Revitalizing Small Towns and Communities in Rural America

Revitalizing Small Towns and Communities in Rural America

As an ag radio reporter, I don’t attend to many press conferences however earlier this week, I was present in Walla Walla for Frontier Communication’s news conference about their America’s Best Communities — a $10 million competition to revitalize small towns, cities and communities across Rural America. Now another drawing card to the event was that the ambassador of this competition is country music star Vince Gill would be present as well. Gill shares why he chose to become involved in this creative competition that helps communities to explore new solutions to address the challenge facing rural cities and towns.
Gill: “This is right up my alley. I’ve spent the majority of my life being philanthropy -minded — helping people that need help. That seemed to me to be something that just makes common sense. That is something this reeks of — is just common sense. Us as a people — when we struggle we will pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and we are not afraid to work hard and we are not afraid to figure it out. This was a no brainer for me.”
At the conference, four of the nation’s 50 quarterfinals communities shared the creative projects that their towns and regions were doing in this challenge. Each of the quarter finalist communities was awarded $50,000.
There will be three more rounds of narrowing down the field of communities: in January, it will be down to 15 and then down to 8 communities in April of 2016. Those eight finalists will each receive $100,000 and then the final three communities determined to be grand prize winners in 2017 will receive $3 million as a top prize, $2 million to the second and $1 million to the third place.
Learn more at americasbestcommunities.com

 

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