In Byron, Mich. (pop. 581), Ashley Connelly found a village hustling to build its future. Community leaders are planning a boardwalk along the Shiawassee River National Water Trail. The village just held a ribbon cutting on a new pocket park. They are working to ensure the continued vitality of their school and revitalize a downtown gutted by fire. There’s a new coffee shop in town, opened by a recent high school graduate, and the village is collaborating with Burns Township on a new community hall and library.

The flurry of activity in this tiny community is driven by local leadership — and strengthened by technical assistance from Connelly’s Lionbear Ventures, which helps small towns turn plans into funded projects. “My soapbox is, technical assistance dollars are very, very hard to fund,” Connelly said. “No one wants to fund the planning. It’s not a sexy thing to fund.”

But since her childhood in nearby New Lothrop (pop. 565), Connelly has seen the challenges small communities face in obtaining funding.  “My dad was water commissioner of my village, and I learned that villages have no staff and no capacity to win grants, let alone plan for them or administrate them,” she said.

In more than a decade working as a financial analyst and controller — including for Lockheed Martin in Italy — Connelly gained skills most small towns don’t have access to but desperately need. She returned to Michigan, invested in real estate and worked in Detroit for a start-up nonprofit serving the national sewing industry.

Hustling for work while raising small kids during the pandemic led to burnout. Like many people during the pandemic, Connelly re-evaluated not just how she wanted to work, but where her skills mattered most. She thought about where she grew up, and how she wanted to contribute to her community.

“I was tired of all the funding going to the same places,” she said. “So I launched Lionbear Ventures on my own and moved home. I wanted places where I grew up to also have equitable access to funding.”

As a contractor for the Shiawassee Economic Development Partnership, Connelly helped secure Michigan’s first successful USDA Community Facilities Technical Assistance and Training (CFTAT) grant – a public funding tool designed to help small communities plan and compete. With the funds, Lionbear Ventures offered free grant writing and planning support to the county’s smallest villages, townships and nonprofits. “For each $1 spent, we returned $24 in outside funds, primarily state and federal dollars,” Connelly said. Those dollars helped small villages hire local contractors, plan long-delayed projects, and bring state and federal investment into communities that rarely make it to the front of the line.

The program and private clients brought in $5 million to Shiawassee County. Now, Lionbear has been able to expand its services to offer technical assistance in a pilot program to other small communities.

One of these villages is Pullman, a low-income former logging community. In Pullman, local volunteers with Beautify Pullman were already organizing around the future of their town. Professional grant implementation helped homeowners determine that their properties were free of contaminants. The community has now built a park, planned sidewalks, and secured a Thriving Communities Environmental Justice grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to test soil and groundwater for contaminants from a decades-old chemical spill.

Connelly’s Lionbear Ventures has now raised over $13 million for rural communities. She hopes this success shows what is possible throughout Michigan, if small community leaders have the professional help to bring their dreams to fruition.

Tiny communities like Byron and Pullman are pulling together to turn big visions into reality — but too often lack access to professional capacity that larger places take for granted.

“These communities in rural places, they need this kind of assistance,” Connelly said. “Public investment and community-based foundations, like The Cook Family Foundation in Michigan, have stepped forward to fill this essential gap. “With a bit of additional professional capacity, rural communities get the help needed to pull together fundable projects that make a meaningful impact. If not, they’re going to continue to be disinvested and overlooked.”