Giving Compass' Take:

• The author highlights the rural Wisconsin town of Westby, which is still thriving thanks to cooperative business models. 

• What needs to happen for other rural towns in America to create cooperative businesses that protect each other's interests? 

• Read about the reasons why we can't get rural America online. 

All in all, Westby is a corner of rural America that’s still modestly prosperous. And while its legacy of locally controlled cooperative businesses isn’t the only reason, it’s a big part of the story. Local farmers are not totally at the mercy of giant agribusinesses when they bring their products to market.

But Westby is the exception, not the rule. It’s a holdout from an earlier era when co-ops helped farmers and rural communities keep a much larger share of the nation’s wealth than they do today.

Most everywhere else across rural America, the powerful cooperative movement has either faded or, worse, become co-opted by giant monopolies that prey off the very small-scale producers they’re supposed to protect.

The depressed state of rural America is getting a fresh look as a result of the 2016 election, and rightly so. People are asking how to bring back rural prosperity and restore small-town civic life. A good first step would be to recreate the successes of places like Westby. That starts by asking why co-ops aren’t doing the same thing elsewhere.

Read the full article on rural America by Leah Douglas at The New Food Economy