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What you’ll get from this post: a concrete model for funding small communities without the application that keeps most of them out, plus the trust-based practices that took one North Dakota program to a 44 of 45 success rate.

Megan Langley was on an intro call earlier this morning, before we ever hit record. A small town. Real needs. The kind of place that shows up on a county map and nowhere else. And the question she keeps circling, in that call and in most of her work, is blunt: how do you let a town of 150 people compete with an organization that has fifteen million dollars?

Most of philanthropy answers that question by accident. It builds a process, picks the cleanest application, and funds the org that already had a grant writer on staff. Megan runs StrengthenND, and she answers it on purpose. She got rid of the application.

That move is the spine of this whole conversation. But to understand why it works, you have to start where she starts. Not with a system. With a place.

Why does rural keep getting left out of the money?

Megan lives on a farm outside Souris, North Dakota, in a community of about 35 people. She grew up near Warwick, the third daughter of a farmer rancher and a saddle maker. She tried leaving. South of Minneapolis. Bozeman. None of it took.

“There’s something about the land here that just makes it feel like home,” she told me. That’s not nostalgia talking. It shapes how she funds.

Here’s the pattern she names early: a lot of what flows through rural communities, whether it’s industry or philanthropy, tends to be extractive. Money and attention come in, take something, and leave. StrengthenND was built to run the other direction. Grant writing. Grant making. A small incubator farm north of Baldwin. Local foods work. A People Power AmeriCorps program. If it touches rural space, they tend to have a hand in it.

The reason rural gets skipped is not that the need is smaller. It’s that the funding machine was built for organizations that look a certain way. Staff. Polish. A development director who knows how a grant application is supposed to sound. Take that machine to a town of 180, and it locks most of them out before anyone reads a single idea.

What was actually broken about the grant process?

Anyone who has raised money in the nonprofit or higher ed world already knows the answer in their gut. The grant process is a giant pain. It’s labor-intensive. It rewards the writing as much as the work.

Megan walked it back to first principles. A community can’t get funding because it can’t put together a quality application. Why? Because it has no grant writer. Why does that matter? Because the application is the gate. So she asked the question almost nobody in a foundation asks out loud: why do you need a standard grant application at all?

“What’s that one lever that we could push to make things easier for everybody, to make it more equitable for everybody? Get rid of a grant application.”

For StrengthenND’s Creative Community Solutions program, that meant letting communities tell them what they need in other ways. A two-page narrative. Audio files. A short video element. The information still comes in. It just doesn’t have to arrive dressed up in the format that favors the org that could afford to dress it up.

This is a radical move in the spaces we work in. And it worked.

What changes when you fund the idea instead of the writing?

Two things shifted right away, and they matter for anyone who funds other people’s work.

First, more of the right applications showed up. StrengthenND saw a real uptick from rural, underserved, tribal, and immigrant-based communities. The ones that were getting left out by the application itself started getting in.

Second, the money started landing closer to the actual problem. When you stop grading writing style, you stop funding the prettiest brochure and start funding the org closest to the need.

Here’s the bad version and the good version, side by side.

The bad version: a community submits a polished proposal with a calculated ROI and beautiful design, written by someone they paid to make it sound right. The funder picks it because it reads well. Nine months later, the project has drifted, the money is locked to promises that no longer fit, and everyone pretends the original plan still applies.

The good version: a community sends a two-page narrative and a voice memo describing the problem in their own words. The funder gets on the phone. They ask what the money is actually for. They find out the org needs more time, not more money, or a connection instead of a check. Then they fund the real thing and stay in the relationship while it changes.

That second version is how you get to a 44/45 success rate. Megan funded 45 projects through that approach. One fell apart, and that one came undone because of external environmental factors, not because the model failed. The rest worked because she got to the root of what people were trying to do before the money moved.

What does a “lever of change” actually look like?

Megan talks about finding the one small thing you can push to make everything downstream easier. Killing the application was one lever. Community-owned capital is another, and it’s the one that made me sit up.

Most economic development conversations obsess over access to capital for businesses. Megan kept noticing that nobody asked the same question about the community itself. So StrengthenND piloted a community-owned financing tool in Cheyenne, North Dakota, with a team called Cheyenne Grit.

The structure is simple and a little radical. StrengthenND put $300,000 into the community and said, in effect, you make the decisions. You invest in yourselves the way any entrepreneur would. We hope the money comes back. If it doesn’t, it was a capital investment, and capital investments carry risk.

Look at what a town of about 180 people did with that trust in under three years. They leveraged more than half a million dollars in other grants into the community. They flipped three houses on roughly 90 percent volunteer labor. They brought back half of their Main Street businesses. They’re working on an apartment building and a childcare facility.

All of that started with one sentence: here’s the money, go.

Why trust beats a beautiful brochure

The thread running through every piece of this is trust, and trust is a practice, not a slogan.

StrengthenND’s whole grant-making philosophy is partnership. Not dictating. Sharing in the success. When a project starts to go sideways, it’s not unusual for a grantee to call and say they need to change scope. And they work it out together. The relationship is strong enough to survive the change.

Compare that to the standard arrangement, where you submit a grant with the information you have at the time, wait three to nine months for review, and then stay hamstrung to promises that may not even apply anymore. Megan’s model assumes the plan will change, because plans always do, and builds the relationship to hold that.

There’s a discipline inside this that’s easy to miss. Megan is careful not to let her own ideas reshape someone else’s why. She’ll bring a wealth of perspective to a community, then caveat it hard: don’t change your idea because you think it’s what gets you the grant. The why stays theirs. She’s only ever helping with the how.

That restraint is the part most funders skip. It’s also the part that makes the trust real.

The story she leads with

Ask Megan where this confidence comes from and she’ll take you to a doghouse and a mean rooster.

She was four or five. Her older sisters had a plan to deal with a rooster that had taken over the dog house and terrorized the yard. The plan involved a shoelace noose, the two sisters perched on the roof, and little Megan as bait, marching down the hill with a pink wiffle ball bat. The noose missed. The rooster came out flying, caught her, and pecked her on the back of the head while she ran. Her mom watched the whole thing and laughed until she could barely stand.

What Megan pulled out of getting pecked by a rooster is the line she still runs her life on. “Everything is figureoutable. Always. You just have to try.” Sometimes you fall flat on your face and get pecked on the back of the neck. You get up anyway.

She started StrengthenND not knowing it would work. The bet was never certainty. The bet was that she could figure it out. That’s the same thing she tells the communities she funds. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done before. We’re going to try, and we’ll get there.

Your action plan

You don’t run a foundation? Doesn’t matter. Most of this transfers to anyone who funds, raises, or fights for a mission. Pick a lane and start.

This week, 30 minutes: Pull up your intake form, application, or donor survey. Read it as if you were a volunteer-run org in a town of 150. Mark every question that rewards polish over substance.

This week, 1 hour: Call one grantee or partner and ask the question Megan asks. What do you actually need the money for? Listen for whether the answer is more money, more time, or a connection. Don’t fix it on the call. Just hear it.

This month, half a day: Find your one lever. Look at the single barrier that knocks the most people out before they ever reach you. Name it. Sketch what removing it would cost and what it would open up.

This quarter, ongoing: Build one relationship that can survive a change in scope. Pick a partner, tell them plainly that you expect the plan to shift, and that you’d rather get a phone call than a failed report. Then mean it.

Before you fund anything else: Run the brochure test. Are you about to back the cleanest proposal, or the org closest to the problem? If those two are different, you have a decision to make.

Resource Hub

• StrengthenND, the organization, programs, and contact: strengthennd.com
• Creative Community Solutions, the application-free grant program at the center of this episode
• Cheyenne Grit, the community-owned financing pilot in Cheyenne, ND
• Northwest North Dakota Community Foundation, StrengthenND’s first client and an early part of the story
• Minot Area Community Foundation, where Megan kept her dream book
• Start with Story, Max’s newsletter on human-first storytelling, at wetellwell.com

Frequently asked questions

What is rural philanthropy? Rural philanthropy is grant-making and giving aimed at small and often overlooked communities. The catch is that standard funding processes were built for larger, staffed organizations, so rural communities are screened out before their ideas are even judged.

Can you really run a grant program without an application? Yes. StrengthenND replaced the standard application with two-page narratives, audio, and short videos for its Creative Community Solutions program. Applications from rural, tribal, and immigrant-based communities went up, and 44 of 45 funded projects succeeded.

What is community-owned capital? It’s an investment made directly into a community rather than a single business, with the community deciding how to spend it. StrengthenND piloted it in Cheyenne, ND, putting in $300,000 that the town deployed itself, the way an entrepreneur would.

Why does trust-based grant making produce better outcomes? Because it assumes plans change. When a grantee can call and renegotiate the scope instead of being locked into a promise from months earlier, the money stays tied to the real problem. That relationship is what carried StrengthenND’s success rate.

Who is Megan Langley? Megan Langley leads StrengthenND from a farm outside Souris, North Dakota. She started in philanthropy at the Minot Area Community Foundation and now runs grant-making, community-owned financing pilots, and rural development across the state.