Transcript from the National Farm Broadcast Service

MIRA: Lost Treasurers:

Countering Rural America's Brain Drain
It's a continuing problem affecting rural farm and ranch communities across America. Young people graduate from high school, leave the community to attend college or other training, and never return.

Many don't return because there aren't enough skilled jobs for them in their home communities. Leaders in Grant, in western Nebraska's Perkins County, were part of a project to try to slow this flight of young talent, through an innovative program designed to teach young people entrepreneurial skills and educate them about how the Internet and modern telecommunications technology may make it possible to profitably operate businesses out of small, rural communities. And at the same time, improve those communities' standard of living.

The Grant group was one of several southwest Nebraska and eastern Colorado communities that participated in a regional project, funded through a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Managing Information with Rural America (MIRA) Initiative.

Grant Group Project Leader, John Stritt, says that the group of adults and students focused their efforts on developing a plan that might impact their community

Stritt: "In our plan, our focus became that of working in two different areas. One was to greater increase -- to provide a better understanding -- of the community to the outside world -- in a sense, by using the Internet as that medium. And so students were hired -- were able to apply for a position and then were hired -- to carry out this process. And, this included working with community business people, and then developing the Web site -- then also providing some services for this community. The second piece of that was that we elected to take about a third of our funds and try to apply for a grant or to extend the mini-grant into a larger grant idea for the betterment of education and health services for the community of Grant."

Grant organizers paired ten high school students with ten adult mentors for the project. They attended six entrepreneurial workshops together with other community groups. These workshops were designed to encourage young people to see the possibility of running a business out of a rural community.

Student cluster leader Paul Demmel is a freshman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Demmel says the project has taught him some valuable lessons about how people have to work together and how to take initiative.

Demmel: "One person can't do it all by themselves, and it takes a while to figure out what you want -- but once you know what you want then it's a lot easier to go ahead with the project, such as the one we undertook."

Demmel explains what rural communities, like Perkins County, can do to encourage young people to return to live and work.

Demmel: "I think young people want to come back. They'd like to raise families in a rural area, but it's just hard to produce incentives. And, I think those incentives would be careers. With that comes good jobs, good pay. I think those are the main things, but also a sense of community. Some of the younger people that come back, often times I think, feel left out because it's an older community. And so -- once you start getting some to come back, I think that they'll be more willing to come back in larger numbers."

Mentor Dr. Cliff Colglazier says that the MIRA project provides the encouragement small communities need to prevent them from being left behind.

Colglazier: "We have a strong medical community and a strong educational system and we're proud of it. But it's pretty evident that rural America is soon going to fall behind the rest of the country, without adequate technology and connectivity. We used MIRA money to apply for a grant that would benefit three things. We wanted to benefit the school system, the health community and community development. Our application was turned down but this process provided us with much experience."

What success did this experience lead to?

Colglazier: "I think our biggest success was approaching Great Plains Medical Center in North Platte, where we sent our X-rays for interpretation, and currently we local doctors in the front line are forced to interpret our own X-rays and CT-scans from accidents to acutely ill patients and people with strokes. Then we send these to North Platte and they're interpreted by the radiologist two or three days later. Teleradiograpy would allow this to happen immediately. North Platte just needed the nudge from our local MIRA to apply for a matching grant and this was to finance teleradiography for fourteen rural communities around North Platte. This grant was for $750,000 and it was awarded this winter and within in the next six months it will be in place and operational."

Colglazier discusses the role that MIRA played in getting teleradiography in their community.

Colglazier: "Our local MIRA group helped raise $450,000 in local donations to finance part of this matching grant and five high schoolers in our group made a ten minute video that was used to attract donors. And we arranged for a spot on our area TV that also advertised for this. Our local MIRA group organized a meeting bringing together about 25 people last winter. These ranged from hospital administrators to telephone executives to software vendors and satellite/internet experts. We tried to find the most cost effective and fastest bandwidth for this project."

Finally, Stritt explains how the W.K. Kellogg Foundation assisted with the project.

Stritt: "The biggest piece that they played in was providing the training, bringing in some outside speakers, economic developers, leaders in community development part. And they provided the training, or at least the discussion to lead us into the planning process of it. Quite naturally, the other piece of it that enabled us to do and carry out the project that we were going to do was the financial funding that went along with it. But those two components were equally important in terms, I think, achieving the success or reaching for the goals that they did."