Rural Community Organizing:
You Must Survive to Thrive
by Catherine Lerza

The United States is an urban nation, and has been for generations. In fact, today, just less than 20 percent of Americans (about 50 million people) live in rural areas, even with a 1990’s growth spurt in areas the U.S. Census calls “non-metro.” 

Given this relatively small population – and the pressing problems of inner cities – why should we pay attention to rural communities? There are at least five compelling reasons to do so:

Rural communities produce the raw materials we all depend on. As Joe Szakos, director of the four-year-old Virginia Organizing Project and a veteran rural organizer, points out, all of us depend on the products of rural communities: food, energy, and raw materials from iron to coal. At the same time, rural communities are dumping grounds for the pollution, waste and toxic by-products of our urban industrialized society. For example, rural communities, especially low-income communities of color, are the sites of huge – and growing – solid and hazardous (including radioactive) waste disposal facilities.

Rural communities have chronically higher rates of poverty. The percentage of people living in poverty in rural communities is higher than the national average – and has been for decades. Some eight million rural residents are poor. Almost 16 percent of rural people are poor, compared to 13 percent of urban people. Of the 200 “persistently poor” counties in the U.S. (those with persistent poverty rates of 30 percent or higher), 195 are rural; they are almost all found in the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, the Texas-Mexico border, and on Indian reservations. In addition, rural people are more likely to suffer from long-term chronic health problems, to be without health insurance or access to medical care, and to be inadequately housed than are urban people.

Rural communities lack jobs. In rural communities, poverty is not the result of lack of training and education or a lack of “connection” to employment, but the absence of any jobs at all, and especially jobs that pay a living wage. As Joe Belden, deputy director of the Housing Assistance Council, the nation’s oldest low-income rural housing intermediary, says, “In many rural places, especially the pockets of persistent poverty, there just aren’t jobs. Working age people simply give up, or never even start, looking for a job.” In 1996, rural earnings per job were 70 percent of metro earnings.

Rural communities lack services and infrastructure. Low-income rural communities, especially those in persistent poverty regions, often lack basic infrastructure that city dwellers take for granted. Adequate plumbing and water and sewer connection, paved roads, safe drinking water, television, telephone service, public transportation systems, even electricity are often simply unavailable, observes Bonita Anderson, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development’s southeastern field representative. Often, people must drive long distances to churches, schools, stores, or even post offices – institutions that are the backbone of urban organizing.

Rural communities are subject to the damaging effects of deregulation and privatization. The “market” does not and will not serve rural communities for the simple reason that there are too few people living too far apart to make it profitable, notes Lorette Picciano, director of the 110-member national Rural Coalition. Back in the New Deal era, for example, the federal government took it upon itself to provide electricity to rural communities (via the Rural Electrification Administration) because the market would never have done so. Similarly, the federal government required airlines, bus lines, railroads, and electric utilities to provide service to rural communities in exchange for permission to operate at all. In today’s climate of deregulation, devolution, and reliance on “free market” forces (e.g., privatization), Picciano says, rural people can expect to pay higher prices for many services – from emergency medical help to electricity – when they can get them at all. Resources must come from outside these communities to help build infrastructure, create opportunity, and organize people to advocate for equity.

Issues Facing Rural Communities

A bifurcated rural economy. There are essentially two kinds of rural communities: ones experiencing massive out-migration and economic decline over the last two decades, and those with populations growing as a result of tourism/second home development or an influx of retirees. Examples of the former include the Plains states of the Midwest and the Mississippi Delta. Boom rural states include North and South Carolina, Vermont, New Mexico, and California.

On average, rural income is about 80 percent of urban, and, contrary to popular belief, costs of living are not correspondingly lower. Overall rural unemployment was about 6.5 percent in 1997, compared to 5.6 percent for metro areas. In the past decade, rural employment grew slightly faster than urban growth, but studies show that new jobs (and income growth) are centered in those “boom” rural areas – and often among the new immigrants, not long-time low-income residents. 

Population booms are driven by natural beauty or proximity to growing metro areas, like Washington-Baltimore, Atlanta or San Francisco, and do not translate into economic booms for local residents. In fact, a population influx drives up land and housing costs, squeezing local people out of home rental and purchase markets. In addition, jobs in industries that serve new populations, be they tourists or retirees, often do not go to low-income local residents. When they do, they are too often minimum wage, dead-end service jobs, often seasonal and part-time. 

Rural economies are rarely diverse; one employer or one kind of occupation tends to dominate. Thus, the closure of a mine, the automation of a timber mill, the off-shoring of textile mills and sewing factories, the depletion of a resource like fish or minerals, or the demise of small family farm agriculture often sends a local rural economy into a tailspin from which it may not recover for generations – as is the case in the “persistent poverty” counties.

New economic development is often undesirable. Aside from tourism, retirement, and second homes, growth industries in rural communities tend to be activities no one else wants: prisons, waste disposal (including hazardous wastes such as radioactive material), and casinos. A second permutation of this pattern is the development of new, more pernicious forms of traditional economic activity. Some examples: the already-destructive practice of strip-mining is being replaced in northern Appalachia with mountain top removal (a mining process that does exactly what its name says); and family farm production of livestock has been replaced with “confined animal feeding operations.” These house literally hundreds of thousands of animals – pigs, cows, chickens or turkeys. The facilities are largely unregulated, creating vast pollution and health problems for rural residents in the Midwest and Southeast.

As traditional industries, including farming, close or consolidate, rural communities are left with few options. It is where individuals organize that such “development” is rejected or subjected to controls that will result in higher wages, local hiring, and environmental safeguards. In almost any rural community, it is not enough to be “against” – fighting to stop a landfill, for instance. Each fight must be accompanied by an effort to create jobs and development that will meet community needs and provide good jobs. 

What’s Different About Rural Organizing?

Everyone who organizes in rural communities knows that working there is “different.” Contending with a set of challenges and opportunities not present in metropolitan communities, rural organizing is not simply smaller scale urban organizing. Rural organizers in Appalachian communities interviewed for this article stressed that in assessing rural projects and organizations, it’s important to keep the following factors in mind:

Distance. Joe Szakos puts it simply: “In rural communities, you can’t walk the neighborhood.” In order to build organizations, staff and community leaders must travel long distances – almost always by car. Burt Lauderdale, staff director of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC), a 20-year-old organization fighting poverty, environmental degradation, racism, and tax inequity, has found that the folks his organization works with in the mountains of eastern Kentucky don’t “run into each other frequently like they might in a city.” KFTC activists may live seven or eight hours apart, making meetings a major commitment of time and money. In west Tennessee, Just Organized Neighborhoods Area Headquarters (JONAH), a 20-year old, primarily African-American community organizing group, has six chapters and 400 member-families in seven counties scattered over some 6,000 square miles.

“A colleague used to come to me with rural proposals and ask me why travel, meeting, and telephone costs were so high for small, rural organizations,” notes Millie Buchanan, a program officer at the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation who funds rural groups working on toxics and is herself a former rural toxics organizer in North Carolina. “I had to explain the distances – that almost every call is long distance, that going to a meeting means a long car trip, not a ride on the subway.” 

Effective organizations recognize that meetings must be planned around long-distance travel, members’ work, and family schedules. Often, attending a meeting may mean taking time off from work and a night away from home. That means insuring that meetings are well run and participatory; that housing and meals be provided for members; and, when possible, that those members are compensated for lost work time. 

Relationships. Amy Mondloch, an organizer for Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM), a 25-year-old social and environmental justice organization based in Lake City in the mountains of east Tennessee, explains that relationships are the essential ingredient of her organization’s work. SOCM’s chapters are a “key element in members’ social lives and so we need to organize with that in mind, building time for socializing into every meeting.” This fact, combined with long distances, means that, in Millie Buchanan’s words, “a slower pace must be built into a budget.”

KFTC’s Lauderdale believes that “the ability to develop personal relationships is more important than in urban areas.” He notes that while outsiders can come into an area and be successful, their success will depend on their ability to recruit effective local leaders who then become the face and voice of the organization. Buchanan says simply that organizers need to build “porch time” into their schedules.

There’s another kind of relationship that is key in rural areas. The Rural Coalition’s Lorette Picciano describes the often profound relationship between rural people and the land on which they live. “It’s a real value. There is a true spirituality of the land,” she says. People are connected to their communities in ways that most of us are not. And that commitment can make for a willingness to think long-term. “People are willing to take five years to solve a problem because they don’t plan on leaving. People say ‘I’ve been here six generations, and I plan on being here six more, so I’ll fight like hell,’” adds Joe Szakos.

Taking a stand can be dangerous. It can be “dangerous in rural areas to voice opinions, even displaying a bumper sticker. It’s not anonymous,” observes Millie Buchanan. “Everything you do follows you.” In addition, since job options are few, taking a stand against the powers that be can cost jobs, homes, and opportunities for children and family. For rural organizations, this fact of life means that the stakes of any campaign are higher than they might be in an urban setting and that research, planning, and relationship building must be done thoughtfully and carefully – with full participation of local people.

Power relationships are clearer. In most rural communities, KFTC’s Lauderdale says, “everyone is clear about the formal and informal sources of power.” And while these clear power relationships may create some of the problems described above, they also make it easy to make linkages and build a campaign. “You zoom fast forward to the global economy really quickly,” Joe Szakos says, adding that this quicker analysis may not make solutions any easier to find. 

Clearer lines of power help organizations identify the right targets and go after them. For SOCM, demands to clean up almost 300 abandoned mines in Kentucky go from state government to the federal Office of Surface Mining, which is currently sitting on $1.5 billion earmarked for deep and strip-mine clean up. The funds are being held, unspent, as part of the federal Administration’s efforts to balance the budget. To address this issue, SOCM belongs to the national Citizen’s Coal Council, composed of several dozen state and local organizations based in coal communities and coordinating efforts to demand release of federal funds. 

For JONAH, fighting for increases in state funding for welfare and health care for low-income people and in food stamp availability, led to demands for tax reform. According to board chair Mike Derrick, JONAH has long worked to eliminate the state’s high (8.75 percent) sales tax on food and to enact Tennessee’s first income tax. With SOCM and other organizations, JONAH is part of a statewide tax reform coalition, and JONAH members fully understand why this “macro” policy initiative is essential to the long-term health of their communities.

These clear lines of power also make it easier for organized people to have an impact. As KFTC’s Burt Lauderdale explains, when an organization can bring even a few dozen people to an action, it makes news – and can bring an institution to the negotiating table. And when groups are part of a larger network, and can generate support from outside the community, that pressure can hit its target dramatically. “A local official in a small rural county is not used to getting letters or phone calls from across the state. You can bring pressure to bear pretty easily where an urban official might not care, might have a thicker skin,” adds Joe Szakos. And when there are fewer votes to count, organized power at the local level can make elected officials, or would-be elected officials, pay attention to a group’s demands and leadership relatively quickly. 

What Do Organizations Need?

In the bluntest terms, as members of NFG’s Rural Funders Working Group can attest, grassroots rural organizations need more money and more funders. At the same time, rural groups all over the country have specific needs, including:

Funding for paid staff. “About one-third of the rural proposals I review,” declares CHD’s Bonita Anderson, “say, ‘We need paid staff.’” For example, Mike Derrick, JONAH’s board chair, notes that his organization has functioned for nine years with no paid staff. Its board members, all of whom work full time and have families, serve in staff capacities. There are many reasons why maintaining staff is hard for rural groups. Fundraising is tougher for many of them, especially those in areas underserved by foundations. Groups working in low-income, sparsely populated areas, challenging local power structures, are not likely to raise enough money to support staff from within their own communities. 

In addition, organizations in the “non boom” communities of rural America have a hard time recruiting staff from outside the region. Rural organizations need adequate salary structures, effective recruitment networks, and assistance in building endowments that can provide funding over the long haul.

Funding for training, mentoring, and technical assistance. Staff and organizational leaders in rural groups are asked to perform a huge array of functions and to tackle many issues. Typically, there are no other organizations or institutions to which they, or the community, can turn for help. Technical assistance becomes an invaluable resource, although all of the organizers interviewed felt strongly that groups must pick their own providers – people they know can work well in their communities. Peer mentoring is an increasingly popular approach for many groups, and networks and intermediaries foster such opportunities. In addition, organizational leaders, often a group’s sole representatives in a given community, are more effective when they are trained in basic organizing and advocacy skills; they can then serve as adjunct staff and as spokespersons. Training in specific skills like fundraising, financial management, media and telecommunications is also essential – and not likely to be available absent specific funding to support it.

Funding for telecommunications. While every organization in this information age depends on effective communications systems, telecommunications are the lifeblood of rural organizing. Effective computer technologies can bridge the isolation created by distance and poor transportation systems. They bring information once only available in large cities or state capital into offices and homes all over rural America. Rural people can track local, state, and federal policy making in real time; they can do corporate research; and they can talk to each other. Communications systems allow rural groups to participate effectively in state, regional, and national networks and coalitions. For example, the Rural Coalition is even using telecommunications to develop selling cooperatives for members engaged in small-scale agriculture. Funding is needed not just for hardware and software, but for training, repair, and maintenance. 

Funding to support participation within the organization. Building a democratic, participatory structure is at the heart of any good group’s mission, but is an especially crucial undertaking for rural groups, given distances and isolation. Money for travel, telephone, computers and e-mail, and facilitation skills is a key, and big ticket, line item for any rural group. Without it, a group cannot succeed. 

Funding for building and participating in coalitions and networks. All effective rural organizations are part of at least one regional, state, or national coalition or network. In fact, rural groups are likely to be part of several networks because they work on so many issues. (The issues tackled by groups interviewed in this article range from adding black history to local school curricula to working on state and federal forest policies.) These alliances enable groups to have an impact in their own communities, as well as on the larger political and economic decision-making that affects them. The information sharing and peer mentoring that goes on in the best of these networks are especially valuable commodities to organizations that cannot find such things in their own communities. However, funding to support such participation should be in addition to – not in place of – basic organizational funding; funders should not dictate to groups which networks they should be part of. 

A Role For All Funders

Funding in rural communities need not mean overhauling guidelines. For example, Bonita Anderson explains that all proposals to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) must meet the same criteria. CCHD supports long-term systemic change, she notes, and that is the goal of all successful rural organizations. “We can’t diminish problems just because they affect fewer people,” she stresses.

And rural organizers like Szakos, Derrick, Mondloch, and Lauderdale say that the problems being tackled in rural communities are directly connected to those confronted by urban ones. But what’s at stake first and foremost in rural places is survival. “When do we stop throwing away rural communities?” asks Joe Szakos. “Something is not okay because it seems to affect ‘only’ 6000 people. Rural people and communities are not disposable.”
 

Catherine Lerza is the former executive director of the Beldon Fund and the Shalan Foundation, both funders of grassroots rural organizing. She also spent 10 years working with rural organizations and communities as a staff person for the Rural Coalition and the National Family Farm Coalition. She is currently a freelance writer and consultant in Washington, DC.
 

Contacts 

• JONAH, 416 East Lafayette, 3rd floor, Jackson, TN 38301; 901-427-1630
• Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, PO Box 1450, London, KY 40743-1450; 606-878-2161
• Rural Coalition, 110 Maryland Ave NE, Washington, DC 20003; 202-544-9611
• Save Our Cumberland Mountains, PO Box 479, Lake City, TN 37769; 423-426-9455
• Virginia Organizing Project, 703 Concord Avenue, Charlottesville, VA 22903-5208; 804-984-4033

Just Organized Neighborhoods Area Headquarters (JONAH) members have organized locally around issues ranging from the siting of waste disposal facilities and infrastructure repair to access to health care and utility rates.

One example of a successful outcome of a JONAH campaign is the prevention of the siting of a hazardous waste dump in Henderson County, TN. Recently, JONAH has been organizing against a landfill in West Madison, TN, andworking to alert citizens to the inadequacies of the current state of waste disposal regulation.

Members are also active, veteran participants in a dozen statewide coalitions that have empowered grassroots people through leadership skills training. These coalitions have successfully fought for improvements in health promotion, family and child assistance, tax reform, and housing.

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