Home Town Competitiveness

Three partnering organizations have combined decades of experience in rural development to develop Home Town Competitiveness (HTC), a comprehensive approach to long-term rural community sustainability. The HTC approach encourages communities to take action in four strategic areas that are essential and workable in most rural communities, yet are usually underdeveloped:

  • Leadership development strives to strengthen the capacity of residents to improve and sustain their community.
  • The goal of youth development is to support and enhance the idea of adults and youth working together to create opportunities for youth to stay in or return the the community.
  • The purpose of developing charitable assets it to strengthen and sustain charitable giving at the local level in order to build an endowment that will sustain local civic institutions and create a new source of opportunity capital for community economic development efforts.
  • The efforts of entrepreneurial development work to identify ans assess entrepreneurial talent in the community and to devise as economic development strategy to increase entrepreneurial business development.

 

Heartland Center for Leadership Development

The Heartland Center for Leadership Development is an independent, nonprofit organization that develops leaders to respond to challenges of the future in their communities. Founded by a group of Great Plains leaders during the agricultural crisis in the mid-1980s, the Center’s co-directors (Dr. Vicki Luther and Milan Wall) earned national recognition for their landmark research, publication, and curriculum, Clues to Rural Community Survival, in which they examined the characteristics that communities need to successfully compete in a changing world.

Most of the Center’s programs are delivered on site in communities throughout the nation. Their Great Neighborhoods! training program helps neighborhood leaders to develop new leadership skills. The Home Town Competitiveness (HTC) initiative ultimately helps rural communities develop programs to diversify and expand local leadership. Grounded in the belief that skilled and inclusive leadership is key to the success of every community and organization, each year we reach approximately 2,500 leaders, citizens and practitioners from 300 communities nationwide.

Center for Rural Entrepreneurship

The Center for Rural Entrepreneurship strives to be the focal point for efforts to stimulate and support private and public entrepreneurship development in communities throughout rural America. By supporting practice-driven research and evaluation and facilitating shared learning among practitioners, researchers and policy makers, the Center works to encourage entrepreneurship development as an effective route to building properous, dynamic, and sustainable rural economies. The Center is part of the Rural Policy Research Institute.

FrontlineSMS

FrontlineSMS is the first text messaging software system created to overcome the most significant communication barrier for grassroots non-governmental organizations working in developing countries. By leveraging basic tools already available to most organizations – computers and mobile phones – FrontlineSMS enables instantaneous two-way communication on a large scale. It’s easy to implement, simple to operate, and best of all, the software is free. You just pay for the messages you send in the normal way.