Welcome to another episode of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell. This episode is brought to you by A Little Hometown Shirt.
And A Little Hometown Shirt is based in a little hometown and they do marketing apparel of all kinds and they do free delivery in the regional area of north central Kansas. So if you are looking for an apparel provider, please give A Little Hometown Shirt a call. Search them on Facebook or contact them at alittlehometownshirt.com. On this episode, we’re going to delve a little bit more into rural inspiration.
Who is inspirational in this rural atmosphere? Who have we modeled our work after? And who have we learned the most from over the years? So I do have a top three on that, and we’ve talked about a few of these people before in the podcast. But number one is Marcy Penner. Here, Marcy talks about her journey home to start this work in Kansas.
Take a listen. Until I got going, and that person was in Madison, Wisconsin. So I ended up moving there and did a lot of things.
I had gone through nine different majors in college. I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. And finally ended up with a degree in radio, TV, film.
But just that was my last major at the time I was graduating, so I went with that. But I finally figured out in Wisconsin that I wanted to be a guidance counselor. So I went through the master’s program and got a degree in counseling and guidance.
I also worked in the University of Wisconsin women’s athletic department, sports information. I’ll tell you guys this story. I worked out in the weight room, and at one point I was bent over doing curls, and a barbell was up against a post, and it fell on my head.
And that changed my life. I’ll come back to that. But I moved to Pennsylvania near the Philadelphia area, became an elementary guidance counselor.
I was no longer able to coach or compete, so I became a guidance counselor, and I absolutely loved working with young kids. But my episodes from this hit to the head with the barbell got worse and worse, and I finally couldn’t work. And I had to move home to Kansas to live with my mom and dad.
And at first, that was a real blow to me. But in the end, that was the best thing that ever happened to me, that blow to the head. The only job I could hold was with my dad.
And on my good days, we’d drive around the state, and we ended up writing a Kansas guidebook. And that was the start of my education about this state. So Marci started out with her dad, and after her dad passed, she continued his work and has done a number of different guidebooks from the state of Kansas.
Here’s more from Marci. From 2012 to 2016, Wendy, this was her first time, but we went to every incorporated city in Kansas. There’s 626 incorporated cities.
If you’ve been to Kansas before or you live here, you know what an accomplishment that is. There are a lot. I think there’s over 600 towns, something like that, in the state of Kansas.
So going to each one and really diving in and digging deeper and talking to the people about what they want and what they see as their challenges and all of those things. Marci really became a voice of a lot of different communities and really inspired a lot of communities to do the work, get involved, and to find out what makes them unique and make them and be a little bit more unapologetic about where we live and choose to live. She’s been very instrumental in the Power Up Movement, which we’ve talked to Simone Elder on this podcast as well.
She’s really trying to work with those younger people that are like 21 to 39 years old who have chosen to be back in a rural area. They’re rural by choice. A lot of times that’s sometimes, not everywhere, but sometimes that choice can be very lonely.
You might be one of the only people that are rural by choice and under the age of 40. So having that network of supporters and people who understand exactly what you’re going through and what your challenges are and can really appreciate those triumphs that you’ve had are super important to your success in a rural area. Marci also really taught me and taught us about being positive about things.
She has a yellow card philosophy at a lot of her functions that basically says, if somebody’s being a downer at your table, you can yellow card them and remind them to reframe. What’s a better way to think of that? What’s a more positive way to think of that? Because I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in a lot of situations where if everybody’s sitting around being negative and talking down on things, it’s easy to go down that rabbit hole of everything is bad. It’s really terrible.
But if you have a lot of yellow carded people who have decided to reframe how they’re talking about things, we tend to look at things in a much more positive light. I would ask my dad all these questions. What’s this? Why did they do that? Why is the fence post like that? What’s that electric pole for? What about this crop? And he taught me so much.
There were two things that we noticed. The Kansans didn’t know their own state very well. In the small towns, there were some small towns that had really good things going on, but there was no way to share it with other small towns.
So we formed the Kansas Sanford Foundation to educate Kansans about Kansas and work with small towns. And I started to see small towns like I saw elementary students. They had self-esteem issues.
They needed someone to cheer for them, needed someone to listen and be there for them, and needed someone to pull them up.
And so that’s what the Kansas Sampler Foundation started to do. Inman’s population is about 1,100. Half of the cities in Kansas have less than a 400 population.
And three-quarters of the cities in Kansas have a population of 1,500 or less. And those are volunteer-led communities who don’t have anyone paid to figure out how to keep the town alive and thriving. But as I’ve done all this since 1990, I have just fallen in love with this state.
Meeting the people, seeing the things there are to see and do. Also, we’ve talked about on this program before, Marcy’s eight cultural elements of architecture, art, commerce, cuisine, customs, geography, history, and people. Those things are something every small town can view.
Every small town has. And so something that you’re looking at and you want to figure out what’s unique about your small town, those are some of the eight things that you can look at. That’s the first half of what I wanted to tell you today.
That I’ve had an interesting route coming back to Kansas. And I love Kansas. One more thing I want to work in there.
One of my favorite things to do is working with people who are 21 to 39 and rural by choice. And I want you to know there’s a lot of young people moving back to rural communities. I got to know Marcy because I was doing my senior thesis in college on my small town, my hometown, and how do you market that and how you would do economic development for that small town.
And somebody said, hey, why don’t you talk to Marcy Penner at the Kansas Sampler Foundation? She might have some information for you. And I thought, no, there’s no way she’s going to have information on my small town. It’s only 400 people.
There’s really nothing there in terms of like, it’s not Disney World. It’s not these other things. And I got a packet in the mail from her.
It was this manila envelope full of papers on Glenelder, Kansas. I was so wrong about when you look through the lens of how Marcy and the Kansas Sampler Foundation looks at rural areas.You look at any town, like I said, and my hometown through those eight cultural elements, every small town has a story and every small town can be really interesting.
So I was always really impressed with that. That made a huge impression on me. Then I actually met Marcy not very much later.
And she remembered who I was like, oh, you’re the one I sent all of that information to about for the senior thesis. I was really blown away that she knew that. Then I saw her maybe five, five years later, probably maybe a little less than five years.
And she knew exactly who I was again. So what a skill to have, you know, remembering people, making them feel valuable, making them feel seen. Marcy has all of those things.
She was one of the reasons that I was rural by choice. She’s one of the reasons that I really thought and could do an advertising agency from such a small town. Again, we call ourselves the largest marketing agency per capita, because we are located in a town of 275 people in Kansas.
And we run a marketing agency out of here called JenRus Freelance and 314 Graphic Design and Media. Marcy was one of our inspirations about that. So we talked about Marcy.
She continues to write guidebooks. She also has the We Can Movement. She’s been doing a lot of work with the Office of Rural Prosperity.
So you’ll need to go check out her work with the Kansas Sampler Foundation. So Wendy and I wrote all these guidebooks. We do programs all over the state.
And our mission, the mission of the Sampler Foundation is to preserve and sustain rural culture. We want to do anything we can to help people be proud of living in this state and encourage them to get to know the state and get out around and see it. I hope you can see why we chose Marcy as one of our inspirations.
And we hope that you learned a lot from her too. So Marcy was one of our inspirations. In the next couple of episodes, I will share with you our next two inspirations, people we think are rock stars in this field of rural economic development.
And so I hope you will join us for the next episode of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell, and thank you for listening.