Lehigh ? As night falls and the glow of Christmas illuminates the quietness of their Main Street, Ruth Coyle credits a small town’s wish and a core of volunteers for delivering the holiday spirit.

Their town doesn’t have a school or even a church, only a grain elevator, half a dozen businesses and a post office. But for a second year, the decorations on the street light poles are all up and working.

“They’re so pretty after all the years of darkness,” Coyle said.

In the spirit of supporting small towns, Marci Penner at the Kansas Sampler Foundation, has launched a 2010 New Year’s Wish List for communities with a population of 2,000 or less, that asks the question: “What is the one thing your city needs?”

Responses may be e-mailed to marci@kansassampler.org.

She’ll post the wishes on the Kansas Sampler Foundation’s Web site, kansassampler.org, not to grant them but to network with other communities. It’s a way to create an exchange that shares the expertise of communities that successfully completed projects with other communities hoping to launch a project.

Three years ago, as their community (population 215, with 76 children) had no money to buy decorations, Coyle e-mailed a few people, asking whether they know of a city that might have hand-me-down decorations?

She credited Penner for posting Lehigh’s Christmas wish on the Kansas Sampler Web site.

Cities much larger than Lehigh responded. Delivery pickups, trucks and trailers loaded with used decorations headed for the Marion County town. A collection of garlands, lights and more filled a borrowed garage and storage shed. All they needed were plug-ins, brackets and elbow grease, Coyle said. “The bank chipped in and gave us a donation to help with wiring the poles.”

A contingent of volunteers mounted the decorations on the weekend after Thanksgiving. This year they doubled up the lights on their tree-shaped ornaments.

“Our little town looks so festive, not as big as the big towns, but we don’t need to. We have our own decorations,” she said. “You just have to jump out there and give it the gung ho if you want get something done in a small town.”

Like the loaves and fishes, Lehigh shared its abundance of decorations with four other communities. They sold the few remaining pieces and set that money aside to update bulbs and wiring.

Small town projects require volunteers, Coyle said, and she has her own way of garnering them.

“When you arm-twist, people generally say, ‘No, I just don’t have time,”‘ Coyle said. “What I did was to call and say ‘You, you and you need to be at City Hall by 5:15 p.m.'”

In addressing the wishes for small towns, Terry Woodbury, Public Square Kansas, hopes for a return of new young leaders who want to return to their home communities.

The Wish List will share information on the reality of wishing for a grocery store or a library. The minimum amount for a wholesale grocery truck stop is $15,000 a week in purchases, Penner said. And while some might think a small-town library couldn’t have a collection of, say, the New York Times best sellers, that might be what a reader who purchases those books would like to pass down.

She suggested the importance of establishing a community foundation to help with wealth retention after an older couple die and their property passes on to adult children who live out of town.

Another source of money lies in school alumni who have gone into the world, are successful in business and willingly donate to hometown projects.

“Communities can get inspired,” Penner said. “Things are happening.”‘