Shane Farthing & Associates (SF&A) helps build communities where people want to live, work, visit, and invest.

Our Specialties:

• Economic & community development programming for small, rural, and under-resourced communities. We bring professional capacity to communities that need it, and we specialize in tools that work across scales—including smaller communities, rural regions, and conservation-focused areas. We partner across sectors and institutions to make projects happen, leveraging federal grant programs (EDA, USDA, DOT, HUD CDBG, CMAQ, EPA) and local economic development tools to sustain and revitalize communities.

• Nonprofit strategy & development. We help community-based nonprofits align the resources, structures, and engagement they need to sustainably achieve their visions. We help mission-based organizations engage community members and decision-makers, and turn engagement into resources and change.

• Infrastructure-workforce linkages. Communities must provide infrastructure to be successful, but how they provide that infrastructure can support the community’s long-term sustainability. We help communities deliver infrastructure that supports quality-of-life while also providing jobs and ancillary benefits.

• Supporting tourism & recreation economies. Tourism is an important tool for many communities. We help communities drive visitation and capture visitor spending to support local quality-of-life. We craft and implement strategies, policies, programs, and partnerships to restore and maintain balance in local tourism economies.

• Trail development and integration. Trails are often a community’s most beloved spaces, representing a shared connection to the landscape and to one another. We help communities and local economies benefit from their trails and trail network investments.

• Brownfield re-use and co-location strategies. We have a track record of success brokering partnerships to revitalize historic brownfields, including large-format industrial and manufacturing uses converted into mixed-use, housing, and medical manufacturing.

Our Offerings:

• We advise and undertake projects for local governments, nonprofits, associations, and foundations—and specialize in building coalitions and governance structures among local institutions to pursue common goals.

• We offer economic, community, and organizational development services in fractional, retained, and project-based formats.

• Through the Fellowship for Economic & Community Development Leadership, we overcome local recruitment challenges by training internal staff into professional EDO/CDO roles.

• We lend professional support to local institutions, ensuring that the communities we love have the technical integrity to secure funding and the operational capacity to create a lasting quality of place.