Shane Farthing & Associates (SF&A) helps communities build vision and capacity, align resources, and deliver sustainable results. We serve local governments, organizations, congregations, and institutions.

Our Specialties:

• Economic & community development programming for small, rural, and under-resourced communities. We specialize in communities of under 50,000 residents, where the gap between local goals and professional execution is often widest.

  We leverage federal grant programs (EDA, USDA, DOT, HUD CDBG, CMAQ, EPA) and local economic development tools to help revitalize and sustain small communities;

• Community project alignment. We help communities bridge the gaps between the desire to revitalize and the demands of a viable project. This includes project visioning, investor attraction, public-private partnership development, capital stack advising, and strategic structuring.

• 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 economies benefit from their trails and trail network investments.

• 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 economies. Many wonderful communities depend on tourists to bring external dollars to support local livelihoods. But an unbalanced tourist economy undermines local quality-of-life (and the future of your most attractive assets). We help craft and implement strategies, policies, programs, and partnerships to restore balance to the local tourism economy.

• Active transportation. We have supported the build-out of hundreds of miles of trails, bike lanes, and innovative improvements to traffic safety, and helped communities build their trail economies through strategic planning, project design, destination marketing, and community program design.

  We have funded and built Trail Ranger, Downtown Ambassador, and similar programs across the nation to support community health, workforce development, TDM, and recreation economy goals.

Our Offerings:

• We advise and undertake projects for local governments, nonprofits, associations, and congregations.

• We offer scalable, experienced, professional economic and community 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 support and grow local talent to lead, manage, and deliver economic and community development outcomes.

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

• We provide engagement strategy at local and regional scales to support programming, partnership, and projects.