Main Street America
Venture Capital companies -- companies that invest in new business -- are typically founded and run by successful business founders who have sold one or more successful businesses and are looking to make money by growing other new businesses.
They don't just make funding available. They provide stewardship and guidance and simply getting an investment of VC money is a vote of confidence signaling to others that someone knowledgeable thinks this has a shot at succeeding.
As best I can tell, Main Street America is the biggest resource in the US for small towns looking to grow and do economic and community development. And it is a nonprofit and requires members to found a nonprofit to join.
I believe it is effectively a fraud. Small town America is dying on the vine because a giant nonprofit spawning more local nonprofits and probably encouraging them to fund it by conning the town into paying their bills has little to no hope of successfully fostering local economic development.
I was a local trying to do freelance work in a small town while working from home. I'm a writer and I did a few local websites for hire.
The local Main Street program was hiring the buddy of the executive director -- Rick Moyer -- to do their website for big bucks. I briefly worked with Rick Moyer. He had difficulty repointing a domain name and when I mentioned I'm the highest ranked woman on Hacker News, he had no idea what Hacker News was.
That's a little like someone making local films never having heard of Hollywood and thinking your lunch with Steven Spielberg is some no-name guy you are dating rather than you name dropping to someone you assume is an industry insider.
Had Wil Russoul helped me succeed as a freelancer in a small town, that would have been local economic development. It would have put money in my pocket and established a local service at affordable prices that wasn't a rip off like Rick Moyer's website service was.
Main Street America is almost certainly wholly unqualified to actually help small towns grow economically.
I have no idea how anyone can solve this problem.
Most urban planning and economic development stuff is by, for and about bigger cities. It's similar to the Venture Capital model: It works the way it does because of the scale and that model doesn't translate directly to small businesses or small towns.
Venture Capitalists invest in a business for a percentage and they are looking for businesses they think can grow big fairly fast. Some will fail and you lose that money. If enough succeed, that's okay.
If you are good at that, it doesn't make sense to make micro loans to small businesses. Similarly, if you are good at community development, you can readily get a better paying job in a big city with more amenities and higher quality of life.
I've abandoned my attempts to solve small town development. Some combination of probably Main Street America and Christianity and who knows what seems to make people think that if you know anything useful to small communities, you should work for free as slave labor. You should do it out of the goodness of your heart, because you CARE about them.
While no one cares about you and your need to pay your bills.
From elsewhere:
I spent some time trying to work with a couple of local non-profits. They both seemingly followed this formula for how to lift this small town out of poverty:1. Get a bunch of volunteers to work for free.2. Do X.3. ?????4. Suddenly, everyone in town is no longer poor!!!!!!
Nonprofits routinely work on things "because we care" and expect volunteer labor and so forth. Many nonprofits are extremely unhealthy organizations that imagine if you slap a "do gooder" label on it, people should throw money at you.
A good nonprofit should work similar to a for-profit organization:
1. Have a service goal.
2. Provide value.
It's monetized differently. The primary idea there is you want either everyone to have access without directly charging for the service or you want to improve the public welfare via helping a specific subpopulation of needy people who are "charity cases," like homeless people.
If the goal is to "help the homeless," that's likely to follow the Shirky Principle and keep the problem alive. If the goal is to "reduce incidence of homelessness," you are more likely to make headway on the problem and it doesn't necessarily need to be a nonprofit.
Project SRO aims to reduce homelessness by fostering the growth of for-profit affordable housing rather than government "projects." Government projects is where we get the phrase "the projects" as an expression for poverty housing and slums.
How I get paid, I don't know. But if I had capital or the right connections, that could be a business plan intended to make me rich instead of a blog.
But an awful lot of nonprofits seem to be run with the idea that if you slap a do gooder label on it, it's money for nothing and your chicks for free.
I was living in Aberdeen, Washington and doing resume work online and doing little affordable websites for locals and I had applied to the executive director job at the local Main Street program. I didn't get the job but they were stringing me along and saying I might have another shot at it.
So on the theory I might get the job like they kept saying, I was trying to figure out how to accomplish the community development goals and bring in enough funds to pay my salary and rent on their office and wondering why I should work there at all. Why not continue being a freelancer working from home and work less or keep more?
And then I found out the city was giving them a bunch of money. And I realized this was government pork barrel with no meaningful oversight.
If you have the skills to grow the city tax base enough to justify them covering your expenses, you would probably be a fool to work for a pittance like that. You are probably adding millions of dollars to the economy and getting a salary instead of getting a percentage.
I'm quite confident at this point that the Main Street America program is a rip-off and it's bilking small towns. Like "someone should sue" levels of knowing and willful wrongdoing.
Is this problem solvable? Can someone talented solve small town development and market it to enough small towns to make it make sense for someone that talented to provide this?
Maybe.
Except small towns seem to all be deeply committed to the idea that you should put money in their pockets because you CARE and not for a cut.
And then there's that other problem.
TLDR: Founding a not-for-profit organization to nominally do local economic development is broken and brain damaged on the face of it.
It's so broken, I don't know why it even needs to be said. But apparently it does need to be SAID.