Thrive in Five with Thrive Community Partners
Building stronger communities starts with stronger strategy.Thrive in Five is a quick, practical podcast for the people doing the important work of building, sustaining, and growing communities.Hosted by Sarah Stephens Krupp and Renee Smith, founders of Thrive Community Partners, each episode delivers one actionable idea in five minutes or less for community leaders, economic developers, chambers of commerce, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and organizations working to create lasting impact.Drawing from decades of experience in community development, strategic planning, entrepreneurship, grant strategy, and organizational capacity building, Sarah and Renee share honest conversations about what works, what doesn't, and how to...
Why We Started Thrive
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 After all of these quick episodes talking about grants, strategic planning, entrepreneurship, community development, leadership and everything in between, Renee closes out Season 1 of Thrive in Five by going back to where it started.
Renee and Sarah kept seeing capable communities, purpose-driven organizations and promising entrepreneurs get stuck. Not because they weren't working hard enough or didn't have good ideas, but because they were missing the right support at the right moment.
Sometimes that's capacity. Sometimes it's grant writing or strategic planning. And sometimes it's simply h...
Not All Growth is Good
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 Entrepreneurs and community leaders are constantly told to scale faster, do more and chase the next opportunity. But growth that outpaces your people, systems or capacity can create more problems than progress.
In this episode of Thrive in Five, Sarah makes the case for a different kind of growth: intentional, sustainable and built to last.
That means building one thing well before adding the next. Saying no to opportunities that don't align, even when the money looks good. Investing in people and systems before you desperately n...
Your Grant Rejection Isn't Personal
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 You spent hours researching, writing, gathering data and building the strongest proposal you could. Then the answer comes back: no.
In this episode of Thrive in Five, Renee explains why even strong grant proposals get rejected, including factors you may never see, from changing funder priorities and budget cycles to the number of applications and the people reviewing them.
More importantly, she shares what to do next: ask for feedback, take it seriously, make adjustments when needed and keep the conversation going.
Because rejection i...
This is Why You Should Ask for Help Before You Need It
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 Sarah speaks to executive directors, small business owners, and community leaders who are trying to do too much alone, describing a common pattern where capacity, strategy, funding, or team issues are ignored or handled internally until they escalate into a crisis. She shares examples of a long-time entrepreneur who waited too long to address financial problems and a nonprofit where unaddressed team dynamics became conflict and turnover. Sarah emphasizes that asking for help and asking questions are not signs of weakness or incompetence, but strategic actions that prevent bigger problems l...
You Don't Need Authority to Lead. You Need Trust.
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 Renee contrasts business leadership with community leadership, emphasizing that community leaders often have real responsibility but limited authority and can’t mandate participation or force collaboration. Instead, they build trust by showing up consistently, sharing credit, staying at the table when things get hard, returning calls, remembering what matters to people, and being honest about challenges. The episode highlights that community leadership is relational before it’s strategic, and that people primarily want to be heard and understood rather than agreed with. Small actions like listening and following up can shift...
Have the Hard Conversation Before You Need To
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 Sarah explains that most partnership agreements focus on shared goals but skip planning for disagreement, changing priorities, shifts in capacity, illness, or even death—realities that can devastate business, nonprofit, and community partnerships when there’s no plan. Drawing on what she’s seen in the field and through CoStarters, she shares an attorney’s common warning: partners often fail to put a solid partnership agreement in place because they avoid difficult conversations. She emphasizes that conflict and life changes are inevitable, and lasting partnerships are built when partners talk about con...
The Planning Process is the Easy Part
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 Renee argues that planning is often the easy part, while real failure happens months later when owners of action items leave, budgets don’t appear, and teams wait for someone else to act. She says most community plans die through a quiet stall and that successful organizations treat implementation planning as seriously as strategy by defining ownership for each priority, creating a concrete first 90-day action plan, and committing real resources before finalizing the plan. She emphasizes revisiting the 90-day plan every three months to catch problems early instead of rev...
The Right People Aren't Always at the Table
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 Sarah speaks to economic developers, community planners, and nonprofit directors about identifying the informal leaders every community has—people without titles who hold real trust and influence in neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches. She argues that professionals often view communities only through the problems they address and miss perspectives they don’t know they lack. Before planning begins, she recommends asking “Whose voice is missing?” and seeking out those voices by going to them, listening more than talking, and valuing their relationships. Drawing on advice from Renee to “choose your five,” Sarah suggest...
Why Community Meetings Fail
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 Renee explains why most community meetings fail: they’re designed to inform rather than engage, with a presentation followed by Q&A that leaves people feeling like spectators. She argues real engagement starts with genuine questions like “What’s the most important thing we need to get right?”, creates space for people who don’t speak up publicly, and changes outcomes based on what’s heard. Renee recommends offering multiple ways to contribute—such as surveys or Post-It boards—because different audiences engage differently. By designing meetings for contribution instead of presentation...
Saying No Is How You Get the Right Yes
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 Sarah from Thrive Community Partners shares why learning to say no is a crucial skill for entrepreneurs and small business owners. She explains that saying no to bad-fit clients, misaligned projects, and distracting opportunities protects your core offer and keeps your focus as you grow. While it can feel scary to turn things down, she argues that saying yes to everything isn’t momentum—it’s diffusion—and it makes it harder to excel at what drives success. Using the example of constant donation requests, she suggests choosing one to two organ...
Your Customers Can't Value What You Don't Communicate
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 This is how small businesses get trapped in a “race to the bottom” by undercutting competitors to win early customers, triggering price wars where everyone earns less and works harder. Renee argues the cheapest competitor isn’t the real problem; the bigger issue is not being clear about why your business is worth more. She explains that price communicates value and that customers who buy only on price are the least loyal, leaving as soon as someone offers less. Instead, she encourages focusing on the value drivers behind the business—service...
The Most Dangerous Word in Entrepreneurship
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 Sarah challenges aspiring entrepreneurs to stop waiting for their business idea to be “almost” ready, arguing that “almost” is more dangerous than failure because it stalls dreams with endless moving targets like more savings, a finished website, or a completed business plan. Drawing on what Thrive Community Partners sees repeatedly, she explains that paralysis through analysis keeps people from launching, while entrepreneurs who build lasting businesses start with what they have, begin small, learn quickly, and adjust fast. She encourages viewers to identify the smallest, most real version of their business...
The Most Forgotten Part of Any Grant Proposal Is Not What You Think
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Most grant proposals don't fail because of the narrative—they fail because the budget doesn't inspire confidence.
In this episode of Thrive in Five, Sarah explains why funders view your grant budget as a trust document and how it influences every funding decision. Learn why your budget should never be an afterthought, how it should reinforce your program narrative, and why honesty about indirect costs actually strengthens your proposal.
You'll also discover three practical ways to improve your next grant proposal:
 Con...The Secret to Winning Grant Proposals
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Drawing on 20 years of grant writing and reviewing hundreds of proposals, Renee explains that winning grant applications almost always share one key trait: specificity. She argues that funders don’t fund vague language or uncommitted ranges; they fund specific, credible, executable plans that state the exact number of people served, the exact location, the exact intervention, and the exact measurable outcomes. Renee notes writers often drift into comfort zones by adding extra time to timelines or using ranges for participants, which works against them. She advises revisiting drafts to circle va...
Stop Grant Chasing and Build Your Mission
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Sarah challenges nonprofits to stop “grant chasing,” calling it exhausting, inconsistent, and harmful to building capacity, and instead adopt a funding strategy based on organizational priorities and three-year goals. She explains that a strategy works backward to identify aligned funding sources, the right sequence, and needed lead time, helping teams move from reactive deadline-hopping to planning. Framing grant writing as relationship-building, she compares applying for mismatched grants to a bad first date that won’t lead to a second, emphasizing that alignment with both funder priorities and your own strategy matter...
Your Rural Community Isn't Too Small. It's Built for This.
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Renee shares why the “we’re too small” narrative is one of the most damaging beliefs rural communities can hold, arguing that small-town closeness is actually a powerful relationship infrastructure that larger cities try to recreate at great cost. She explains that rural communities can move quickly because key people already know and trust each other—mayors, superintendents, economic developers, and major employers can get in the same room within a week without layers of bureaucracy. While acknowledging the everyday reality that small towns make quick errands difficult because everyone knows ev...
Why Your Grant Proposals Get Rejected
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Sarah explains that grant proposals are rarely rejected because of poor writing, but instead for three common reasons: misalignment between the project and the funder’s priorities, weak community evidence that the problem is real and the organization is credible, and a lack of a clear implementation path showing how the work will happen after funding. She advises spending an hour before writing to confirm true alignment, demonstrate that the community is experiencing the stated problem, and outline a practical plan for execution and sustainability beyond the funding period. Addressing th...
The 3 Questions Every Strategic Plan Needs
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In this episode of Thrive in Five, Renee explains a common mistake communities make: investing heavily in planning, visioning, and strategic frameworks while skipping an honest conversation about capacity—who will do the work, with what resources, and on top of what else. She shares how small staffs often take on more initiatives without stopping old ones, and how plans fall apart when unexpected absences occur. Renee argues that a plan without a realistic capacity assessment is a wish list, not a strategy. Before the next planning process, she urges le...
This is Thrive in Five | Podcast Trailer
What are your ideas to THRIVE? Share!
Welcome to Thrive in Five, a new podcast from Thrive Community Partners featuring Sarah Stephens Krupp + Renee Smith.
If you're a community leader, economic developer, chamber professional, nonprofit executive, entrepreneur, or someone working to strengthen your community, you're in the right place.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, your hosts share one practical idea in five minutes or less to help you build stronger organizations, stronger partnerships, and stronger communities.
Drawing from decades of experience in community development, strategic planning, entrepreneurship...
