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.
Takeaways
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.
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.”
Megan Langley, StrengthenND
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. 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.
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.”
Megan Langley
For StrengthenND’s Creative Community Solutions program, that meant letting communities tell them what they need in other ways.
A two-page narrative
Tell us the problem and what you’d do about it. Plain language wins.
An audio file
Talk it through in your own voice. No grant writer required.
A short video
Show the place, the people, and the need. That’s the application.
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.
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 of 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.
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.
All of that started with one sentence: here’s the money, go.
The thread running through every piece of this is trust, and trust is a practice.
StrengthenND’s whole grant-making philosophy is partnership. 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.
The discipline most funders skip
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 that makes the trust real.
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.
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.
The notes are great. But if you’re ready to stop reading about storytelling and start investing in yours, let’s talk.
