Lesson 9: Commit To The Long-Term

"We are the way we are in many rural settings because of fifty years of negative trends," says Dr. Jim Beddow, Rural Learning Center executive director. "That's a long time, and we won't transform or reinvent rural places without considering the long haul."

What have been some of those negative trends?

"We started telling our youth in the 1950s and '60s that success meant building careers elsewhere," Jim says. "We typically didn't reinvest in businesses, stopped taking care of our town's appearance, and quit building houses about 1970."

Now, he states, such communities must demonstrate they have a view of themselves in the future. “People have to see evidence of it,” he says. For example, as Miner County builds renewable energy industries, it claims towering wind turbines spinning in three locations. Perhaps as important as the power produced, says Jim, “is how those turbines have become symbols of the work happening here to create a future that will be different.”

Maybe the biggest problem most small communities face in revitalization work, Jim thinks, "is the difficulty of sustaining leadership. There are too few leaders and often they stay too long. At first glance it might seem that leadership that remains in place is good for the long haul. But it isn't. If you're trying to bring new people in, some of the established people have to give up power."

In other words, sustained leadership doesn't mean sustaining the same individuals in their positions. The Rural Learning Center has committed itself to helping communities broaden and renew leadership. "And it may be that a small town will really make progress only when it decides to support some minor staffing, as has happened in Miner County," Jim says. "You can only go so far with all volunteers. Rural communities have no problem putting tax dollars into their physical infrastructures, and putting some of that funding into leadership may be a necessary investment, too."

Leadership comes up constantly as communities discuss the long haul, "but maybe it's really about involved citizenship, more than what we call leadership," Jim says. That term implies lots of people carrying the work over the years and decades, some of them in quiet yet hugely important ways.

Miner County Lessons

Lesson 9: Commit To The Long-Term