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 move from ideas to implementation.
Whether you're leading a downtown revitalization effort, writing your next strategic plan, building partnerships, supporting entrepreneurs, or looking for funding strategies that create long-term success, Thrive in Five provides practical insights you can apply immediately.
New episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Topics include:
- Strategic Planning
- Community Development
- Economic Development
- Entrepreneurship
- Grant Strategy
- Organizational Capacity
- Leadership
- Partnerships
- Rural & Small Community Growth
Because thriving communities don't happen by accident—they happen through intentional leadership, practical strategy, and people willing to do the work together.
Episodes
19 episodes
Why We Started Thrive
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....
Not All Growth is Good
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 T...
Your Grant Rejection Isn't Personal
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, inc...
This is Why You Should Ask for Help Before You Need It
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 ...
You Don't Need Authority to Lead. You Need Trust.
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 s...
Have the Hard Conversation Before You Need To
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 par...
The Planning Process is the Easy Part
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...
The Right People Aren't Always at the Table
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 churche...
Why Community Meetings Fail
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 ...
Saying No Is How You Get the Right Yes
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 protect...
Your Customers Can't Value What You Don't Communicate
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 ...
The Most Dangerous Word in Entrepreneurship
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...
The Most Forgotten Part of Any Grant Proposal Is Not What You Think
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<...
The Secret to Winning Grant Proposals
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; th...
Stop Grant Chasing and Build Your Mission
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 strate...
Your Rural Community Isn't Too Small. It's Built for This.
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 co...
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Why Your Grant Proposals Get Rejected
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 organi...
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The 3 Questions Every Strategic Plan Needs
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 resourc...
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