Small Bets, Good Ideas, Local Money

The system for community development that nobody has connected yet

Over the last couple of years, I’ve stumbled across three frameworks that I keep coming back to. They’re not brand new, each has been around roughly a decade, but a decade is still pretty fresh in economic development, where some of the conventional wisdom dates back to the postwar era and nobody has bothered to question it since.

What draws me to all three is the same thing: they’re built around what residents can do right now, without waiting for a savior company, a federal grant, or a city council resolution.

That doesn’t mean you never ask for permission. Sometimes you do. But a lot of the best community development work doesn’t require anyone’s approval. It requires people deciding to act, taking the smallest reasonable next step, and seeing what happens.

These frameworks aren’t about grand plans or bold visions that require everyone to agree before anything moves. They’re about doing things at a scale where failure is survivable and success builds on itself.

Taken together, they form something I haven’t seen anyone put into a single argument yet: a complete system for how small places can grow on their own terms, with their own people, and keep the results local.

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Think Small: The Strong Towns Approach

The first is Strong Towns, the organization and movement built around the work of Charles Marohn. The core argument is straightforward and, once you hear it, hard to unhear: most American cities and towns have been building in a way that is quietly bankrupting them.

Big infrastructure, big developments, big bets. All of it generates short-term tax revenue that looks like growth but can’t cover the long-term cost of maintaining what was built. The math never works out.

The alternative Marohn proposes is incremental development. Small investments, spread across a broad area, made over a long period of time. Not one anchor project that’s supposed to transform downtown, but many small bets that build on each other.

In South Bend, Indiana, a cohort of small local developers working on modest properties in disinvested neighborhoods has collectively become the largest developer in the city. Not one big player with a master plan. Many small ones, each with skin in the game.

Strong Towns describes their own approach as a method of thinking, not a method of doing. That’s an important distinction. They’re making the philosophical and financial case for why incremental development is smarter than the big bet approach most towns default to, and showing you what it looks like when it works.

What they’re not doing is telling you how to get your neighbors off the couch and moving on something. That’s a different problem, and it requires a different tool.

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Get People Moving: The Idea Friendly Method

That’s where Becky McCray and Deb Brown come in. Through their work at SaveYour.Town, they’ve developed what they call the Idea Friendly Method.

The premise behind it is a direct challenge to how most communities actually operate. Most of the city council members and administrators I’ve met are hardworking people doing their best to keep the lights on, the roads patched, and the water flowing.

Their systems and processes were built for big projects: bond issues, infrastructure investments, major developments. Small ideas, the kind that a handful of motivated residents could actually pull off, don’t fit neatly into that machinery. They get tabled, assigned to a committee, or quietly forgotten while everyone moves on to the next agenda item.

The Idea Friendly Method is built for a different starting point. Maybe you have a specific idea and you want other people to join you. Maybe you just know your town could be better and you’re not sure yet what that looks like.

Either way, the method works in three steps.

First, you gather your crowd. Not a committee, not a task force, but a loose collection of people who share your vision or your desire to see things improve.

Second, you build connections within that crowd and beyond it, turning like-minded people into a network that can actually get things done.

Third, and this is the part that matters most, you take the smallest possible next step. Not the boldest move, not the most impressive launch. The smallest one that still moves things forward, because small steps keep money from being a barrier and keep more people in the game.

A group of moms in Alva, Oklahoma wanted a better playground. They didn’t wait for the city to put it in the budget. They got together, built their crowd, and made it happen. They eventually formed a nonprofit to manage upkeep, but that came later. It started with a specific idea and a willingness to take the next smallest step toward it.

That’s what makes the Idea Friendly Method so compatible with Strong Towns thinking. Both assume that small, survivable action beats grand planning every time. Where Strong Towns shifts how you think about what’s worth doing, the Idea Friendly Method gives you the process for gathering people around an idea and moving it forward without waiting for official permission or a perfect plan.

But sometimes, even small steps cost money. And that’s where the third framework comes in.

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Fund It Locally: Crowdfund Better and NC3

The Idea Friendly Method gets you moving. Small steps, low barriers, no permission required. But ideas have a way of growing, and eventually some of them get ambitious enough that funding becomes part of the conversation.

When it does, most towns default to the same tired options: write a grant, recruit a developer, or wait for someone else to solve the problem. There’s a better way to think about where that money comes from, and again, it’s probably more familiar than you think.

Small towns have been raising community funding forever. A new fire truck. A community swimming pool. A scholarship fund for graduating seniors. Neighbors deciding that something matters enough to pool their resources and make it happen, without waiting for a grant or a government program to do it for them. That’s community capital, even if nobody called it that.

When residents contribute to something financially, even a small amount, something shifts. They’re not spectators anymore. They show up. They tell their friends. They want it to succeed because they’re part of it.

That’s a fundamentally different kind of community investment than a grant that arrived from somewhere else or a developer who built something and moved on.

The informal version works, and the things communities have always pooled their money for matter. Fire trucks save lives. Swimming pools give kids somewhere to go in the summer. These aren’t small things.

But what if, alongside those contributions, residents could also see a return on their investment? What if the people who funded the improvement could share in the value it creates? That’s the possibility that more structured approaches to community funding open up, and it changes the nature of what community capital can be.

The tools for doing this now span a much wider range than passing the hat at a city council meeting.

At one end, a structured reward campaign lets contributors give at different levels and receive something meaningful in return: an experience, a recognition, a connection to the thing they helped build.

In the middle, a loan-based campaign gives contributors an actual financial return, turning neighbors into lenders who have a real stake in the project’s success.

At the far end, a formal community investment fund allows everyday residents to become ongoing investors in local real estate or business development, building wealth over time as the community grows. Rhode Island has the first Diversified Community Investment Fund in the nation, raising $3.5 million from ordinary residents to support real estate projects that keep ownership and benefit local. It's proof that this model isn't theoretical.

Kathleen Minogue at Crowdfund Better and the National Coalition for Community Capital are both good places to start depending on where your community is and how ambitious your project is.

The point isn’t the mechanism. The point is who’s at the table and what they have at stake.

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Putting It Together

Nobody has put these three frameworks together explicitly, at least not that I’ve seen. And I think that’s worth naming, because the gap between them is exactly where many community development efforts stall out.

Without Strong Towns thinking, you’re still making big bets and wondering why the math never works out.

Without the Idea Friendly Method, you have a better way of thinking about development but no practical process for getting your neighbors moving on it.

Without community funding, you’re leaving on the table the possibility that the people who care most about your town could also be the people who benefit most from what it becomes.

Each of these frameworks stands on its own. Communities are doing good work with Strong Towns thinking, with the Idea Friendly Method, and with community funding every day, independently of each other.

But imagine what becomes possible when you use all three together. A way of thinking that keeps you from making bad bets, a civic process that gets people moving on the right ones, and a funding spectrum that lets residents be more than just cheerleaders for what gets built.

Together, they form something closer to a complete system. A way of thinking about what’s worth doing, a process for getting people moving on it, and a spectrum of tools for funding it in a way that keeps residents invested, literally and otherwise, in the outcome.

That’s worth trying. And the good news is you don’t need anyone’s permission to start.