Becky McCray on Blurring the Lines Between Business and Community

In this episode of Breaking Down Barriers, McKenzie sits down with Becky McCray to unpack why the old lines between "business" and "community project" don't hold up anymore, especially in rural America. Becky has spent nearly two decades at the intersection of entrepreneurship and small-town community building, and she brings that experience to life through real examples: an engineer wrestling with whether a timber festival makes him a "greedy capitalist" or a "community do-gooder," a divided building in Colfax, WA that became home to microbusinesses, and a beautification project in Freedom, Oklahoma (population under 200) that's using duct tape and cardboard mockups to let residents co-design their own downtown before a single dollar is spent.Becky and McKenzie talk about:Why the for-profit/nonprofit divide is a legal classification, not a reflection of how communities actually think about valueHow Freedom, Oklahoma is blending history, public space, and economic development into one active-living and beautification projectThe "idea-friendly method": gather your crowd, build connections, take small stepsWhy bigger towns tend toward silos and how smaller towns can model a better wayWhy standardized entrepreneurship curriculums fail, and what happens when programs start with intake instead of a lecture outlineThe new cohort model Becky and Deb Brown (SaveYour.Town) are building with Andrew Button of Mashup Lab, bringing entrepreneurial and community-minded participants into the same room Becky's closing advice: Start looking around your own community. The blending of business and community thinking is already happening. You just have to go find it and start the conversation.Connect with Becky:SaveYour.TownLinkedIn: Becky McCrayBeckyMcCray.comSmall Biz Survival newsletter2026 Rural Challenges Survey