Goal: Create justice and equity in rural communities.
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About Center for Rural Strategies
Leadership
Dee Davis
President
Dee Davis is the founder of the Center for Rural Strategies. Dee is the former Executive Producer of Appalshop, the venerable community-based media and cultural center. In 2001 he and others formed Rural Strategies to apply the tools of strategic media, public information campaigns, and press relations to help rural advocates and organizations.
Recent activities include the following:
Keynote address, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues "Rural American, Community Issues," a national journalists' seminar at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Keynote address, annual meeting of Voices for Alabama, a statewide children's advocacy network, Birmingham.
Panelist, "Hillbillies vs. Hollywood: How a Small Nonprofit Took on CBS Television and Won," 2004 Council on Foundation annual meeting, Toronto.
Presenter and participant, European Union-sponsored meeting on rural development, LEADER, Netherlands.
Presenter, Digital Independence Conference, San Francisco.
Katharine Pearson Criss
Vice President for Asset Development
Organization’s Objective
Rural America has much to gain from a vigorous discussion of economic and social policy. But the current civic debate that passes for a discussion of rural issues actually focuses on a narrow set of cultural values questions that do not address underlying economic and social conditions in the countryside.
Rural America has the highest poverty rates, the highest rates of drug abuse and addiction, the highest suicide rates, and the highest death rates from the war in Iraq. But rural communities are perceived to be less likely than urban ones to support progressive policy solutions.
Rather than grapple with this apparent contradiction head on, the progressive community has consistently focused its organizing efforts and communications strategies in cities and suburbs while ignoring more than 60 million rural Americans. Perhaps progressives reason it is not cost effective to reach dispersed rural audiences. Perhaps they assume poverty in rural America is easier to handle and therefore does not require a governmental response. Perhaps they assume rural America is all white (though it is only 8 percentage points less diverse than the country as a whole).
Whatever the reason for progressive America’s disengagement from rural communities, the result is manifest. In a nation that is evenly split politically, rural conservatives provide the margin that shuts out progressive solutions and stultifies civic debate. A fuller, more robust civic dialog about rural issues will be good for rural communities and the nation as a whole.
* Organizations with 501(c)3 legal status engage exclusively in non-partisan education and civic engagement activities.
