What is Giving Compass?
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Giving Compass' Take:
• This case study by Allen Smart and Britt Davis lays out the role of philanthropy in rural New Mexico, exploring the unique cultural context.
• How can funders use this information to guide giving in rural New Mexico and inform efforts in other rural areas?
• Learn more about rural philanthropy.
An urban dweller drives into a rural New Mexico town. He is struck by all the things he takes as part and parcel of his city life that are missing in this rural place. “You poor people,” he says to a local resident. “You don’t even have street signs.” “Why would we need street signs?” the resident replies. “We know where everything is.”
This exchange isn’t fiction, and it sums up a core tenet of effective rural philanthropy: Rural communities may be small, but they know what assets they have, what they need, and where they want to go.
As America becomes more urban, the dominant narrative for rural life seems to shift to a tale of woe and want. Many funders fall under the spell of this narrative, immediately defaulting to a focus on what’s “wrong” with rural places — with the implication that answers to challenges must be imported rather than homegrown.
“Rural work needs to be reframed from a negative (deficit) model. Too often funders assume that rural areas want or need help the way funders want to give it,” says Dr. Dolores Roybal, executive director of the Con Alma Health Foundation, a $28 million health conversion foundation that serves the entire state of New Mexico from its headquarters in Santa Fe.
It doesn’t mean that there are not needs in rural communities: it just means that the people affected have to be part of the decision-making and community problem-solving.
Roybal understands the perspective of rural residents first hand, having grown up in Cuarteles, a small rural community (population 469) in northern New Mexico’s Espanola Valley between Santa Cruz and Chimayo. As a member of that community, she learned at an early age to recognize assets.
“When I was getting my masters degree at the University of Denver, it was the first time that I found out that other people considered us poor,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘What do you mean we’re poor? We have our home and our land, we have our community. We don’t see ourselves as poor.’”
Instead, Roybal sees rural places — and rural funders — in New Mexico as “small but mighty.”
New Mexico also is a place with deep and intertwined multicultural histories. Statewide, just over 40 percent of the population is white alone, not Hispanic, 2 percent African-American, and 8.8 percent Native, with 46.4 percent identifying as Hispanic or Latino. Non-white residents outnumber white residents in approximately 60 percent of New Mexico counties. Rural residents statewide count for just over 22 percent of the population. Six counties have no urban population at all. The state is home to 23 Native American tribes who survived colonization by the Spanish and the white-led U.S. government that restricted them to separate pueblos, reservations and land grants.