The Rural Development Industry and the Friends in the Field

Benjamin Winchester Center for Small Towns

The Rural Development Industry and the

Friends in the Field

byBenjamin Winchester

University of Minnesota, Morris

November 19, 2007


Why is this on my radar?

• Studying this since 1996 when I began working for CST

• Who are all these groups?• First conceptualized by

Winchester/Cantrell, 2003• Model presented during Symposium –

Summit 2006• “Working better together for the common

good”


Ron Anderson, Mayor of Milan

• The demise of ‘Rural America’ has created or stimulated an entire industry whose ‘sole purpose’ is to ‘save Rural America’. Jobs, careers, and bureaucracies have been created to address this specific issue; poverty creates wealth and opportunities, not for the ‘rural poor’, but the bureaucracies created to address the problem. Do the designated population benefit or is it the ‘carpetbaggers’, opportunists, and bureaucrats who reap the actual rewards?

• The problems of ‘Rural America are compounded by diverse intellectuals, elitists, and self-serving bureaucrats; whose main goal is self-preservation, not the elimination or reduction of the economic problems of rural America.


the Rural Development Industry

• Who are these people?

• Cantrell & Winchester, 2004

• Totality of non-local private and public organizations dedicated to working in and for rural areas

• Let’s examine it like an industry


Small Towns

Service Providers

Funding Sources1

2


Level 1

Funders

Service Providers


Level 2

Service Providers

Recipients


Think of it as an industry

• Products – leadership, economic analysis, agricultural eduction, etc.– Specialized– Based on paradigm of funding unit - RFPs

• Price– Is this really based on demand?

• Competition (within the industry)• Consumers and Choice

– Funding organizations and, ultimately, small towns (perfect information?)

– Is there a menu that communities can choose from?


Boundaries and Regions

In the United States, there are 3,043 counties – 72% serve less than 50,000 residents.

Of the 36,001 sub-county subdivisions, 90% serve less than 10,000 residents. (Charles Fluharty, 2001)

The RDI works in this complex web with a complex web of its own…


Friends in the Field mapping exercise.

August, 2007


All Together Now!

August, 2007


So what?

• Two levels of analysis– Funders & Service Providers– Service Providers and Communities

• Feedback not always shared with funders or other RDI participants

• RDI related to human service industry

• Generally cooperative & kind

• Individually we are but a chapter (or paragraph) in the story of a small town


Organizing the RDI

• The RDI cannot just tell communities to work together

• Community development is a process – even more complex with the number of overlapping boundaries– Jurisdictional and specialization of RDI work– Inventory of “community capacity” before work begins– We may want one of our partners to implement their

program first

• Unable to identify individual outcomes – measure collective outcomes when funders demand individual accountability


What Did We Do?

• Survey indicates that over half of us will be working with an increasing # of communities– What are we doing to manage this growth?

• Survey: “Those in the field need a better understanding of other programs....or they need to be able to refer to a "one stop shop" location of programs.”

• If a community is not ready, do we know who to point them to? The smallest towns have the fewest resources


What Can We Do?

• For rural Minnesota– a RDI database searchable by zipcode – receive a list

of all the agencies that serve their area

• For the RDI– Determine “community capacity” model for the social

infrastructure– Build a “knowledge base” for the industry to utilize.

• Towns, projects, leaders, outcomes• This can also be utilized by small town leaders to see what is

happening in other towns– Work better together!


Levels of Collaboration

Source: National Network for Collaboration

Level Description

None No working relationship

Networking Communication and understanding

Cooperation

Match needs and efforts to avoid overlap

Coordination

Share resources to address common issues or create something new

Coalition Share ideas, leadership, and resources over time

Collaboration

Build a program together to accomplish a shared vision and outcomes

The Rural Development Industry and the Friends in the Field

Documents

Transcript of The Rural Development Industry and the Friends in the Field