Exploring Rural Development: Rural Brain Drain
Posted on | June 24, 2010 | 2 Comments
As an online colleague of mine, I’m pleased to present Joanne Steele, the fifth contributor to The ‘Fringe’s limited online series exploring rural/rurban development. Not only does Joanne have loads of experience under her belt, she is generous with her time and knowledge and shares this online, as well as in numerous other venues. Her strong travel and tourism background has led her to develop a rural tourism marketing consultancy business … and she has agreed to share some of her insights here. Enjoy!
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How Rural Communities Can Stop the Brain Drain
By Joanne Steele
At the BC Rural Tourism Conference this spring, sustainability was one of the key focus areas. For rural communities, the consequences of an aging rural population is a sustainability topic of concern.
Most of the tourism business owners at the conference were middle-to-late middle-aged, and most of the youngsters from the tourism program at Thompson Rivers University were talking about industry jobs with either an urban or academic focus.
So … the rural brain drain is an appropriate topic for me, a rural tourism marketing expert. Who will be running all the rural adventure businesses and small town stores that round out the rural experience, when the current crop of owners retire?
How did we get in this current brain drain mess and how can we fix it?
Most rural communities have been resource-based economies for generations. Up until 25 years ago, in my area, most kids graduated from high school and immediately went to work in one the local lumber mills. Where my husband grew up in Indiana, kids took over their parents’ farms.
Now, the mills are closed and on a typical Indiana farm, it takes over 1,000 acres to support one farming family.
Loss of traditional rural jobs is one problem, and another may be our rural school systems. In the United States, in an effort to increase rural students’ opportunities, we have seen a tremendous push toward college prep programs in rural high schools. Kids are educated to leave home to go to college and never come back!
In their article, ‘The Rural Brian Drain,’ Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas summarize a depressing number of reasons for the brain drain. Their own study of 200 rural Iowan youth interested me the most.
Rural communities reading this study will learn that this is one area that we bear direct responsibility and have a clear opportunity to make a change. We rural parents and community members push our best and brightest out of our communities, according to the study, and we under-support and under-value those who choose to stay.
I’m guilty myself. Getting a college education is something I preached to my kids from the time they were babies. And, like many rural parents, I didn’t counsel them to examine which careers would help them make their way back to the town they love. Two of our four children may someday make it back by sheer will and tenacity. I could have helped them come to wiser decisions as they looked at future career choices.
We can grow our own entrepreneurs.
Not every rural student is interested in college, and most technical schools are not training for rural careers. What would happen if we taught entrepreneurship in rural high school? A study of successful Oklahoma, US rural communities showed that fostering entrepreneurship builds successful small businesses and strong, successful communities … why not foster a crop of young, home-grown entrepreneurs?
In California, the Virtual Enterprise program offers excellent curriculum that schools can implement to provide hands-on entrepreneurship training. Why isn’t this approach being used in rural communities everywhere?
Entrepreneurship training through local community colleges would also help rural business owners to plan, not only for their business’s development and growth, but also for its sale to the next generation. Each time a successful rural business closes when the owner retires, a small town is diminished by that loss. (Ed. note: Or is it? Discover a counter-argument here.)
We rural residents cannot wait for “experts” from afar to solve this problem for us. We have the human resources to begin addressing it from within. Marci Penner at the Kansas Sampler Foundation in Kansas, US has opened the dialog amoung Kansas 21-40 year-olds with the ‘Powering Up’ program. Brian Whitacre and Lara Brooks of the Daily Yonder are studying and reporting on rural entrepreneurial successes.
How is your community supporting young entrepreneurs and encouraging your children to stay and raise their families in your small town?
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Tags: brain drain > entrepreneur > Joanne Steele > rural > rurban > Tourism > youth
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Community development, growth and communication in the rural-urban fringe landscape.
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June 24th, 2010 @ 12:00 pm
Well said
July 13th, 2010 @ 8:40 am
[...] before I go, remember the recent guest post by Joanne Steele? In it, she encourages communities to support local entrepreneurs, with many great examples [...]