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Missourians once again showed the power of connection during Missouri Good Neighbor Week and Excelsior Springs stood out among them.

The 2025 Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities Conference ended with a call to action – one centered on civic pride, collaboration and the simple power of caring for the places people call home.

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When Dr. Mallory Rahe embedded herself in small towns across Iowa to study what made local projects succeed, she expected to find answers in data and budgets. Instead, she found relationships, not resources, were most often the determining factor in whether communities could thrive.

Faith, mindset and hard work were the focus of agricultural consultant Deana Imhoff’s presentation during the Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities Conference.

When two former colleagues met for coffee in late 2022, they had no intention of launching a new venture. Yet that simple conversation would set the stage for a growing network of collaborative workspaces now helping entrepreneurs reimagine what community can look like.

Neighbors can make or break a community, and the relationships they form ripple out to strengthen local businesses, civic life and even the economy.