By JIM McCLEAN
Kansas News Service
Mandy Fincham and her husband run the Kettle in Beloit, Kansas. Some people think it’s quality-of-life initiatives like their cafe and wine bar make a difference between small towns shirking smartly or withering badly. Chris Neal / For the Kansas News Service
PHILLIPSBURG — The opening of a child care center attracts little notice in a city or suburb.
In rural Kansas, it’s cause for celebration.
The focus on young families, and the hope that represents, is remarkably rare in small towns fighting for survival against forces largely beyond their control.
No matter how scarce, said Iowa State University social scientist Dave Peters, it’s an essential ingredient in what he and his research team refer to as a “shrink smart” town. A place residents remain committed to improving even as it gets smaller.
“Shrink smart communities are those that saw faster than average declines in population but also had above-average gains in quality of life,” Peters said.
Small, rural communities can do little to reverse decades-long population trends, Peters said. But they can improve the quality of life for the people who stay. To start, they need a core group of people determined to confront challenges rather than letting nature take its course.
“That’s really what it takes,” Peters said. “You need a lot of people to step up and take a leadership role. It’s not going to happen otherwise.”
The research from Peters and his team confirms that shrink-smart towns are rare. Only seven of the 99 Iowa communities studied have earned the distinction. Far more common, Peters said, are places where people have all but given up. He said they tend to leave the heavy lifting to small groups of elected officials, whom they’re quick to blame when new problems develop.
“In these declining — or withering — towns, as we like to call them, once there’s a failed project, the community turns nasty,” Peters said. “Then, of course, nobody wants to take the risk of trying to do anything.”
Peters and his team haven’t studied any communities outside of Iowa. So, there are no verifiable “shrink smart” towns in Kansas. Still, some we visited while producing the My Fellow Kansans” podcast appear to have at least some of the qualifying characteristics.
Phillipsburg, for example. It’s a town of about 2,400 in northwest Kansas where a couple of quality-of-life projects appear to be paying dividends.
One initiative addresses an urgent need for quality child care, said Nick Poels, the head of Phillips County’s economic development organization. The community made it a priority at the urging of business leaders, who, Poels said, kept getting the same question when interviewing job candidates: What’s the availability of day care in your community?
The new child care center in Phillipsburg, Kansas. Tired of not having a good answer, the community went to work. A cross-section of residents pitched in to transform an old convenience store into a child care center built to the state’s exacting licensure standards. To help with the costs, they hustled up a grant from the Dane Hansen Foundation, which exists solely to help pay for community improvement projects in 26 northwest Kansas counties.
“It was a no-brainer, we had to do a project like this,” Poels said.
The shortage of available child care is a common problem in rural Kansas. So, it wasn’t surprising when more than a dozen communities dispatched envoys to Phillipsburg in August to inspect the new center and get advice from Poels about how they might build their own.
There are also signs of shrink-smart thinking in Beloit, a community of 3,800 about 80 miles southeast of Phillipsburg. A young couple — B and Mandy Fincham — thought the town needed a place where people could gather for coffee during the day or meet for a glass of wine or craft beer in the evening.
So, Mandy quit her grant-writing job to open the a combination coffee shop, cafe, wine bar and music venue in a renovated building downtown.
“We just thought, we don’t want to be 80 and have regrets,” Mandy Fincham said. “So we decided to try it.”
The Kettle has loyal customers, but it doesn’t make a lot of money. So, the couple and their two children need the salary Fincham earns as an elementary school teacher to make ends meet.
Even so, the Kettle meets the Finchams’ definition of a successful buisness because it fills a need in their community.
“Time and again,” Fincham said, “people have told us we’re a cultural hub.”
Shrink smart towns depend on people like the Finchams and those who mobilized to build the child care center in Phillipsburg.
Too often, said Peters, the rural sociologist, communities fighting for survival overlook those opportunities. Instead, they focus on recruiting that one new business that can deliver dozens — perhaps hundreds — of new, good-paying jobs.
Spending money on incentives and industrial parks, he said, is a “risky strategy” because it precludes investments in quality-of-life initiatives that can be more effective recruitment tools. Communities can thrive more, Peters said, by investing in social needs so that they can sell themselves as good places to live and work.
“They see how progressive your town is,” Peters said. “That positions you better to go after a new firm.”
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Support for this season of “My Fellow Kansans” was provided by the United Methodist Health Ministry Fund, working to improve the health and wholeness of Kansans since 1986 through funding innovative ideas and sparking conversations in the health community.
Jim McLean is the senior correspondent for the Kansas News Service, a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio covering health, education and politics. You can reach him on Twitter “https://twitter.com/
The topic was first brought to light at the school board meeting by Board member Jim Schmidt.
