Imperative Three
Make the Right Investments in Rural America
Rural communities are critical to the strength of the nation. This report makes the case for greater investments in rural leadership development and capacity building efforts – growing local leadership is a critical place to start to increase thriving, equitable, and healthy rural communities.
RuraLead also calls for increased investments in rural America more broadly – not just because of prevailing narratives that rural is poor and underserved (even though far too often, it’s the truth), but because rural communities are places of great ingenuity, resilience, and innovation. Rural America needs more support. Taken as a whole, rural communities share universal challenges other communities face, and strive for the same opportunities for education, health, and living wage jobs, but they receive a disproportionately small influx of capital and support. The vast majority of national philanthropy dollars—94 percent—flows to urban areas.
“Rural places are, by definition, smaller. You’re affecting smaller numbers, smaller populations. You have to come to grips with [the fact that the] ‘N’ in which you’re trying to move the needle is likely to have, one digit fewer, two digits fewer. And yet, I don’t think it makes it less important or less relevant. Because these are the places we rely on to provide food, to provide natural resources. And, they have an outsized implication for, frankly, our civic structure. Their experience economically ends up playing out in a broad public dialogue nationally [in a way] that we have to be conscious of. I’ve picked up in some conversations the pursuit of impact from a sense of scale, that in a lot of cases makes it hard for philanthropy to wrestle with how to engage in small places, in small communities where social change is both possible but requires help.”
– Dan Smith, CEO of the Vermont Community Foundation
Many solutions designed for urban and suburban communities will not work unless adapted for rural settings by local communities with the help of rural-serving organizations. National foundations who offer issue-centered grants do not offer significant support to rural communities. It has proven difficult for large pools of money to make their way to small, distributed places, each with unique needs and strengths. The way money flows or pools is often a logistical issue, because it is easier to reach more people in dense areas.
Federal spending has its own challenges. The federal government knows how to invest billions in infrastructure (and now economic recovery), but too often, trickle-down dollars do not find their way to communities in practical ways. Resources are often managed too far away from rural communities, or are processed through states or intermediaries without recognition and accommodation of rural’s lower capacity to navigate the complex processes required to qualify for and request funding.
Further exacerbating the federal spending challenges, national philanthropies tend to focus on issues-centered giving around health, education, justice, and so forth. Solutions in these realms are also in great demand in rural areas, but national philanthropies concentrate their giving in densely-populated areas.
Rural is…
of land in the United States
of the total U.S. population.
of philanthropic investments.
The Opportunity
To better serve rural America, informed perspectives and guidance are needed from every level of government (federal, tribal, state, and local), philanthropy, and philanthropy-serving organizations. Rural needs better representation and equity in funding.
Solutions
Earmark 20% for leadership development. Whether philanthropic or stimulus money, earmark 20 percent for rural leadership development, capacity building, technical assistance, and coaching. Investing 20 percent of a budget to help communities develop leaders who can work together to lift up an entire community, equitably, will pay dividends for years to come. This type of funding targets the persistent lack of capacity in rural communities. It also helps fund leadership transitions from one generation to the next, ensuring long-term viability for local communities. Such efforts can help local leaders design and execute on a strategic vision that helps everyone grasp opportunities, whose sum of parts will grow to be far greater than the initial influx of capital.
Work through rural development hubs. Rural development hubs specialize in leadership, community, and economic development, and often provide a bridge that connects supply and demand. They are found throughout the nation and are characterized by their focus and innovative strategies towards rural revitalization. Hubs use regional and local approaches to develop strategic plans, help local communities align systems, and have an agile, enterprising spirit to respond to crises or opportunities as they arise. These hubs “provide an array of services to local organizations, firms, entrepreneurs, individuals and families, while simultaneously providing eyes, ears and boots on the ground that can inform state and federal agencies, foundations and others — and knit them into the action,” according to a report by the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group. See their resource on how to find a local rural development hub.
Partner with rural funders. National philanthropies should seek out partnership with local rural funders. These include health funds, community foundations, local corporate giving, and individual donors. They have deep knowledge of what’s needed in rural communities. They also understand that rural leaders often have multiple jobs and responsibilities and lack the time and other resources to keep up with the detailed grant-reporting requirements from national philanthropies. If a national foundation were to fund an issues-centered program in a rural area, local rural funders could become valuable intermediaries and help with advice, operations, and evaluations. Some national foundations have partnerships in place, but if the partners lack rural expertise, those foundations should expand to forge new partnerships with the right parties.
Prioritize rural representation. The varied cultures of rural America are little understood by private and public sectors controlling funding and investments, leaving rural interests under-represented, if not invisible all together. Culturally informed change is long-lasting, sustainable change. For these reasons, it’s important to have rural representation in decision-making bodies of public and private investors, be it for infrastructure funding, meeting the demands of supply-chain economics, or to help advance the mission of philanthropic organizations.
The nation can rise to meet the opportunities presented by the post-pandemic world in a fair and just way, but only if rural, diverse populations are a fair and just part of the equation.