Committed Kansan’s working everyday. Come Help.
There is a great team of committed professionals working to move rural Kansas forward, not backward. Diversifying the entire economy for a portion of Kansas which is roughly twelve times the size of the entire State of New Jersey, changing the negative non-bragging narrative that most Kansan’s have, and finding new markets for a commodity driven Ag base that can easily let us down. What is your superpower?
It’s a big, but not impossible job. But it’s hard, draining, work that needs supported not torn down. As someone that has moved away from a rural area, what can you do to help?:
- Come back and be part of the solution. Part of the army working for better. Do you need help to figure out how? Contact the Economic Development office in the rural area that you want to move back to. They can help show you the way. If you don’t have an Economic Development office, look for a Chamber of Commerce or your local banker.
- Give yearly to a local Community Foundation in a rural area and better yet, include that Community Foundation in your estate planning by pledging a 5% estate gift.
- Tour your rural place. If you cannot live in your rural place, come back and visit often. Spend money in rural retail shops. Get gas and groceries, if it is an option. Always take the option. If any of the rural businesses have an on-line buying option, buy often from home. Eat at the local restaurant. Seek out the local farmers market and buy from local farmers, if that is an option.
- Share the news. Give your urban friends the local hometown newspaper, if that’s an option, so that they can fall in love with the town like you have. Not a news reader? Follow a good social media platform that represents your rural place well.
- Come and bring a friend. Bring them to your rural place, take them to the museum, watch a sunset, and show them the beauty of the countryside. Come back to the town celebration. Stay at an AirBnb or a VRBO. Even if your town doesn’t have a motel, it might have one of these options.
- Move your job back. Ask your current employer if they offer telecommuting or if they would consider a remote working situation where you come back to their office at scheduled increments.
- Start your own business. Have you worked for a company and now you have great skills in a job that you love? Figure out how you can start a business in the place you want to be. Is that possible? Ask your local Economic Development office or banker for help and advice.
- Find a Job. Look at on-line job boards like Indeed.com or get a subscription (paper or on-line) to a local newspaper in the rural area that you want to move. Also consider checking the websites and social media accounts of the Economic Development agency or Chamber in the rural area you are considering.
- Rural Opportunity Zones. If you want to move to a rural place in Kansas, consider looking for counties that participate in the Rural Opportunity Zone Program. It’s a program from the State of Kansas that can help pay back up to $15,000 of your student loans. Also if you have lived out of the State of Kansas for more than five years, you could qualify for a State Income Tax Exemption. Good job State of Kansas!
- Support. If you cannot come back, at least do no harm and be supportive in the ways that you can. Be supportive of those who do make the choice to be rural.
Where are Bob and Nancy?
There are still those Bob Dole’s and Nancy Kassebaum’s in Kansas, it just takes an article like this for them to come out of the woodwork and be vocal. Most of them are the “super heroes” mentioned in this article that are too busy tackling large problems in their own backyard to spin their wheel’s preaching to those from bigger areas who find it hard to understand. As an example, Luke Mahin from our office spent almost nine hours talking with the author of this article and taking pictures with their freelance photographer. He gave pages and pages of great things going on in rural. When this article came out, it took only a few negative things out of the context of the other hours of input that he shared.
Kansas Farming is a family affair.
How frustrating to do this every day as a lawmaker? Is it any wonder that many of the good advocates choose to stay home and do the work? Fighting for those hard-working farmers like my Father who routinely worked sixty hours a week and only took two vacations in my eighteen years of growing up in his house. Only to work that hard and be dependent, as the article rightly pointed out, on the weather and the market to decide if he would make a profit.
“Communities Can Solve Problems Better for Themselves”
My Father was the one I learned about entrepreneurship from. Where I learned that you have to show up, even when you are sick, even when it’s an evening, even when it’s a holiday. If there is work to be done, you do it, no matter when it is. That dream was worked too hard for, on the same ground that has been in many of these families for hundreds of years. People who are “Rural by Choice”, (those that get a College degree or learn a trade and move here on purpose) that realize that dream, those people, that land are important and are worth fighting for and preserving. There are those, like Congressman Roger Marshall who was quoted in your article, who do go to the Capitol to fight the good fight. But, as he rightly pointed out, “I think communities can solve their problems better for themselves.”
