A Message From Our President & CEO, Patrick Woodie

At the Rural Summit back in March, I told our audience that the world in which we live is increasingly characterized by a singular challenge: adapting to the ever increasing pace of change. The challenge of managing change is on the front burner of every rural community we serve, every nonprofit with which we partner, every part of government at every level with which we interact, and every business or budding entrepreneur aspiring to grow.

To help communities grappling with change, we unveiled a framework that identifies eight?key forces driving change in rural North Carolina. These eight drivers influence our people, our communities, and our businesses. Underlying everything else are changes - positive and negative- resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding these drivers will help focus all of us on the work ahead.

In mid-May, Rural Center staff embarked on a 12-county multi-region Summer Road Trip for direct conversations with rural people on the ground about the forces driving change in their community and region. The road trip will allow us to have deeper conversations about the region-specific data and findings, helping our staff to understand what obstacles rural places are facing as well as where and how they’re having the most success. We want to know where we got it right as well as what we may have missed.

For the rest of this year, we are also launching a monthly feature in our eNewsletter that will drill down on each of the eight drivers of change. We kick it off this month with our first “People Driver” - education for tomorrow’s labor market. We stand at a moment in time when rural North Carolina needs every working age adult engaged in the rural workforce and committed to a lifetime of continuous learning. We see from the statewide data that our rural working-age population is at a disadvantage when compared to those same age groups in suburban and urban counties. Nearly three-quarters of our rural small business owners report struggling to find job candidates with the right education, skills, or training needed for their open positions. As you will see from the numbers, higher educational attainment means greater lifetime earning potential and greater job security – and the margins are huge.