Transforming a Community Tales an Army

A LinkedIn post by community advocate Jeff Siegler hit close to home for many of us working in small-town revitalization. For four years, Siegler dutifully responded to his community's calls for input — planning boards, chamber surveys, economic development forums — and heard nothing back. Not a word. The requests weren't genuine invitations; they were theater. Going through the motions while the same insiders kept their hands on every lever.

Tom Peters, one of the sharpest business minds of our era, put it plainly: "Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause — and ignoring conventional wisdom to play the game by very different rules."

Those rules matter, because the conventional playbook is failing communities across America.

Here's what you'll find in nearly every struggling town: the same one or two dozen faces rotating through nearly every board seat in the county. The Chamber board. The Main Street board. The planning commission. The economic development authority. Different letterheads, same people. This isn't a conspiracy — it's inertia. But it is, without question, one of the most stubborn obstacles standing between a struggling community and a transformed one. Expecting the same group that presided over a community's decline to engineer its renaissance is, at best, wishful thinking and a fool’s errand.

The data backs this up. According to joint research by the U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps, the national formal volunteering rate increased 5.1 percentage points between 2022 and 2023 — a growth rate of more than 22 percent in just two years, the largest expansion of formal volunteering ever recorded. The desire to serve is surging. The problem isn't a shortage of willing hands. The problem is that the door to meaningful participation often stays shut.

An estimated 137.5 million Americans — 54.2% of the population — helped their neighbors informally in the past year. People are ready. They're looking for a way in. Your community just must open the door wide enough to let them through.

The fastest path to building a transformation army is usually through an outside catalyst — someone with no political debts and no turf to protect. Like the neighbor who tells a teenager the same thing his parents have said for years, but this time it lands. An outside voice breaks the spell. From there, you identify a small core of energetic, clear-eyed locals who already sense that something must change. Then you cast a wide net.

And "wide" means genuinely wide — not just the usual suspects wearing different name tags.  You need healthcare. You need veterans' organizations — the VFW, the American Legion. You need the civic clubs: Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions. You need local churches and faith communities, which in most small towns represent some of the deepest reservoirs of organized volunteer energy in existence. You need educators at every level. You need first responders — police, fire, rescue. You need local business owners. Underrepresentation in community governance means the concerns of minority, low-income, and younger populations get overlooked — and over time, issues for higher-engagement groups dominate the agenda. A true transformation army corrects that imbalance by design.

Once that broader coalition is assembled, you then bring in the established organizations — the Chamber, Main Street, city government — not by seating their leaders at the head of the table, but by welcoming their members into the work. There's an important difference.

In 2023, 76% of adults reported being satisfied with their neighborhood, and 61% held favorable views of their local government — far higher than views of the federal government. People still believe in their communities. They still want to fight for them. The role of this new, broadly representative army isn't to tear down what exists — it's to accelerate what's possible.

Once organized, the next imperative is choosing the right project: something visible, achievable, and energizing. Something that proves, quickly, that working together produces results. Nothing recruits like a win.

Transformation is a marathon, not a sprint. But every marathon starts with a single step — and the first step is building a team worthy of the distance.

John Newby, Pineville, MO., is a nationally recognized publisher, community, business and media consultant, & speaker. This column appears in over 50 communities nationwide. He is currently the CEO of the McDonald County Chamber and the founder of Truly-Local, dedicated to helping communities create excitement, energy, and synergy with local media to become more vibrant and competitive. He can be reached at info@Truly-Localllc.com.