns. If you don’t have a good place for people to live, they aren’t coming.

If you want to retain your young people, you’ll need housing options for them. Walkability and livability are huge factors in where people choose to live when they have a choice.

Communities without good housing can’t stay communities for long.

Rental houses can become a source of blight and dilapidated housing if they aren’t well managed.

Keeping your town’s rental housing in decent condition can require a little economic self defense as a community. Right now, corporate real estate investors are buying up rental housing even in tiny towns. They have a terrible track record when it comes to maintenance and tenant relations.

One solution is to create a local investment team to buy up rent houses before corporations snap them up, or buy them back. You could do this on a community ownership or cooperative model.

Making a spec home out of a blighted property

Revitalize Randolph, Nebraska, (population 944) used local investment to transform a dilapidated property with an $8000 assessed value to a new home even before a buyer was found.

In 2015, Gary A. Van Meter, Community Development Director in Randolph, told me about the project. It was the first spec home in Randolph in recent memory and was funded by individual local investors.

It certainly drew a lot of interest, with 150 visitors to the open house, including a city administrator from a nearby community.

They did their homework to make it an attractive house to buyers, including super energy efficiency, custom touches like cabinets, and additional storage and workshop space in the garage. They also put in a concrete-cast FEMA approved safe room.

That workshop and garage space makes the home a good match for makers and crafters looking for a live-work space. Those potential entrepreneurs might be your existing residents or new artists to attract to the community.

Improving Rural Housing: An Idea Friendly Approach

There is no one solution (not even local investing!) that can solve every housing challenge in rural communities. Since your situation is different from other towns, the Idea Friendly Method helps you test any idea to make sure it will work for your community before you commit to expensive plans that will be hard to change.

Deb Brown and I put together a 24 minute video at SaveYour.Town that shows you how to apply the Idea Friendly Method to improving housing and shares the most promising ideas that almost any community could adapt.

Learn more: Improving Rural Housing: An Idea Friendly Approach

As Carlos Moreno points out, “they” are never coming to save us. Small towns are on our own playing economic self defense. Photo by Becky McCray.

Not everyone who says they’ll help your town is telling you the truth. 

If you want a resilient small town economy and prosperity for the people in your town, I have some self-defense ideas for you. 

Focus more on your own people, less on attraction. 

1. Stop paying people to bring business to your town that will drain resources out. Forget about retail attraction. Skip trying to attract outside entrepreneurs. Never, ever give incentives of any kind to chain businesses. Never even read the corporate site selection RFP list. 
   1. Instead, support your own local entrepreneurs. Cut down the barriers to entry so even a one square foot business idea is valued, encouraged and possible. Create more shared spaces. 
2. Stop fretting about what will bring people to town. Tourism comes after. Recruitment is best seen as being attractive. 
   1. Instead, focus relentlessly on being such a great place for your own people that others can’t help wanting to be part of it. 
   2. Be open to people’s own ideas and dreams. The town you want to live in is the town you could be building together. 
   3. Eschew formality, regulation and red tape. No one is attracted to the moribund. 
3. Stop letting the same ten people dominate your leadership. When you–without even thinking about it–expect people to have plenty of resources in order to participate, you miss out on some of your best people.
   1. Instead, reach out to everyone in town, every single one. Give people small but meaningful ways to participate.
   2. Actively connect to diverse people including Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. You need innovative ideas to survive, and you’ll find more innovative ideas when you bring together people who don’t all share the same backgrounds and all think the same.
   3. Involve people with disabilities and people with less financial resources by giving even smaller but still meaningful ways to participate. Not everyone can do the same things or afford the same things. Everyone has gifts to share.

Focus more on trying ideas in small ways, less on paying others to pick ideas for you. 

1. If you can test an idea with duct tape and cardboard, you don’t need a feasibility report. 
2. Never pay for predictions. A professional guess is still a guess. 
   1. Instead, your own people can and will run experiments once you get out of their way. 
   2. Crowd source the answers you need by testing tons of different ideas.
   3. Tiny failures are almost free, high quality evidence of what doesn’t work. Big failures are evidence you didn’t experiment small enough.

Focus more on local investing, less on creating profits for outside people 

1. Create a local investment team to take these actions: 
   1. Buy up rent houses, so outside real estate investors won’t destroy their value for profit. 
   2. Loan money to local businesses in tiny amounts that big banks can never touch. Loans under $50k are economically infeasible for banks, but arguably the most important for your would be tiny businesses.
   3. Fund community projects with a bias toward tiny individual informal experiments, and away from existing formal organizations. 
2. Move your money to local banks and credit unions. Run a campaign to get more people to join you. 
3. Drive out payday lenders. 

You probably know that I don’t normally cast my opinion in such strong language.

While I was working on videos to help small towns recover, I couldn’t get away from the bad economic decisions we see town officials make over and over.

And I wanted to help you avoid some of those.

What I want most is for your town and your people to prosper. I want you all to build a town together that you are happy to live in. I want you to create something so amazing together that other people want to join you. I want you thrive together.

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