On this week’s episode of Can Do, Jennifer Sheets, a writer and English professor at the University of Montana talks about her success in winning the 2018 John Ruffato Business Startup Challenge along with $22,000 prize in start-up funding.

Sheets entered the competition with no business background or training. But, her idea to create StorySquares, a web-based writing platform for individuals, schools, and businesses that would let users complete a writing task from beginning to end using digital storyboarding methods won over judges.

Montana saw the biggest growth in median household income of any state in 2017, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released last week.

Senator Jon Tester says he’s concerned about Congress’ ability to pass numerous spending bills necessary to keep the federal government operating by the end of this month’s deadline.

Last year a similar time crunch led to Congress passing a so-called omnibus bill. Critics say omnibus bills lack the transparency of passing multiple appropriation bills under so-called “regular order.”

A middle school teacher from Bonner has been named the 2019 Montana Teacher of the Year.

Montana’s Public School Superintendent Elsie Arntzen visited Bonner Thursday to announce that social studies teacher Dylan Huisken had been selected to represent Montana in the National Teacher of the Year program next year.

Governor Steve Bullock is creating a bipartisan working-group to develop a plan to reduce premiums for people who buy health insurance on the federal marketplace.

A Montana Healthcare Foundation study found that reinsurance programs insulate insurers from very high claims and save consumers money.

Montana is preparing to replace its more than decade-old voter registration system as part of a federal grant program to improve election security.

However, Secretary of State Corey Stapleton says not all those improvements will be in place ahead of the 2018 midterms.

As Montana's fire season winds to a close, crews are closing-in on the handful of fires still burning across Western Montana.

Just two years after he'd taken up the bass guitar, sixteen-year-old Nathan East found himself on the road with Barry White. The next time the phone rang, Quincy Jones was on the line. The calls kept coming, and for more than forty years, East has been holding down the bass on hit songs with Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, and Daft Punk.

In the Redoubt, an isolated region of Idaho, Montana, and Eastern Oregon, the confrontation between old and new America plays out in emotional and violent skirmishes. This “true West,” as a character calls it, is “where all the Indians were dead and we white men had finally gotten around to killing ourselves.” Come West and See, by Maxim Loskutoff, unravels the mythology of the West and illustrates life in oft overlooked rural towns where men and women scramble for safety in their relationships as violence escalates around them. In twelve interconnected stories, Loskutoff’s fiction offers startling insights into America, its wounds and perpetual conflicts.