Giving Compass' Take:

• Ben Goldfarb details the opportunities to support rural civic engagement that donors can engage in and highlights essential considerations that must be taken into account. 

• Are you ready to commit to rural civic engagement? What role can you play? 

• Read about rural philanthropy in the time of COVID-19.

A growing number of foundation and nonprofit leaders have become increasingly concerned with our sector’s decades-long withdrawal from rural America. These regions and communities face identical challenges to those in cities: access to quality healthcare and education, corporate disinvestment, wealth inequality, infrastructure decline, environmental degradation, and political dysfunction. Because philanthropy’s attention was focused elsewhere, we failed to see not only the gathering needs and dispossession in rural and small city America, but also the abiding resiliency, resourcefulness and energy that have always been hallmarks of these communities.

Following the 2016 election, however, donors around the country are becoming more interested in examining how they might re-engage with rural towns and states. In this paper, long-time organizer and grassroots consultant Ben Goldfarb, presents a nuanced landscape analysis and strategy review, providing cogent insights for funders across the issues and challenges that affect those who live in small towns and cities. He outlines a set of options for investments by national and place-based donors and their grantees to reverse our absence.

In the near-term, Goldfarb writes, the task for foundations and nonprofits interested in rural work is to establish grounded and dialogic relationships whereby we learn about and take our cues from leaders and organizations in towns and small cities. Simply relocating urban assumptions, attitudes, organizing and advocacy models, communications, and organizational structures to the rural context is unlikely to succeed. As funders, we can work together to aggregate and align resources to more effectively resource the significant and growing challenges facing these communities—challenges that profoundly impact American society as a whole.

Numerous nonprofit and foundation leaders across the country and across sectors have informed Goldfarb’s research and thinking, and we thank them for their insights and their important work. There are certainly many more people to learn from and avenues to explore. This report—and the conversations surrounding it—mark just the beginning of a longer and broader project to include rural communities in philanthropy’s vision for a fair, just, and prosperous America.