Continuing our series from previous months – Read below about Chapters 5 and 6 of the book, 13 Ways to Kill Your Community.

Chapter 5—Shop Elsewhere: Did you know every dollar spent within a community reaches seven other hands before it leaves the community, which keeps the local economy advancing? Each dollar spent outside the community is gone forever. Businesses have grown to expect people to shop locally and don’t always provide the price, quality, selection, or service that folks demand. Drive your community’s economy into the ground by ensuring that businesses and consumers demand from each other, instead of supporting each other, and your future will leave town as fast as the dollars.

Chapter 6— Don’t Paint: A community’s appearance is the most telling sign of its own pride, it’s the clearest indication of faith in itself and it is the clearest outward sign of its future. I know that saying a community’s appearance is critical to its success is like saying we should judge a book by its cover, but in reality, we do exactly that. Failure may take a concerted effort to turn your town ugly, and of course that will only create the facade of failure, it will only create the illusion that your town is dying, and in essence it will only put an ugly cover on your book. With patience, however, no one will pick up that book to read, no one will be attracted to your community, and eventually that illusion of failure will become a reality.

This article was published in the Venango Chamber’s April 2024 VenangoWorks! Newsletter.