Welcome to season two of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell. So thank you for everybody who has followed Less People throughout season one and I just wanted to come and say a special thank you for following the content that we are putting out there.
We really appreciate it and we hope that you, if you have not actually listened to season one, that you’ll go back and listen to that and give it a like, share it with your friends, and follow us on Spotify so that we can continue to build our audience. But now we are in season two and I thought I would come to you and talk to you about the conference I just spoke at in Wichita. It was the Network for Change conference through Network Kansas and one of the things that I spoke about in my session was that capital flows to certainty and optimism.
And that is a quote that we have used in our office for a few years now. I always used to misquote it and when Luke Mahin worked with us, then he would always correct me on how that went because I’d always forget. But so capital flows to certainty and optimism.
After Jeff Siegler came to Republic County, we talked a lot about this and thought through how this applies in the work that we have done throughout the last 20 years. And one of the things we talked about was that how do you make change in small towns, even the smallest towns? How do you start? Where do you start? I think a lot of people have those concerns or those questions and something that we saw in Courtland was that the real change started to happen after the city of Courtland did a community development block grant through the state and federal government to replace the downtown sidewalks and street poles. And you don’t always notice how bad your town is looking or the changes in your town when you’re in it.
So you might not see those things that are happening every single day. But as the First Impressions program showed us in Kansas, K-State Research and Extension did First Impressions program where they chose communities of similar size and paired them with each other. And then they sent representative volunteers into each community to do a First Impressions look at the town.
How does the town look? Can you find your way around? What things stand out as things that need to be changed or what things stand out as good things in those communities? And then the presentation happened in the community to show what the findings were. And something that we noticed was that you’re able to bring those topics up with people because if I come into your community as a community member and say something’s looking bad, you either don’t take that person seriously because you’re only an expert 25 miles from home or you get offended. So it was really nice to have volunteers come in and look at the communities and say, okay, these things stand out and these things need to be changed and these things are good.
But one of the things that we didn’t notice was that the downtown street poles and the sidewalks really looked shabby. And so I know that it was a big leap for the city council and such a small community of less than 300 people to spend the money because you do have to pay back a community development block grant. You have to make payments and for a long time and it’s from such a small community, you’re going to have to make payments for a long time.
And they chose to do it. They chose to bite the bullet and they redid the sidewalks and the street poles. So that was the first step.
They spent capital flows to certainty and optimism. That was something that made people feel certain about Courtland downtown was that it was going to be there for a long time because they had expended so much time and effort and money on downtown street poles and sidewalks. So then the Soul Sister Ceramics building, they were actually an Etsy business that started in their home and they wanted a downtown location and the city had secured this Chase station, which used to be a gas station in downtown.
And they’d had it for quite a few years, not really doing a lot with it besides storing some things for the city in there. And they were able then to sell the building at a reasonable price to Soul Sister ceramics. Another thing that helped though was that there was actual contractor that was interested in doing work in downtown and in Courtland.
And that hadn’t happened for a very long time. Good contractors. We didn’t have enough of them.
It took, you know, probably two, three years of wait time to get somebody to come in. And this person had come in from Kansas city and he had moved back and he was looking for work and he wasn’t scared to take on these historic jobs. So he took on the Soul Sister ceramics building, figured out, you know, how to heat and air, do heat and air conditioning in a place like that.
How to, instead of taking out the car lift, making that into a table because it was way too heavy to take out, you know, and the owners were really great too. Shanna at Soul Sisters has great vision and understanding about what she wants and how to, how to make it come to fruition. So that was the first project that was done on main street was the Soul Sister ceramics building in the Chase station.
And then once people saw that they hired that contractor and we actually built, we actually took out a building at 301 main that had been the place that people had bought their first implement and their first washing machine. And so it had been so many different things over the years since the early 1900s. But we went in and actually stripped it down to the brick, kept the floors added, you know, took out the false ceilings, did all those things and put in new windows.
And those windows I talked about at the conference, we almost should have gotten some sort of commission on those windows that year because the, once people saw what a change the new windows made, we took it back to the historic openings. And then we had five, I think about five different community buildings. People had decided, you know, Hey, those look really nice.
I’m going to do those for windows for my buildings. So the windows started to change in downtown, but because we had the availability of a contractor, you know, like I said, capital flows to certainty and optimism. People were very optimistic after they saw one building and then two buildings.
And so somebody could see, Oh, that’s cool. I could do something neat. Oh, that could do something cool.And it just started to snowball from there. So it’s not necessarily something that one person did. It’s not something that economic development did.
It’s something that the community did as a whole. And as things started to roll with the downtown streets and the different sidewalks and lampposts, and then one building did business and somebody with vision did something, then somebody else decided, you know, that’s cool. I could do something like that too.
And it just went on from there. So now our two block downtown in Courtland is pretty much all renovated. There’s one last building that an alumni from Michigan, so he’s actually from here, but he lives in Michigan and has for a long time, has decided to take on our biggest, one of our biggest challenges down on the end of the street that had been our community bar for years.
It had been the summer hotel back in the early days, actually had things still hanging on the walls from 1970. I believe there was a calendar that hung on the walls from when people used to live up there and it had sat for many years. It was starting to deteriorate pretty badly.
And he’s taken that on and is working on renovating that now. So that’ll be our last piece, but there’s been other pieces throughout the years. One of the, we had community bank buildings, side-by-side banks, and they had been owned by the veterinary.
He was, he ran a veterinary practice out of there until probably the early 2000s, but he had owned both buildings and one of them was starting to really have structural issues. And we had looked at each other for years going, if somebody doesn’t do something with that building, it’s going to fall down. If somebody hasn’t do something with that building soon, it’s going to have major problems and it’s not going to be fixable.
So the Heartland Gamebirds and the Wallen’s and other friends had come in and they had decided to invest and spend a lot of their money and time on those two buildings. So again, certainty flows to capital. There, see, I messed it up.
Capital flows to certainty and optimism. Things started to take hold. So if you’re looking for that first step in your community, maybe look at a first impressions type of a program.
Look at, to the city to make some investments in your downtown, especially if they haven’t for many years. And I believe that you will also see that capital flows to certainty and optimism. If you’re interested in having somebody come in and consult your community on what those first steps could be, if you’re interested in some strategic efforts around that, please contact us and we would love to talk to you about that.
Coming into your community, doing some consulting work. We would also love to have you come to hear more about how do you get these things started in your community? How do you motivate entrepreneurs in your community? We will be speaking at the Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities Conference in Kingman next month in June 2025. And there are some registrations still available for that.
So it’s a CEC conference in Kingman, Kansas that will also be hosted in Republic County next year in 2026. So we hope that you will join us for one of those Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities Conferences and hear more about how other communities and our community has made change. And like I said, made change in some of the smallest communities.
How do you start? Where do you start? And how can you translate those ideas back home? So again, thank you for the first season of Less People and we are excited to bring you this second season of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell and we will talk to you soon.