Three reasons to believe in the potential of rural America

Not part of our mailing list??Subscribe to our newsletter today!

People often ask about why I decided to found an organization focused exclusively on supporting the future economy of rural America.?

My response comes down to three key reasons.

First: The inspiring people who show this work is possible and impactful.

It’s people like Ashley Lovette, whose story you may remember from?our report?this spring on rural America’s tech employment landscape. Growing up in a small town in Missouri, she had always enjoyed puzzles and problem-solving, but her exposure to computers was limited. She had never thought about becoming a software developer. Then, while working as a bartender, she heard about?Code Labs?at Codefi in Cape Girardeau. She started to recognize how well coding aligned with her interests, and that the program’s flexibility and price tag — there is no cost to students — made it seem achievable. Fast forward: In less than a year, Ashley has gone from her first day in the Code Labs program to accepting a software engineer position this month with Vizient.

But it’s also young people like the kids around the country participating in?Youth Coding League, which we profiled earlier this month on our blog. These are youngsters eager to try something new and different, some coming from rural schools with limited extra-curricular opportunities, some with limited exposure to computers. The experience creates more confident, engaged students whose eyes have opened to a future they never knew could be for them. As one student put it: “Without coding, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, to be honest … but computer science is just really fun.”?

Second: There are misconceptions and conflicting definitions about what is considered rural America that have resulted in poor and uncoordinated investment in rural communities.?

The struggle to consistently define what counts as “rural” is the subject of the first story in the?Rural Aperture Project, our latest research effort made possible by funding from the?Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Did you know the federal government has over a dozen definitions for what qualifies as rural that dictate its funding decisions? Or that the two most accessible and widely used definitions disagree about including?more than 15 million people?in our country’s rural population? I’d encourage you to?dig into this story and its data visualizations?to see how the discrepancies between just two of the many existing definitions can paint dramatically different pictures of rural areas. The report is foundational for the Rural Aperture Project, with future stories touching on issues like equity, diversity, and economic opportunity in rural America.

Third: The clear desire of our leaders in Congress for new, updated information on what rural America’s needs — and an authentic concern that those voices and data are not getting to the table.?

I was honored to be one of the rural voices that the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth invited to participate in a?roundtable?earlier this month on building inclusive prosperity for rural America. Venues and conversations like that one, which owes to the commitment of elected leaders like Committee Chairman Jim Himes, Ranking Member Bryan Steil, and Rep. Angie Craig, are so valuable.

But what really fuels my belief in rural potential are the voices of those younger than myself. The stories of Ashley Lovette and the kids in Youth Coding League reinforce that, as did one of my fellow roundtable panelists, a college student representing the Virginia Future Farmers of America, who spoke about his own interest in technology but lamented that he and his peers didn’t feel they could pursue a tech career and stay in rural Botetourt County, outside of Roanoke.

These young people can be the future of rural America. But we must create the programs to help them thrive, inform philanthropy and government funders of the best ways to address rural economic challenges, and change the narrative about what is possible in rural America by raising up the voice of these extraordinary people.

-Matt Dunne, CORI founder and executive director, July 2022

(View full newsletter in your browser.)