Rethink Local invests its time and energy in initiatives that help build civic resilience and strengthen our communities. These initiatives are primarily supported by revenue from our technical advising services and include activities such as meeting and work sessions, facilitating collaboration, and helping to find grant/funding sources with a variety of local government officials and stakeholders, such as towns, regional planning commissions, state agencies/departments, nonprofits, and community groups and individuals.
Here are three of the areas that we’re working on in 2025:
Housing. Housing has been a ‘crisis’ in the Upper Valley for more than a decade. This is a complex issue, but with several important consequences that are negatively impacting our communities. The first and most obvious is that there isn’t sufficient and affordable housing to meet the demands of the region. Employers, including local governments, are struggling to hire people, and this is having a negative impact on many downtowns and local economies and will continue to have a growing impact on the delivery and availability of a variety of public services. Beyond that, because home ownership is one of the primary wealth-building tools in the United States, the current dynamics place additional pressures that contribute to NIMBYism, where small groups of people often acting in their perceived best interest in protecting their financial asset, restrict the ability for others to live in the place that they do. However, through smart planning and community engagement practices, there are ways to build new housing that maintain community character, protect natural and open space areas, and create vibrancy and places for people to live. Rethink Local is engaged in a number of conversations with stakeholders, ranging from helping towns and nonprofits consider and implement robust community planning activities to working with stakeholders to find ways to reduce the cost of new construction through simplified or innovative wastewater solutions.
Public outreach and engagement. It’s imperative that local governments go “beyond transparency” and find ways to be proactive in bringing people into the conversations in their communities. Too often decisions are made in small and non-representative spaces, and with broader public outreach and engagement, town officials can better understand their communities and make decisions that represent a wider range of people who live there. Rethink Local is engaged in a number of conversations with local government and related stakeholders helping to encourage and educate about the ways that they can use offline and online methods to bring more community members into local conversations.
Elected official onboarding and support. Many local elected officials, even with the best intentions, are not able to be successful in their roles because of fractured relationships with other officials, lack of trust in their community, or not having had the opportunity to receive training on board service. Rethink Local is engaged in a wide variety of conversations and projects aiming to bring more best practices out and to local governments to help local elected officials be set up for success in what they do. Trust, for example, is an imperative part of community decision-making, but creating it is not easy. We are working to release a set of best practices in the spring 2025 on elected official onboarding and orientation materials that will be freely available to any town or stakeholders.