Welcome to another episode of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell. So, we’ve talked a lot about young people returning to rural areas and we just got done speaking to Simone Elder who is the power-up manager from the Kansas Sampler Foundation.
And power-ups are people that are 21 to 39 years old that choose to move back to a rural area and they are rural by choice. They do that on purpose and they don’t get stuck there. They think of it as an advantage and it is an advantage to live in a rural area when you’re a young person.
I moved away from home and I was from a rural area of about 400 people and I moved back to a town that is a 275 person town and I started a marketing agency in a very small town. And we like to say we’re the largest marketing agency per capita in the state because we are in such a small town. But we are a rural by choice business.
Rural by choice people can be very well-educated. You don’t have to be, it isn’t a step back to be a young person in a rural area. You can be well-educated, you can bring your degree back and there’s lots of new opportunities, especially with remote work and the internet to be just as successful in a small town as you would be in a major area.
Oftentimes, young people in rural areas become pros at multitasking. Don’t lose that. Always stay involved.
There’s lots of extracurricular activities available for rural small town people and people of all ages, maybe even more than in a bigger area because you have to specialize so much in a bigger school and a bigger area. In rural areas, you can be very multi-talented and use all those different talents and you can use those talents in many different jobs and volunteer options throughout the communities. Here’s some examples of maybe some people that are not necessarily less successful by choosing a rural area.
It’s just a preference. Things were really revolutionized, things that really changed my view on if I could be successful in a rural area, especially as a young person. There were two things.
The Kansas Sampler Foundation, as I said, Marcy Penner is one of our role models and we just spoke to Simone Elder, who she has hired on as their power-up manager. I love how they look at things. Like I talked about a couple of episodes ago, they have the eight cultural elements that every small town has.
Every small town has architectural history that’s unique to that small town. Each small town has an aspect of art, commerce, and cuisine. Different towns have different customs.
Your geography is always unique to your small town. The history of your town is only unique to you and the people of your town is only unique to you. No matter how big your town is or how small your town is, each town has those eight cultural elements.
I talked about that a couple of episodes ago as well. How do you make your town stand out? How do you make your town unique and how do you brand your town so that no other town can be exactly like yours? Researching your history, coming up with these eight cultural elements. If you ever need help with that, that is something that we specialize in, is how to brand your town, how to find that thing that makes your town unique.
If you ever need help with that, please hit me up. I’ll put that in the link comments down below. Again, things that revolutionized my view of rural Kansas and my rural small town, Kansas Sampler Foundation, number one.
Number two is when I started working for Brush Art Corporation in Downs, Kansas. Downs is a town of about 600 to 800 people and Brush Art Corporation is there in that small town. They’re a major marketing organization.
They can compete with all kinds of large community centers. One of the main things they worked on when I was there were Caterpillar dealers from across the nation. We covered those Caterpillar dealers in the Los Angeles market as well as in Canada, so international, all from this really small town in Kansas.
That really changed my view on what you can do in rural Kansas and how successful you can be from anywhere. Young people ages 20 to 30, why should you move back? USDA Economic Research Survey studied young people ages 20 to 30 who had returned to rural communities where they grew up. A lot of them chose that because of family ties and friends, the geographical closeness of rural communities means shorter trips to work, shopping and visiting relatives, outdoor recreational opportunities and participation in school sports for their kids.
That is something I have noticed that my kids are able to be very diverse in what they do. They have touch points in pretty much everything they’re in. They can do theater and music as well as football and baseball and track and all the different sports that maybe in a bigger place they’d have to try out and they wouldn’t even get a chance to do.
We really like that for our kids in a small town. Something that I learned when I went to college, a lot of our small towns and small communities, you know the league pretty well, you know the people pretty well. A lot of times they are your competition and you don’t really, you know those are your big rivalries.
But once you get to college and beyond as an adult, those people are becoming your best comrades. Often times you identify them college and beyond and you have a lot in common.
If you can’t move back, encourage and help those to move back and think of moving somewhere regionally because regionally tends to have a lot of the feel of home even if you didn’t prefer your small town, your hometown, being moving back regionally you can still kind of get that rural feel, have those rural connections but not necessarily have to move to your specific hometown.
What I learned is the way it’s always been, it doesn’t always have to be that way. So I know we talked a little bit about population loss on this podcast and I’m going to go back into that in a couple more episodes but people think just because population loss was how it has been, you know we’ve never been as big as we were in 1800, that does not mean that’s always how it has to be from now on and we’re seeing a lot of change around that.
We’re seeing we need to change our attitudes about that, we need to decide what we’re going to, that we’re going to take up that challenge, step up and start thinking progressively and those communities that have done that around are really making it work and really being successful and we need to stop apologizing for loving it in rural areas.
We need to be more like Texas. Texas thinks they’re the best at everything and a lot of times from our small communities, from our state, especially in the Midwest, sometimes Kansas is like that. We tend to be apologetic about where we live and we don’t really want to say, hey this is where we live and we need to really change that.
What people don’t think about, they don’t think we have jobs in rural areas. A lot of our counties in Kansas have a 3% unemployment rate and really that’s 0% or less unemployment rate. About 3% of your population is never looking for work.
They are maybe they’re handicapped, maybe they can’t work, those type of things. So really a 3% unemployment rate means that pretty much everybody in your communities is being utilized in some way in a job that can work. Like I talked about before, we advertise our jobs differently and we’re really trying to change that in our area by putting jobs more online instead of just word of mouth and in the paper because that makes it really tough for somebody that is either wanting to move back or is wanting to move to your community and has no touch points there already to get here.
How do you get a job in a rural area? Pursue jobs that translate back. So a lot of times writers, graphic designers, social media programming, drafting and consulting, those jobs can be done from a computer and they can be done from anywhere. So why not do them from a rural area? Look for jobs that allow remote or telecommute work.
Number three, don’t forget that plumbers, electricians, contractors, welders and masons can make really good money and often much more money than people with a four year degree and all of those jobs are very much in demand in a rural area. We need services that will keep our communities going, we’ll have a high retirement rate in the coming years and we need people to come back and take on those jobs. So those jobs will be a great degree to have a job in in the coming years.
Enjoy where you live. It used to be that we were more isolated but now we have better transportation, we have the internet which not only means internet for work but for entertainment access and why not work and live in a more peaceful environment where you can reverse commute on the weekends and we talked about reverse commuting before on this podcast. Sometimes in a bigger city you might not have the money to go out and do a lot of things, you might not actually get to go to a lot of things and when you live in a city we talk a lot about in minutes traveled instead of miles traveled.
Here we talk about miles traveled. So something in Kansas City or Chicago or even in your same neighborhood in a city might be an hour away. Here you can drive an hour away, not see a lot of traffic and you’re an hour away in Salina or a little over an hour away in Manhattan.
Those things can be deceptive. You know you think you’re in a city you’re going to have a lot of access to things but really you probably have just as much access in a rural area. You can drive an hour and get to a lot of things or you can drive an hour and get to some things in Kansas City.
An hour versus an hour it’s really very similar. So you got to realize it’s not always apples to apples when you’re comparing a city to the country. So a lot of people say I can’t afford to move back to a rural area.
If you have, here’s the problem though, is your housing normally. Anything built here and if you can find it that’s the other part of this whole thing. But if you have a $400,000 house you have to have a salary that pays for that.
If you have a $700,000 house in the city you have to have a salary that pays for that. But a lot of our houses here in a rural area they’re more like $300,000, $200,000, those type of houses. So your salary doesn’t necessarily have to keep up with the lifestyle.
So it’s not apples to apples comparison when you’re comparing a city to a rural area. I’ve also heard there’s not a restaurant or a mall on every corner so you don’t tend to spend as much with extracurricular money. I guess you could go out to eat every night here in a rural area but you would probably get pretty darn bored of what the options are because we just don’t have that many restaurants to choose from.
And the other thing is about a rural area, if you don’t like it, change it. You have the ability to do that in a rural area and that is a very big responsibility but it’s a very, it’s an option with a lot of possibility for somebody who really wants to make a change. So here are the last six items of I moved away from home and here’s what I learned.
Rural people are awesome. People from rural areas are not lesser. They’re just maybe a little bit different than a city atmosphere and we function just a tad bit different but that doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing.
Number two, rural people are not less successful. They just have maybe some different priorities. Three, your lead competition can be your comrade.
Four, the way it’s always been, it doesn’t have to always be that way. Five, people don’t think we have jobs here but as we talked about, we really do. And number six, people don’t think they can afford to move here and maybe that needs to be rethought because it’s not always apples to apples.
Alright, so that is I moved away and came back to a rural area and that’s what I learned and we hope to catch you on the next episode of Less People.