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There are no easy solutions for the many challenges that rural Americans face, but it’s clear that rural communities themselves must drive change and transformation.
Brian Dabson, Field Perspectives Series Editor, brings together four well-respected rural development practitioners to share their distinct perspectives on how we can better define rural development success.
- Shanna Ratner shares the wealth creation framework as a way of achieving realignment, economic inclusivity, and resilience at a regional scale.
- Ines Polonius highlights the possibilities of “Community-Centered Measurement,” which focuses on locally defined progress, equity participation, unique place & context, and relativity.
- Mark Gabriel Little notes the importance of measuring increases in power — especially shifts in political and financial power for BIPOC communities.
- Anita Brown-Graham examines the health and wealth of networks for improving educational achievement and equitable development.
Context
What counts as rural development success? This seems at first a straightforward question, but it becomes much more complicated when a follow-up question is asked: For whom?
Rural people want the same things city people want – safety and security, a sense of community and belonging, good and stable employment with benefits, affordable and good-quality housing, healthcare, education, and so on. That said, those exist in different measure in different places. So, it stands to reason that the people living and working in any community are in the best position to determine which of those qualities most need to be improved, taking into consideration local factors such as culture, geography, institutional capacity, and the range of assets they have to build on. In other words, they should be able to define what success means to them.
However, those who provide funding and invest in rural people, places, and initiatives – whether government, philanthropy, or corporations – tend to define success in terms of their own priorities. This can mean imposing “success criteria” that are appropriate for metropolitan areas but have less relevance for rural regions and families. For example, seeking outcomes in terms of raw numbers of jobs, services provided, or customers served will always favor higher-density cities over rural areas. Moreover, decisions that may make strategic or operational sense to a government agency or a private corporation – perhaps to reduce cost, increase profit, or open new economic opportunities – may have long-term, negative consequences for rural communities that lose a hospital, source of employment, or quality of life.
Thus, the question For whom? raises others: Who decides what success looks like? Who is at the table when plans are drawn, priorities determined, and resources allocated?
Measures That Matter and Motivate: Wealth Creation, Inclusion, Resilience – and Learning
As we seek to create a more inclusive and resilient economy, restructured to favor investment over consumption and resource repair and revitalization over human and natural resource exploitation, we are driven to revalue the contributions of rural areas to the larger regions of which they are part. This means re-examining the ties between urban and rural with an eye toward turning existing systems that exploit rural for the benefit of urban into systems that are reciprocal and mutually beneficial. This is not just a “nice” idea; if we do not take this challenge seriously, we run the very real risk of losing the population base, connectivity, environmental quality, and infrastructure that rural areas must have to continue to contribute to the well-being of all communities. Rural success depends on this realignment.
One practical and applied framework for achieving realignment, economic inclusivity, and resilience at a regional scale is the wealth-creation framework. Wealth-creation value chains, organized in and across specific sectors within regions (think manufacturing, food systems, forestry and wood products, tourism, housing, healthcare, etc.), build bridges between community and economic development by intentionally integrating economically marginalized people and places into the mainstream regional economy as business owners, employees, investors, and consumers. The broad intent of the wealth-creation framework is to build integrated and inclusive regional economies that recognize and reward the contributions of rural – not through subsidies, but through market-driven investment that serves the interests of demand and supply partners equitably.
In some rural communities, the economically marginalized are Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, Latinx, and other people of color; in others they are white. In all cases, a myriad of factors – including, but not limited to, public policies, economic dislocations like factory closings, generational poverty, substandard education and health care, and employment discrimination – have left rural marginalized populations and places economically isolated and excluded from adequately compensated participation in the mainstream economy.
So, How Do We Know If We Are Making Rural Development Progress?
The first question is, Who is “we”? All too often, “we” is the funder, not the participants on the ground. The funder establishes the measures, generally with the intent of ensuring the accountability of the funding recipient. The funding recipient must siphon resources away from the work at hand to meet the demands of the funder.
This devalues local efforts, disempowers participants, and redirects attention away from the goal of improved conditions toward the needs of outsiders. It is inherently extractive. It weakens local capacity to experiment, learn, and make changes in real time on the ground. Effectiveness is all about intentionality, and intentionality is all about where we focus our attention. Measures are a tool to help us focus on achieving what we desire. Properly employed, measures are tied to the goals of the people engaged in the work itself and improve their focus on the ends that matter to them, not to an outsider.
Purposeful measurement begins with clearly stated goals. What are the conditions that participants seek to engender on the ground? Within the wealth-creation framework this becomes, “What does a fully functioning wealth-creation value chain in a given sector look like?” The answer to this question points to the goal or the conditions that define success. The answer explicitly includes the desired impact of the value chain on each of the eight forms of wealth, as well as on the larger system of policies, norms, and expectations in which value chains operate (e.g., the cultural climate). The specifics of the goal need to be determined by local people at the local level in the context of local conditions and local assets.
Measuring for Progress, Not Just Accountability
The key to measuring for progress rather than accountability is to use measures and measurement systems that benefit the participants in the work.
For example, many food system-related value chains seek to engage BIPOC and other under-resourced farmers. Yet the measures used to calculate progress, such as the amount of food that flows through the chain overall, may do little to help farmers improve their own practices. Many low-wealth farmers could benefit from simple systems that give them a better handle on the costs of production, including their own labor, in relation to the returns. By helping farmers integrate appropriate measures into their own enterprises, they gain the information they need to improve.
That information can also be requested to inform the progress of the entire value chain with little additional effort or cost. Farmers can learn from each other about ways to contain costs, improve crop quality, and retain a larger share of earnings. Farmers can also benefit from learning how to measure (or partner with others to measure) environmental improvements – whether in soil or water or other quality – as a basis for inducing investment.
Similar examples are widespread for all the partners who participate in the production process in any wealth-creation value chain, regardless of sector. Refocusing measures on those things that producers need to know to improve their own practices changes the entire nature of the measurement process and drives improvement much closer to the ground.
Value chains built using the wealth-creation framework intentionally measure progress in improving and/or increasing the stocks of all relevant forms of wealth, beginning with baselines that understand current conditions in local context. New knowledge is gained as baselines are revealed. False and limiting assumptions fall away. Participants begin to see which types of actions and actors will – and will not – lead to positive changes in the system in which they find themselves. They also begin to see areas where the system itself must be changed to address specific gaps and bottlenecks and to bring into play underutilized resources – as well as the types of partners they must engage to bring those changes about.
Needed at the Center: Community-Driven Measurement
Measuring the efficacy of philanthropic and federal investment has become big business. Investors equate numbers with success – jobs created, dollars leveraged, people trained, kids fed. Naturally, the bigger the number, the greater the success. Right?
A blind focus on quantitative success measures naturally leads to the ever-elusive quest for “scale,” which is easier to achieve in denser, more urban areas where more people can be reached with less effort and investment. If we get what we measure, then it is no surprise that, from 2010–2014, grant-making in persistently poor rural places averaged $50 per person, while it ranged between about $2,000 to over $4,000 per person in New York City and San Francisco.³
Community economic development has been compared to throwing a rock into a lake, creating ripples over time. Investments in urban places address specific challenges, are most often project-focused, and lend themselves to measuring success in numbers. But if you have ever actually tossed a rock into a lake, you may notice that those ripples don’t reach the far shore. If, however, you drop a pebble into a puddle, the ripples quickly reach the edge of the puddle and transform its shape.⁴ The same holds true for investing in and measuring success in rural communities. Strategic investments in rural places have the potential of transforming entire communities.
Measuring rural success correctly, especially in areas of concentrated poverty and in predominantly BIPOC communities, can help that pebble drop and ripple. But to do so, it requires what is called “Community-Centered Measurement,” which follows these principles:
- Locally Defined Progress. People living and working in the rural community or region need to define the measures that indicate progress – and communities need to be measured against themselves, not against urban or micropolitan benchmarks.
- Equity Participation. Residents of diverse backgrounds – across race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, income, and ability – must be involved in that defining.
- Unique to Place and Context. Success must be measured differently from one rural place to the next, with local agreement on clear markers over the short- and medium-term that indicate progress.
- Relativity. Only relative quantitative measures – like percent increases or decreases from a baseline – are helpful when measuring rural success: for example, jobs created in relation to the size of the local labor market, children fed in relation to local school population, and additional sales taxes generated in relation to local public budget.
With these principles of Community-Centered Measurement in mind, the following three interlocking outcomes are best used to measure transformational change that leads to a thriving rural community:
- Quality of Life. Long-term improvement in quality of life can lead to the arrival of new residents, the return of individuals who grew up in the community, stabilizing or growing population figures (especially among the younger generation), and the attraction of small businesses and eventually even large job creators. Short-term markers may include the availability of new products and services delivered by locally owned businesses, affordable housing, or the conversion of vacant properties into productive space, pocket parks, and community gardens. Medium-term markers may include qualitative measures related to a newly won sense of pride in the community.
- Mindset Shift. How do we best measure hope? Rural places that rely solely on their part-time mayor and council to move their community forward often wait for a knight in shining armor to save them. Instead, the shift from despair and loss of the “good old days” to an opportunity-seeking mindset across local government, the business community, schools, and families indicates that long-term transformation has occurred. This qualitative measure is often more palpable for outsiders – but it can also be assessed through pre- and post-interviews with residents.
- A short-term marker of that mindset shift is the willingness of residents to volunteer and step into community leadership roles.
- Medium-term markers may include improvements to the downtown, new business start-ups, expansion of an existing business, and house renovations – improvements resulting not from external intervention, but from a mindset shift within the larger local population turning into self-generated action.
- Economic Activity. For a community to thrive, long-term transformation leads to local economic activity that supports the livelihoods of all residents and services provided by local government. The national WealthWorks model provides proven measures.⁵ Supporting a local leadership team in assessing assets across the eight capitals – individual, intellectual, social, built, natural, cultural, political, and financial – and using them to measure change over time provides important markers. Some of these can be measured quantitatively, others qualitatively. Utilizing all eight ensures that strategies implemented balance economic, social, and environmental progress while doing no harm to any one capital (or asset).
DeWitt Does It
In 2011, the City of DeWitt, Arkansas lost 400 jobs when a shoe manufacturer closed its doors. The city had a shrinking population of 3,200 people with 24 percent living in poverty and 8.5 percent unemployed. Almost every storefront in the beautiful courthouse square was boarded up.
The transformation in DeWitt began when Communities Unlimited (CU), a rural development hub that combines a community development financial institution (CDFI) with a community development organization, worked with DeWitt’s first leadership action team to launch a biofuel value chain. The team used Community-Centered Measurement and the eight WealthWorks capitals to plan and then measure the increases in each type of capital.
Focused on Built Capital, one team member converted a condemned fuel transfer station into a booming restaurant and feed store. In 2016, a reconstituted leadership team implemented a tourism strategy supported by CU. Today, the courthouse square houses a vibrant events space, coffee shop, and a secondhand retailer. In August 2021, two young women moved to DeWitt to launch Bridget Lane Boutique in the square. The new businesses are generating more than $140,000 in additional sales taxes to support the city’s annual budget. The nine new businesses employ more than 3 percent of the labor force, and unemployment has dropped to 4.1 percent. The poverty rate dropped from 24 percent to 20.5 percent of the population.
Adding to the growing economy and momentum is a new hotel. When Communities Unlimited first met with the mayor of DeWitt in 2011, he said the town needed a hotel to capitalize on its historical and natural assets by attracting overnight tourists. At the time, a hotel feasibility study did not support the investment. But as community leaders developed an entrepreneurial ecosystem over the next decade, the community mindset shifted toward building new businesses and local assets, including tourist attractions.
Local entrepreneur Chandler Boyd stepped up in 2020 to fulfill his dream of developing Boyd Farmhouse Inn, with the support of community leaders. The Inn is now scheduled to open its doors and welcome its first visitors – another sign of success on multiple fronts.
Investments in rural places have the potential to transform whole communities. This transformation takes a decade or longer, especially considering setbacks caused by decades of disinvestment, COVID-19, and an accelerating climate crisis. While funding a rural project for 12 months will create certain outputs, it cannot lead to the transformation that allows a community to thrive interdependently.
Rural transformation requires capacity building, especially for people of color who have been historically excluded from opportunities to lead. It also requires a new approach to long-term, Community-Centered Measures across quality of life, mindset shift, and economic activity – with clear short- and medium-term markers of progress along the way.
Power: Caused the Past, Creates the Future
In physics, power is a measure of the amount of work done over a period of time. In human society, power is the means by which an individual or a community can construct its future. Power enables communities to declare their own measures of success and construct their own solutions to the challenges they define. A community can draw its power from within, through the collective recognition of and respect for its own assets. And communities can build power based on what the broader society deems valuable.
In the United States, power is most recognized in terms of political and financial agency. Direct measures of political power include rates of voter registration and turnout, particularly in local elections; sophistication of collective political planning and coordination; percentage of candidates for and winners of elected office; and rates of participation on local boards. Measures of financial power include net wealth, income, property and business ownership, and access to cheap or affordable capital.
The global history of just struggles for more power is long, from gender-based salary equity to full political rights for Americans of Asian descent. However, the path towards power parity among some communities in rural America has languished for centuries. Financial and political power have been denied, eroded, and compromised by the folkways, mores, and laws of this nation for Indigenous peoples – both those in federally recognized tribes and not; for Latinx peoples – particularly those with deep roots in the North American continent, from before the Mexican concession of 1838 to the first-generation immigrants of today; and for Blacks, specifically the descendants of enslaved Africans.
There are many accounts of the historical, legal, and cultural evolution of power between America and its Latinx, Black, and Indigenous peoples. Today, some of the clearest examples of these complex power dynamics highlight the degradation of one group versus the benefit of another more powerful one. For example, the European Union relies on American woody biomass shipped across the Atlantic for combustion in electric power plants to meet its ambitious goals of reducing CO₂ emissions. The result of this particular climate-economic exchange has been the environmental and social degradation of communities in the rural Black Belt in and around the forests that have been clear cut, arguably with little to no climate benefit.
Similar geographies of ethnically disparate impact can be found in the handling of waste and pollution – for example, higher rates of air pollution exposure for all people of color across the U.S. and disproportionate hog-waste exposure for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx North Carolinians. These examples also reveal the passive ways in which financial and political power works: The powerful rarely engage in these place-based struggles because polluting industries, for example, do not even attempt to locate in the communities where the powerful live.
The historical legacies of power are even written in the street. Somewhere in the rural South exists a factory town built in the early 1900s by a major European metal refining corporation. In keeping with local laws at the time, the town was designed for racial segregation, with white and Black residential and downtown districts separated by a regional highway. The industrial operation continued for more than a century, providing decent wages but polluting local groundwater. Today the factory is closed, but the sides of town are distinguished by race and economic investment. Streets named for Confederate and Union Civil War and Revolutionary War generals dominate those on the Black side of town while the white side streets are largely named for tree species. Commercial investment and public buildings are exclusive to the white side of town, echoing a consistent feature of desegregation across the South: the closing of Black and Indian schools and destruction of Black businesses.
The struggle for power is a zero-sum game. The path to more financial and political power for some Indigenous, Black, and Latinx communities could mean less power for states and the federal government, or less power for the “good ol’ boys” and “old money” in local communities. It will therefore face strong resistance. However, by directly challenging the ways in which the American political system is designed to exclude access, there are ways to increase political power – for example, by providing pay to “volunteers” on local boards, increasing pay and professionalizing local elected positions, and legalizing undocumented workers. This latter change would also quickly alter the daily dehumanization of day laborers as interchangeable “amigos,” which exists and persists only because these human beings have zero political power.
Strategies might also seek to decrease the ability of those with wealth to purchase political power – for example, by adopting public financing of political campaigns and significant restrictions on political advertising. And there are strategies that directly address financial power by fairly compensating Indigenous, Black, and Latinx people and communities for the land, work, and wealth they and their ancestors have provided – for example, via a range of reparations.
Transitory or Trend?
Between these two (and every other successful rural story) ncIMPACT has studied, we have discovered four conditions associated with progress. Each is well worth measuring along the way to rural development success:
- Building a broad-based will for change with a laser focus on equity. This is not just about getting people excited about the future. Within the network or collaborative, everyone must understand the importance of an intentional focus on equity and have the skills to help the broader community build a will to ensure equitable outcomes from any change process.
- Leading from a place of transparency and trust. Networks must be fueled by people who are viewed as good listeners and honest brokers representing all important stakeholder groups. Some members will be the “keepers of the torch,” the people who insist on the alignment of resources and who keep things going even when the going gets tough. Without them, the effort will not thrive.
- Staffing that provides facilitation, data analyses, and logistics capacity. Networked collaboratives work because there are people who see it as their responsibility to ensure the critical to-do’s get done. Whether paid or volunteer, staffing support is essential.
- Developing and delivering the benefits of dense and diverse networks. These networks must be capable of being mobilized effectively to support the goals of the collaborative and the people it seeks to support. Diverse and dense networks at the community or organizational level are not enough; they must include community residents and the people the effort intends to benefit.
There may be a technical answer to how to repave a road. However, if the decision at hand is how to increase Black male academic achievement or to ensure minority communities benefit from adaptive reuse of buildings in their communities, then a community and its funders need to start thinking about the density and diversity of networks needed for success. Not every rural development project requires a deliberative networked approach, but the ones involving complex challenges will not find correspondingly complex solutions unless people are willing to work together and share resources aimed at producing equitable results.
In those cases, here are some questions worth asking – with answers worth measuring – about the health and wealth of networks that can help do the job:
- What are the internal connections in the community?
- Are these connections based on high levels of trust?
- Are the right people – the full range of stakeholders with self-interest or community interest on all sides of a challenge or opportunity – involved? (Who is missing?)
- Are they fully engaged?
- Are there formal or informal mechanisms or entities that maintain and build productive connections?
- Do these connections allow for collective action within and beyond people of color in the community?
- How strong are the ties among leaders of color?
- How strong are the ties between leaders of color and other community leaders?
- What are the connections between the community and external resources outside the community?
- How many people in the community are connected to people and institutions beyond the community that possess high-value resources?
- What is the effect of multiple connections to an external high-value outside resource?
- Is there a sustainability plan for the development effort that includes connections to these external high-value resources?
- How easily are those connections accessed and mobilized when needed?
