Communities from Montana, Texas and Wisconsin Join Local Crowd

LARAMIE, Wyoming, October 17, 2016. The Local Crowd (http://www.thelocalcrowd.com), a locally-focused crowdfunding platform, has selected three rural communities to serve as Demonstration Sites for a USDA funded research project.

The Local Crowd’s platform offers features and educational programs designed to help rural communities activate entrepreneurial ecosystems and spur local investment. The two-year USDA Small Business Innovation Research grant will support the launch of up to 30 Demonstration Sites, with the ultimate goal of commercializing a new tool that provides better access to capital for businesses and organizations across rural America.

The three communities selected to be Demonstration Sites are Butte, Montana; Lower Valley Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Harlingen, Texas; and Wood County, Wisconsin. They will join the communities of Bozeman, Montana; Laramie, Wyoming; Golden Hills, Iowa; Goshen, Indiana; Monadnock Region, New Hampshire; Oregon, Illinois; Sauk Valley Region, Illinois; Spoon River, Illinois. and Teton Valley, Idaho.

“We are pleased to have such a strong group of dedicated and visionary communities coming in as our second group of Demonstration Sites,” said Diane Wolverton, Co-Founder and CEO of The Local Crowd. “During the review process, each community team submitted a vision statement about how being a Demonstration site would impact their community. These vision statements capsulized their commitment to stimulate ‘deep collaboration, innovation, local investing, job creation, eco-tourism, youth engagement, and connectivity between businesses and the community.’ We are looking forward to great results from this dynamic and extremely creative team!