Thank you all for sharing this time with me today. I see this as an opportunity in general to strengthen connections between the sometimes chaotic lessons out in the field and the more reflective lessons within academia and more specifically – to enhance the solid partnership between NeighborWorks® America and Southern New Hampshire University.
I say enhance because our ties are already strong. Our CEO, Ken Wade, currently serves on the School of Community Economic Development’s board of overseers.

There are a growing number of us who feel that we have been in the community economic development field for so long that we actually began before the field had a name. And we are grateful to leaders like Michael Swack who recognized that if the various counter-cultural impulses to change communities for the better were ever to have a prayer of sustainability, they had to be tracked, they had to be aggregated, studied, sorted and refined into systems and linked to durable institutions. The Community Economic Development program at SNHU is now itself an institution, broadly recognized and respected by a field that it helped to recognize and in a very real sense, co-create. The School of Community Economic Development at Southern New Hampshire University is the nation’s first accredited academic program to confer Masters and doctoral degrees in community economic development (CED). Thank goodness there is SNHU, a place of recognized academic excellence where practitioners can leverage their hands-on experiences into graduate school credits.

Because I am here representing the NeighborWorks Rural Initiative, let me say a few words about who we are and what we do. NeighborWorks America is a national intermediary created by Congress in 1978 as the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, whose mission is to provide financial support, technical assistance, and training for community-based revitalization efforts. A large part of our work is to support a growing network of community-based organizations who carry the chartered brand NeighborWorks. To give you a sense of scale, there are some 240 NeighborWorks organizations throughout the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. This growing Network directs investment capital into underserved communities at the rate of about
$2 billion per year.

The NeighborWorks Rural Initiative recognizes the rapid growth of the community development industry out into rural markets. Today, 75 out of 240 organizations in the NeighborWorks network serve rural markets.

Those of you who work in rural markets know that while the community economic development principles may be the same, the actual practice of community economic development is experienced through what we call the Rural Lens. We may be doing the same activities – technical assistance, training, micro-lending, organizing, small business lending, business recruitment and retention, etc. – but through the rural lens, the activities seem quite distinct.

Because we believe in a bottom-up approach to program design, the Rural Initiative has been shaped by executive directors in a variety of rural regions. Practitioners have defined the Rural Initiative as follows:

The NeighborWorks Rural Initiative promotes, supports and enhances comprehensive rural community development – a mix of affordable housing, economic development, and other locally determined strategies that strengthen and revitalize rural communities.”

Because we’ve experienced a strong trend within the Network to community economic development programs and activities, particularly among rural serving NeighborWorks organizations, we’ve hired a national community economic development specialist. We conducted a national search, and I’m very pleased to say that Rebecca Seib, currently in your Ph.D. program, joined us on the first of August.

To see more clearly through the rural lens, we have designed a dozen new rural courses for our national Training Institutes. We’ve “ruralized” many of our standard courses so that the increasing numbers of rural folk who attend will find rural content in those courses. You can imagine the disconnect if you sign up for a week long course on community revitalization; you are from Lecher County, Kentucky, from a town of 282, and you strain to understand how the case study from Chicago’s southside revitalization applies to you. We continue to ruralize, and we are building out a full Rural Program of Study. Within two years we will have a body of courses that individuals can take over as much time as they need to achieve a certification as a Rural Community Development specialist.

In addition to rural courses we offer national symposia in The New Rural America series. We have one coming up on December 7 in San Francisco, and I’ll give a plug for this at the end of my talk.

I don’t want to spend a lot more time on the Rural Initiative except to say that we have a protocol between our Training division and the CED program at SNHU. Because of this program and the training and course design work I’ve done for our Institutes, I learned that I would be considered part of SNHU’s adjunct faculty. This led to an email conversation with Yoel Camayd-Freixas about course material here in rural CED, and the Colloquium series.

So today is something of a trial run. Yoel suggested that I come up with a stimulating topic. So I thought - Aha, let’s use an old folk story to illustrate a principle in rural community economic development. I do not mean to suggest that the principle does not apply in non-rural settings, but I do firmly maintain that the Rural Lens offers so many distortions and deviations from the non-rural practice of CED that a separate focus, at least a translation, is necessary.

Now let’s take a good look at the bear.

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First the tale, no pun intended.

When I was a little boy, my grandfather regaled me with stories from his travels and the world. Of course no matter how tall the tale, I believed every word. One story involved a trip to Kodiak Island in Alaska, home of the Kodiak bear which, according to my grandfather, is the largest and most ferocious bear in the world. In the story, grandfather is salmon fishing and runs into a bear. He tries to fend the bear off with his fishing road, but the bear just swats it aside. The bear rises up in front of grandfather, and he’s at least nine feet tall with 6 inch, razor sharp claws. The bear is so close that grandfather can feel the hot breath. The bear’s shaggy head is as big as grandfather’s chest. The bear bellows, opens his jaws wide and lunges at grandfather. Well, what can he do staring into that enormous mouth? There is only one thing to do. He climbs into that bear’s mouth and extends his arm inside the bear all the way to his tail which he yanks with all his might until he’s pulled that bear inside-out...and concluded grandfather, an inside out bear is not very scary at all.

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In our brief time together today we’ll take a look at one principle in rural CED which I’m calling Turning the Bear Inside Out.

For those of you who don’t care for tall tales, the bear has another connotation. In financial circles a bear market is in decline. Investors pull out. Capital flows out rather than in. With the notable exception of high amenities regions, vast areas in rural America face one sort of financial bear or another. For those of you who may not be as familiar with these regions, I’m referring to the Mississippi Delta region, Appalachia, Indian Country, California’s Central Valley and other concentrations of migrant farm workers.

In the business of rural CED we work to turn around local economies, to transform them from stagnant or declining, to robust, marked by sustained and sustainable growth.

The principle and the magic that I allude to in the title of today’s talk, does not reside in an external agent riding in on a white horse, but rather with residents stakeholders. They must learn to see the bear in a different light. The real magic is the transformation of what has been perceived as a bear into, if not a bull, at least something of added value to the community.

Some of you may say, well aren’t we just talking about the balance sheet equation? In CED we need to grow assets in order to offset liabilities and move communities progressively into the black.

Yes, I am and we are, but I want to zero in with you to the tipping point. What is it? Where is it? What causes it? How do we change a commonly held perception that a given rural community is NOT a good place to invest? How do we turn that perception around?
Outside agents can definitely play a role, and leadership is always key, but the fundamental perception must come from within and be held by the community.

Let’s visit three rural places where the Bear has been a real issue.

Elsa, Edcouch and La Villa are three small rural communities along Texas State Highway 107, located in the Llano Grande – Broad Plain – area of Hidalgo County in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, fifteen miles North of the River and the border with Mexico . This is a deeply Hispanic region by which I mean that Mexican-Americans have been living in this area for hundreds of years. It has been the traditional winter home for thousands of migrant farm workers who head North in the Spring to vineyards, fields and orchards.

Economic prosperity has eluded this population, even while it has grown in nearby urban and suburban communities, fueled by snowbirds seeking warmth for retirement.

In 2000 the population of the Elsa-Edcouch Independent School District was 90.9% Hispanic. Ninety percent of its households have an annual income of less than $10,000.
The so-called economically disadvantaged portion of the population is 85.1% of the total. By comparison, the Texas average is 45.1%. Roughly 9% of the parents of students in the district have a high school diploma, and a little less than 50% of the parents have been identified as migrants.

English proficiency is a challenge. 53% of tenth grade students are considered to have “limited proficiency” in English. The percentages increase as testing is done in lower grades.

What could turn the bear inside-out in Edcouch?

Francisco Guajardo is a school teacher who grew up in the colonias. In the 1980’s Francisco, along with others who had gone away to college and returned, formed an informal network of teachers, parents and community members which eventually became the Llano Grande Center. In the 1990s a college placement initiative at E-E High saw over 80 students gain admission to Ivy League and other elite colleges. The Center grew and in 1997 became the Llano Grande Research Project.

We could spend a week and perhaps an entire semester digging into the lessons learned from Llano Grande, but I want to give a specific example within this transformative culture. As you might imagine, students at the Llano Grande Center are empowered to solve problems and face challenges on a level field with their adult mentors and teachers.

In one of the brainstorming sessions led by students, the low English proficiency kept coming up. It was holding back the community. Surrounded by Anglo prosperity, Spanish without English was a big part of the barrier. They poured over their community statistics and economic indicators. They approached the problem from the asset side of the equation. And even though there was much that was said about their cultural heritage, the language barrier still showed as a liability. But then — and here’s that tipping point, that inspiration — a student observed that Spanish was becoming such a presence in the North American culture that wealthy Americans were paying lots of money to fly out of the country to places like Costa Rica for immersion programs in Spanish. Why not open an Immersion program in Llano Grande?

In that moment a perceived liability is transformed into an asset. Freed from conventional needs-based thinking, lack of English became abundance of Spanish. From a CED standpoint, the concept of an immersion program is highly leveragable, into tourist revenues which can feed the regional economy in a myriad ways.

The Immersion school is just one of many initiatives that have spun off of the Llano Grande Center.

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Let’s go to another rural market, this time in rural Nebraska. Arthur, Nebraska, population 123. Like quite a few communities in the Great Plains, Arthur had been steadily losing population throughout the twentieth century. One by one the town’s businesses went under. In 1997, Arthur’s only grocery store closed. The nearest outlet for food became a 30-40 minute drive away.

Recognize the bear? This particular bear is stalking vast expanses of rural America today.
Just look at how many states are listed in the proposed New Homestead Act as having depopulating counties and other signs of flagging economies.

The closing of the grocery store cast a huge shadow over the community. The school system, already tiny, was hanging on by a thread. What was Arthur to do? The Plains are littered with ghost towns, and it would be hard to blame anyone for sensing that greater opportunity was anywhere but here in Arthur.

When I went out to North Platte, Nebraska in February of 2001 to speak to a statewide conference on homelessness, I picked up a Wall Street Journal in an airport and read a profile of a remarkable woman named Joy Marshall who happens to be a resident of Arthur and also the regional coordinator for the Nebraska EDGE program (stands for Enhancing, Developing, Growing Entrepreneurs). The Journal was also fascinated by Arthur’s dilemma and detailed the community’s innovative and entrepreneurial response – they started their own store with the last pool of labor available, high school kids.

Here’s what 13 year old Sabrina Sample has to say:

I was only 13 when we SIA (Students in Action) thought of the project. But before us, Scott Trimble, the business teacher, and his business math class thought of it. They had gotten a business plan started and did a lot of research. That's when we started to get into the project. Scott Trimble, and community members, Laura Cooney, Joy Marshall and Virginia Sizer got a grant to do the project. The grant was for $22,500. Without this grant we couldn't have made it. The grant was called LB144. The grant money was used to fund such things as Seeds Day, a trip to Minnesota to visit a student-run store, and a video library.

When I was 14, we really got into doing the project. We held a phone survey to find out what the community thought of a student-run grocery store and what they thought of having a grocery store back in Arthur, because we hadn't [had] a grocery store for three years. Before we got the new store, people had to go 40 miles just to get groceries. Then we had to find a building to use for the store. We had a hard time trying to find a building to use. We finally decided to use my Aunt ReNee Peterson's house. The unique thing about the house is that it's made out of railroad ties. We made a deal with her about the rent. Before we did find a building, we got many free items, such as shelves, from Wal-Mart because they were moving into a new building.

On Saturdays the board of directors, Jackie McConkey, Virginia Sizer, Travis, Amy, and Joy Marshall, Jessie White, Charlie and Patricia Steel, Scott Trimble, Laura Cooney, Vickie Morrell, and I as secretary, and volunteers, went up to the house and cleaned and painted the rooms. While we were doing that, we had to find a manager. After some interviewing, we decided to have Rita Bowland, a local community member, be the manager. A few weeks before the store opened, the entire school helped clean, paint and put up shelves. I had a lot of fun doing that.

On November 15th, 2000 the Wolf Den Market opened. It was a really great success and a lot of people showed up. I think the grocery store will continue to be successful.
All my experience with this is positive. I've learned what it takes to be a leader, how to get people interested in projects and, most importantly, how to get a business up and going.
The store is now making about $1000 a week. The most important thing, I think, is that the community is a lot happier because we have another reason for living in a very small town and a reason to bring more people to the town of Arthur.

Again, we could spend a lot of productive time analyzing this story and teasing out all the CED strands. Once the community freed itself from thinking that the standard for profit small business couldn’t make it in Arthur, they were able to reinvent small business while at the same time giving real challenge and meaning to high school students. They reinvented business by setting up the store as a cooperative which greatly reduced all their upfront labor and materials costs. They leveraged the student project status into discounted supplies from the Dredna Grocery in Hyannis (the 40 mile drive Sabrina references). They reinvented what a local grocery store would carry by conducting their own market study which showed a high demand for a mix of convenience items including staples, videos and hot pizza.

I offer it to you today as another example of a rural community turning the bear inside-out.

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For the last example I thought we’d look a little closer to home here in New England.

West Rutland, Vermont was once one of the wealthiest communities in the state thanks to an abundance of white marble. The community grew up literally on a solid vein of white marble that runs for miles in the Otter Valley. The town library and high school are almost entirely made of locally quarried marble. Most of the buildings lining Marble Street - the commercial street that peels off Main, the old Route 4 that runs East to West and connects the county seat, Rutland City, to Whitehall New York and the railroad South to Albany – have marble stoops, marble thresholds and marble lintels over the windows.

Between the two World Wars, West Rutland’s fortunes reversed. The increasing costs of extracting and finishing the stone clashed with the decreasing costs of diversifying product lines of synthetic building materials. Then the trains stopped running to Rutland City, and West Rutland was doubly marooned. The economic impact was so intense that literally, the last banker on Marble Street shot himself. When the Vermont Marble Company closed its doors, a Polish family that had been involved in the business for years, the Gawets, bought all the facilities and kept them warehoused for thirty years barely touching a thing. The cranes and hoists and pulleys sat rusting in the valley. Giant blocks of marble lay strewn throughout the valley just as they had been on the day the company shut down. The company stores lining Marble Street, including a host of derivative industries such as a shirt factory, were abandoned.

To add insult to injury the generations of quarrying and finishing marble in the valley had left a delta of fine marble dust that blocked the natural drainage through the valley, creating a manmade wetland which the Environmental Protection Agency then decreed could not be drained. The water table in the valley steadily rose, and most of the buildings on Marble Street had regularly flooded basements, or “wet feet” as the locals would say.

A federal grant to devise a drainage canal with lopsided banks to both drain Marble Street and retain water in the valley, did not turn around the local economy.

I’d like to tell you that the NeighborWorks organization we opened on Marble Street in 1986 turned around that community after 40 years of barely hanging in there, but I can’t.
Once the basements dried out, we went ahead and rehabbed a number of the owner-occupied buildings. We were instrumental in creating a new national historic district, and we ran some of the last of the old Rural Development Action Grant (HUD RDAG) funds several times through the street to help recreate the original mix of commercial below, residential above streetscape.

But all these well-intentioned activities and strategies did not dig the bear out. In a county that had no less than eight banks duking it out for a slice of the market, we couldn’t get one to open a branch anywhere in West Rutland, let alone on Marble Street. The water may have left, but the stigma remained. The bear in West Rutland was all about the marble, and the long term residents, many of whom had been involved in the industry, did not forget. They stayed where they were and grew old in their homes. They tried to rename Marble Street as Centennial Avenue, to erase the legacy as if that would help.

An artist from Boston named Bernadette DeMare happened upon West Rutland while searching for a place to open a marble carving studio. She fell in love with the marble yards stuck, as it were, in a time warp. She praised the white marble as the most workable stone this side of Italy. It wasn’t long before the energetic artist had charmed the Gawets into letting her use the old marble yards as the new home for what became the Vermont Carving Studio.

Some people will tell you that the moment I look for in these community turn arounds took place when Bernadette invited local residents into the new Carving Studio. Ancient Poles who had worked the mines came to the new studio. Why? Not because they knew or cared about who these artists were. It was because they had not set foot in the old company store since the day the mines closed. And some will say the moment was when Derno Ambrosini reached up to the dusty top of a 10x10 framing timber and pulled down the original company store ledger and found his name and his last purchase on the hand written sheets. Others will say it was the unveiling of a monumental marble frieze dedicated by the artists to the community, that it was in that ceremony that the community reconciled itself once more to the stone.

But I witnessed another moment that has become for me the tipping point in West Rutland’s relationship to its economic core. Once the word went out about the quality of the stone, artists came literally from all over the world. They worked odd hours, sometimes camping out on or near their block of stone, and then, when inspiration struck, they’d work furiously day and night. Just as word traveled abroad about the quality of the marble, word traveled in the village about the crazy foreigners who set up lights and worked on the stone through the summer nights. I saw those who had mined the marble 30 years earlier mingle with those who chipped away at the stone today, and I saw the bear turned inside out. The bond between those who had extracted the stone 30, 40, 50 years earlier and those who worked it today was the marble itself.

There was no more talk of changing the name of Marble Street. Instead there has been a push for better artist housing. A bronze caster relocated his business to be near the marble sculptors. An art guild opened for other media, paint and pottery.

And there is at least one post script to this story. When the townspeople saw how marble could come back in a totally different guise and still be an asset, they began to rethink their wetland. Just as they’d turned away from marble, they reviled the wetlands. They dumped their garbage in what they called “the swamp”. They set fires regularly when the pampas grass turned dry in late summer. But then one day someone noticed a group of outsiders, strangers with field glasses, pointing excitedly into the marsh. Birders. And the selectmen had religion now. The opportunity fever was as catching as the despair had been earlier. “We can do something with this,” they said. So they cleaned up the wetlands and installed a series of boardwalks and canoe paths throughout the valley.

We can learn about the importance of finding your niche, but the actual journey in community is likely to be anything but textbook direct.

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I’ve enjoyed sharing these stories from the field with you. Before we open up the Q&A, I’d like to plug our San Francisco Training Institute, December 5-9. In particular, The New Rural America Symposium entitled Partners & Progress will showcase 8 new case studies in community economic development, each demonstrating a unique strategy to strengthen their region’s economy. An all star cast from the Llano Grande Center will be highly visible. Among other things we’ll be talking about environmental stewardship in the Adirondacks, how the Crow Nation compromised on sovereignty issues in order to gain conventional financing for home ownership in Montana, how nine communities in the Mora Valley of New Mexico chose to band together on a new water system.

Hope some of you can attend. I have brochures in the back.

Questions….