Building the Future: Kanokla Forever Fund Launches First Project

In addition to expanding broadband infrastructure, Kanokla is investing directly in our communities—laying down pre-development infrastructure that attracts new housing, supports workforce growth, and strengthens the future of our towns.

Kanokla recently announced the creation of the Kanokla Forever Fund, a community development initiative designed to strengthen the vitality, competitiveness, and economic ecosystem of the communities we serve. At its core, the goal is simple: we want our towns to be great places to live, work, and raise a family. When those basic quality-of-life needs are met, good things tend to follow.

The Kanokla Forever Fund is a statement of confidence in rural America. By setting aside resources today, Kanokla is creating a permanent mechanism to support community projects and strategic initiatives that keep rural places competitive and resilient.

The first project for the Forever Fund: attracting quality housing. It is a perfect pairing with the broadband network we constructed nearly 15 years ago. We are growing our Work-From-Home workforce because of broadband – now we need the Homes to work from. “Grow your own” has been our mission for years. We back that up with revolving loans to spur business creation, technical workforce development, youth internships, and community grants. To maximize economic impact, living and spending in the same community is powerful.

Across rural Kansas and Oklahoma, one challenge consistently rises to the top when local leaders talk about growth — a lack of available homes. Without places for people to live, growth stalls before it even begins.

For many small towns, vacant lots and underutilized land represent untapped potential. Strategic housing development can transform those spaces into neighborhoods that attract young families, skilled workers, professionals and entrepreneurs who want to live and work in rural America. This brings new students into schools, new customers into local businesses, and new taxpayers to help support the infrastructure and services that make communities thrive.

When rural communities grow, everything grows with them.

A timely opportunity in Caldwell made it possible to convert prime acreage within the city limits into a future housing subdivision, maximizing valuable infill land. This project is now underway with the foundational work of engineering, surveying, and platting. In the coming months, the next phase will move into grading and the installation of water, sewer, and street infrastructure to prepare the site by year-end for more than twenty new homes. We will also promote the available lots along with a list of local area licensed contractors for an easy path to build your own home.

Caldwell is also unique in that the City put a 10-year NRP (neighborhood revitalization program) in place in 2024, allowing up to 95% of the property taxes on new construction to be reimbursed to the homeowner for ten years. This generous incentive will be paired with 2 additional incentives: Free lots and no special assessments for an attractive package, making the decision easier for homeowners to choose Caldwell. It also plugs directly into Caldwell’s unique amenities. Caldwell’s new Caldwell Regional Medical Center cleared the path for the lots to become available. Building vertical assets within this footprint expands both the patient base and tax base that full-circle supports the new hospital.

This first project reflects the Forever Fund’s mission: investing today to create the foundations for vibrant, growing communities that will thrive for generations to come. Each town we serve has unique assets to build upon, and no two community development projects look exactly the same. We didn’t choose the timing of the Caldwell project, but the serendipity of our focus landing a match is a window of shining opportunity for housing and population growth in Caldwell. Hardtner, another member community, is also in need of a unique infrastructure upgrade. Though not a hands-on direct involvement, we are assisting in this vital project for livability.

For at least the past half century, basing public investment on population mistakenly assumes population equals productivity, which unintentionally undervalues low-population regions that carry high production responsibility. Our backs are breaking. The urban-bias is a real, learned behavior that’s underwritten into everything.

When capital consistently flows away from the places that generate value, decline is the self-fulfilling equation. Population drops, funding formulas shrink, and reinvestment becomes harder — not because rural places lack productivity, but because the system measures the wrong thing.

Rural reinvestment and recognition as a high-output region that generates the energy, food, fiber, fuel, and increasingly, data infrastructure that powers life, will be life-changing for 100% of our country. Continuing to operate with low reinvestment based simply on headcount is sucking the life out of 80% of our country’s landmass, eliminating the very people that make our country run.

Rural America is a production engine of the nation.

* Rural places produce disproportionate value.

* Metro places consume disproportionate value.

* The system reinvests disproportionately elsewhere.

* The imbalance is structural — let's see it and change it before it's gone.

Kanokla will work with our members to reverse this trend. We will look for funding, match opportunities, find the right partners, and reinvent the broken wheel. There’s no looking back because it is unhelpful. We only have the future, and it needs the seeds planted today.