Using Telecommunications In Community Development

One of the fundamentals of building a successful community development program is correctly assessing your infrastructure.

In almost all communities, regardless of their size, telecommunications is a major player.

Here’s a link to an excellent overview of the role telecommunications can play in building a sustainable community.

— Dan Cowling

The Broadband Imperative For Community Development

Providing broadband access to those in rural areas in this century is just as important as providing electricity to rural Americans was in the previous century.

Is an increase in broadband availability and use a key part of your community’s strategic development plan?

It should be.

By the 1930s, about 90 percent of the people who lived in America’s cities had electricity. In the rural areas of the country, however, it was a far different story.

Only about 10 percent of rural residents had electricity in the early 1930s.

Private utility companies believed that supplying power to rural farmsteads was a cost-prohibitive proposition.

There also was the belief that many of the farmers were simply too poor to afford electricity.

President Franklin Roosevelt believed otherwise. FDR was intent on providing all Americans with access to reliable electric service.

In 1935, Roosevelt issued an executive order to create the Rural Electrification Administration. Congress authorized the agency in 1936 and made it a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1939.

During the late 1930s, there were a number of court cases concerning the federal government’s involvement in what previously had been the purview of private utilities.

Some members of Congress argued that the REA was a dangerous program that bordered on socialism. Their voices, however, eventually were drowned out by the REA proponents.

The growth of the REA was nothing short of amazing.

By 1939, there were 417 rural electric cooperatives serving 288,000 U.S. households.

The work of the REA also encouraged private utility companies to expand their services.

By the end of the 1930s, more than 30 percent of rural homes had electricity.

By the early 1970s, 98 percent of rural homes had electric service.

The REA was abolished in 1994, and its functions were assumed by the Rural Utilities Service of the Agriculture Department. It had, however, made a profound difference in the lives of rural Americans.

In the years following World War II, the rural South steadily began closing the huge gap with the rest of the country in average per capita income. There were several major reasons for this.

1. For starters, there was the massive effort to pave roads in rural areas.
2. There also was the fact that the REA made it possible for electric service to come to places that had never before had electricity.
3. And because of electricity, folks in the rural South were able to buy fans and later air conditioners.

Suddenly, those in the rural South got out of the mud, out of the dark and out of the heat.

In recent decades, though, progress has slowed. The gap in per capita income is widening again, in part because rural areas of the country haven’t made the transition to the information age.

One reason for that is the lack of broadband access.

As stated at the outset, access to and the use of broadband in this century is just as important to rural residents as having electricity was in the last century.

Increasing broadband availability and use simply must be part of the strategic plan for your community.

If not, there’s something wrong with your plan.

— Rex Nelson

Growth Isn’t Everything In Community Development

For economic developers in the 20th century, bigger translated into better.

They were always looking for more.

More businesses. More jobs. More people. More roads.

But bigger is not always better.

The smart community developers of the 21st century will be quick to tell you that sometimes better is better.

The National Rural Funders Collaborative  distributed an article several years ago by Bill Bishop that was titled “Finding Rural America’s Prosperous Communities.” I still quote from it in speeches.

Bishop wrote this about rural America:

“Prosperous rural places have more places for people to meet (restaurants, bowling lanes, country clubs), and more people attend churches that are engaged in their communities.

Prosperous rural places aren’t fast growing.

As a matter of fact, they grow more slowly than do communities on average.”

That goes against everything you’ve been taught, doesn’t it? You’ve always tried to grow. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But have you thought about the fact that future growth might start with making what you already have better?

Yes, sometimes better is better — a better system of public education, better jobs, better housing stocks.

I often refer to a framework for rural development that was designed several years ago by the Indiana lieutenant governor’s office and the Purdue Center for Regional Development.

That framework outlined what’s referred to as the seven pillars of rural economic development in the new century. They are:

1. Nurturing regional groups that include the public, private, nonprofit and academic sectors. Competition is no longer between one county and its adjoining counties. Regionalism is a necessary part of modern economic development.
2. Advancing civic leadership and engagement through leadership development programs and similar efforts.
3. Investing in community assets related to natural resources, history, the arts and cultural activities.
4. Promoting rural innovation.
5. Fostering youth engagement so they can help build rural areas in which they will wish to raise their families as adults.
6. Increasing wealth creation and retention by capturing emerging economic opportunities for rural areas.
7. Ensuring diversity, inclusiveness and access for all to basic human and social services.

When I served as one of the president’s two appointees to the Delta Regional Authority, we developed a strategic plan for the 252 counties and parishes we served in Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee. That plan incorporated many of these strategies.

In the new world of community development, it was evident to us that it was no longer about attracting that big industrial plant from up north.

The keys were to instead: 

1. Attract and retain entrepreneurial talent.
2. Attract and expand philanthropic capital.
3. Train our workforce in creative ways.
4. Deploy broadband to rural areas.

No, it’s not longer just about growth for growth’s sake.

In this century, it’s all about quality of place.

Does the strategic development plan for your community include all of the things listed above?

— Rex Nelson

Private Investment—The Key To Rural Community Development

To achieve true community development, you must attract private investment — not just government grants.

That private investment most likely will flow to the places that:

1. Improve the health of the workforce with the clear understanding that healthy people yield healthy economies
2. Deepen the culture of learning through improved public schools, workforce training programs and adult literacy programs
3. Embrace diversity and new ways of thinking, a high hurdle in many tradition-bound rural communities
4. Nurture an entrepreneurial culture
5. Deploy broadband Internet access and other forms of enhanced information technology tools

As we’ve seen since the end of World War II, the economic competitiveness of a rural area is no longer assured through natural resources and inexpensive labor. The lower Mississippi River Delta region, for example, has some of the richest soil and hardest-working people anywhere. Yet it is, to be generous, struggling.

The answer is to do a far better job than we’ve done in the past developing and retaining the talent necessary to find a place in the global economy — an economy in which knowledge and innovation are rewarded as never before.

Developing talent encompasses more than simply providing a technically skilled workforce.

It now entails educated, healthy and motivated citizens.

Poor health reduces labor productivity and the size of the labor force.

A lack of education lessens earning potential and is increasingly linked to lower life expectancies.

Given the current economic situation worldwide, there’s a real danger that our rural areas will drift from the national consciousness without a dramatic change in the community and economy development strategies that are deployed.

No one denies that the problems are profound. The last thing that needs to happen is to simply repackage existing workforce development ideas and training programs.

In a nutshell, we must start thinking far differently than before when it comes to rural America.

I highly suggest a visit to the Southern Rural Development Center website to learn more about this issue. It’s filled with useful information.

— Rex Nelson