Episode Transcript

Welcome to the first ever installment of Less People with Jenny Russell. I am your hostess, Jenny Russell, and I have been in rural economic development for the past 25 years. I also run a rural marketing agency. What really got me interested in this kind of work is I did a senior thesis on this subject, economic development for my hometown. That was in my senior year of college, and one of the students actually asked the question at the end of the survey, at the end of the presentation: if it’s dying, why do you want to save it? Why don’t you just let it die? Of course, that was somebody coming from a city who had never had those close relationships of a little small town. So it became my passion and really ignited something in me that said this is something I should probably put my efforts into and focus on for my career because it’s something that really spurred me on.

Something else that got my attention in 2016 was a survey from the Rural Institute at Wichita State, and they were talking about how by 2050 about 60% of the Kansas population would be living in the Kansas City area. That makes a lot of assumptions, as most people say. Assuming makes an ass out of you and me, so I really wanted to prove that with technology, fiber internet, those types of things, small towns and rural areas have a lot of value and the ability to turn their population loss around.

There are lots of problems with housing, lots of problems with childcare, and these are the issues I see across the country in rural areas, not just here. A lot of people think, oh, that’s just a here problem, just my hometown’s problem, and that’s not true. So in this podcast, I’m going to address all of those things that many rural communities have issues with, and then I’ll try to offer some ideas for remedies and solutions to those issues.

I would love to hear your feedback and I’d love it if this is one of your passions. If you follow along with me on the podcast Less People, I will try to update this weekly and we can have discussions about why less people does not necessarily have to mean less life. It actually means more life, and it means lots of different connections that you can’t have anywhere else. So join me on Less People, the podcast about rural economic development.