The rural parts of America are a great place to live, but many communities are challenged to attract job-creating industries that will keep the younger generation from moving away. With the decline of so many of our resource-dependent jobs, such as logging, mining, farming, and fishing, there is a real need for rural community economic development work to be done.
I learned a few things while working with a number of timber-dependent rural communities during the Spotted Owl Wars of the early 1990s in Oregon and they may still be of use to those who are perhaps volunteers “in the trenches”, trying to keep their rural communities alive and healthy. I don’t like to be gloomy, but the challenges facing rural communities in a global economic slowdown would appear to be a lot worse than those my community faced in the mid-’90s.
I hope that these tips will give you some good ideas to guide you, as well as keep you from falling for some of the tricks that big-city industries (and your local sharpies) may try to pull on your community.
