Rural Development

Comment

Comment by David R. Dangler on February 20, 2010 at 9:38am

What a terrific conversation! We are in the final stages of preparation for the biennial gathering of NeighborWorks organizations that work in rural areas. This year's conference is hosted by Southern Mutual Help Association - www.southernmutualhelp.org/ (check 'em out) in the heart of Acadiana. Practitioners will network and learn first hand about SMHA's powerful contributions to the larger Gulf Rebuilding efforts following Katrina and Rita.
The conference moves to the New Orleans NeighborWorks Training Institute for a national rural symposium on Wednesday, March 3 entitled "Investing for Change - Leveraging Community Assets in Rural and Small Cities".
I know I'm wading in late to this larger conversation on rural training content but would like to throw in a couple of points for consideration:
-1- The need to continuously translate urban experience and templates in community development into rural terms and context remains urgent, but we are making gains. Happy to make this case in a subsequent posting.
-2- A corollary to this is a caution - as a minority (20% of US population even if we dwell on roughly 80% of the land mass) we have to be careful not to inadvertently contribute to the isolation which is so integral to the challenges of working in rural communities. That's one of the reasons that we pitched this symposium to include small cities. New and emerging economic regions bear little resemblance to town, county, even state delineations. The synergies that seem to hold the most promise are mixed market within regions that are organic and self-defined.

Comment by Vicki Watson on September 21, 2009 at 3:41pm

I am interested in your defining rural communities. My geographic area is truly classified as "frontier." My key issues of focus are school retention and small business succession planning. Too many young people are leaving for jobs elsewhere even if they would prefer raising their families "at home." Legacies of farm and ranch land and small businesses are lost due to failure to plan who might carry on the tradition. Each time someone retires or dies another door is closed--leading to the continued loss of tax base and students to suppor the schools.

The idea of education for government leaders is interesting. Do any of your experiences involve working with extension services?

Comment by Kay Decker on September 19, 2009 at 6:17pm

HI Rural Practitioners! When we started this communication process a month or so ago, there weren't that many of us. Now it looks as though we are up to 21 members of this group. Way to go! I am pleased to see more professionals signing up all the time--this should make for some very interesting conversations!

Comment by Paul Webb on July 7, 2009 at 10:25am

Dale, Kay - I will respond to your pervious questions more when I get time, but I want to inject my view that; Many rural/not rural issues are routinely addressed in courses now, but I agree that we might well generate a short reminder checklist, especially for the truly no-rural-background faculty, who, like all of us, tend to glide over things we don't know much about.

I also agree that crafting new narrow courses in a very limited resource situation is not a great idea, and that the after-class seminar approach is a great idea. That would also help define audience and demand.

Comment by Kay Decker on July 7, 2009 at 10:12am

Let me know if there are opportunities for me to facilitate training for rural practitioners. I would be happy to share what we have done to "train" our local and county government officials as well as what we have done to explain urban/rural differences to state agency staffers.

Comment by Dale Prunoske on July 7, 2009 at 8:22am

Thanks Kay. I agree the conversation is very helpful and puts us on the way to looking at the identification of training needs of rural practitioners and how we integrate those needs into our training tracks.

Comment by Kay Decker on July 6, 2009 at 4:41pm

Dale, your past experiences sound exactly like what my organization does so we can meet the needs of underserved populations in our five county region. I serve as Executive Director on a volunteer basis because the organization cannot afford to pay my salary as well as the other two staff persons. We contract out our book-keeping and accounting, and we contract out some of our grant writing. As a university professor, these activities fall within my scope of expertise and thankfully my university does support my efforts (although we do not have formal agreements in place). I wonder sometimes if the low-mod programs which were implemented during the Johnson administration such as Community Action Programs and then the CDBG program initiated during the Nixon administration need to be "rethought"? What I have seen in our area is a complete demographic change across our state. The NW portion was economically well off in the 1960s, but that is not the case today. Unfortunately many government agencies still hold the view that our region does not need assistance. Anyway, this is a great place for us to exchange dialogue and maybe we can effect a difference or at minimum provide support to rural providers through information and place based training. Thanks!

Comment by Dale Prunoske on July 6, 2009 at 3:39pm

Thanks Kay, it is helpful.

I use to cover a five county area (both rural and urban programs) in Upstate (western) NY. I know the admin for many programs does not come close to covering the operational costs - we had anything from 3% to 8%. We usually had multiple programs and mulitple program types to make ends meet.

As far as the program was concerned, we typically blended 3 or 4 resources to make our rehab program (owner occupied, acquisition/rehab, weatherization, etc) work for homeowners.

In addition, one of the ways we were able to meet our financial demands was to become fee for service construction managers. We did this for the small, rural, local government agencies that received grants but did not have the staff or knowledge/experience to run the programs. We also acted as a developer (construction manager) for another entity that was responsible for an acquisition rehab and resale program. We were paid a fee for this service as well. This entailed initial inspections, work scopes and cost estimates, bidding, construction management and close-out. Both of these activities proved to be a reliable income streams and helped to pay for salary, benefits and also covered mileage costs. We also took on several training grants based on our expertise and were able to deliver the training sessions and use the funds to help underwrite other portions of our operations in addition to doing the training.

I know this is increasingly difficult but I think it begs the question - how do we get inventive and come up with solutions that will assist folks in delivering their programs or products with satisfactory resources to do so?

And, how do turn this into a good training opportunity to share with other folks?

I think we've started a good discussion that will head us in the right direction.

Comment by Kay Decker on July 6, 2009 at 2:56pm

Dale, from my experiences here in the southern Great Plains, rural community development entities and similar organizations provide a multitude of services. The issues that I know create the greatest amount of difficulty are with housing development, housing rehab-both owner-occupied and acquired, neighborhood revitalization strategies, and Main Street revitalization strategies. Geographic distances that service providers cover is substantial (an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined is not uncommon) and the lack of qualified skilled labor in rural areas creates problems with bidding, etc...When CDBG funds can be accessed and the cap on administrative fees is at 6% that can effectively stop many providers from doing any type of joint private/public projects. The percentage for admin does not allow for much in the way of mileage let alone the cost of administering programs. NSP admin is capped at 7.5%, and my organization is covering 2 counties in NW Oklahoma with the NSP program which means we have to really plan our assessment, inspection, and contractor compliance trips to not "waste fuel". The weatherization money from CSBG caps roof repair at such a low figure that no one can really get a roof repaired. For example, to reroof a 1,200 sq ft house with one pitch without replacement of decking will cost about $6,000. and weatherization funds do not come close to that figure. I suppose in urban areas there would be other entities available to help with other costs, but in rural America there are not. Is this what is helpful to you?

Comment by Dale Prunoske on July 6, 2009 at 1:49pm

Kay & Paul,

Based on the dialogue I have some questions:

What are the particular activities, projects and/or programs that needs to be addressed through training?

What are the differences between the urban and rural experience for these particular items?

Where do these "differences" fit in the training curriculum - are they affordable housing, asset management, construction and rehab, economic development, main st. redevelopment for villages, neighborhood re-development for healthy rural communities or as I suspect - all of the above?

I think we may need to begin to look at items for inclusion in the training tracks, prioritize them and figure out how to fit them into course curricula. I am not sure that any one concept will merit its own course (and I've been wrong many times before) so this will not be an easy task. It might be worthwhile to bundle information since many rural groups probably provide multiple services and the training could address several issues - 502, 504, 523, 533 programs. As an example, if we did a rural rehab course we could cover the 504, 533, matching funds (HOME, Weatherization, etc), finding contractors and how to run the program as an example. The other opportunity may be to offer afternoon workshops on specific agenda items that you think are critical for rural practitioners.

What do you think are the priorities? How do we include them?

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