Center on Rural Innovation

For many, the notion of rural America conjures up images of farms and ranches, small picturesque downtowns, big skies and beautiful lakes. 

For others, they see the reflection of the more recent struggles, empty storefronts, aging white populations, the devastating impacts of the opioid epidemic. Poor broadband infrastructure and little innovation. A place you could visit and vacation, but not actually stay to earn a living or have an aspirational career. 

While aspects of each of these perceptions have elements of truth, none provide the complete picture. And, more importantly, the future of rural does not reflect these images and, for the good of the nation, the future economy of rural America must look different. 

I am applying for the Elevate Prize to ensure that the future of rural America does look different, and I believe that digital economies are the solution. With the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI), the nonprofit I founded in 2017 to lead our digital economy ecosystem building efforts, I would use the Elevate Prize to accelerate and scale our transformative work to empower rural communities to thrive in a digital age.

People often ask me why I’ve dedicated my career to rural America. Here’s the truth: It’s because my father passed away while I was in 8th grade. My community, Hartland, Vermont, wrapped its arms around our family—as rural communities do. They made sure my brother and I got to practices and rehearsals—and ultimately gave me the confidence I needed to get to the college of my dreams. They are responsible for where I am today. 

Hartland was once fueled by dairy and machine tool manufacturing, and I developed an early appreciation for these traditionally rural industries. My family witnessed neighbors and community members struggle as small dairy farms disappeared and machine tool manufacturing became a shadow of itself.

I founded CORI with a vision of building sustainable digital economies in rural America, the culmination of a career that has spanned elected office, corporate CSR, and national service. In four short years, we’ve grown into a $4.5 million organization with presence in more than 20 states across the country. With Covid-19 accelerating the conversation about remote work and where people can live and thrive, I am eager to scale our work to bring transformative change to rural America.

After the Great Recession, a rift emerged between urban and rural economies in the U.S. Technology jobs concentrated in burgeoning metro innovation hubs, while automation and underinvestment left small towns without a path forward. By 2019, metro employment was 10% higher than its pre-recession level, while rural employment remained 4% lower, and just 5% of tech jobs were based in the rural places that made up 15% of the nation’s workforce. Rural America is home to 24 million working people and we are working to close that gap by getting 500,000 new people working in digital economy jobs.

We partner with rural communities to develop digital economy ecosystems with a focus on five direct drivers of success: entrepreneurship support and incubation, access to capital, digital workforce development, access to digital jobs, and inclusive tech culture building. These efforts are designed to address common gaps in access to resources and expertise, empowering communities to design strategies and access funding to execute them. Especially in rural BIPOC communities that are traditionally left out of the tech economy.

To date, we have supported more than 20 rural communities doing digital ecosystem building, with a goal of getting to 50 communities by 2022.

Our work is innovative in both its approach and its focus. Unlike other organizations working in rural, we take a systems approach  — in addition to our ecosystem building work, we zero in on policy change and shifting the narrative on rural. Our focus on digital economy jobs specifically is also unique among organizations and leaders in this space. What is more, we have been successful in securing national caliber resources and expertise to unlock small town potential in a coordinated, comprehensive way. 

From the start, we knew we needed to do more than focus on single community success stories. We needed to bring together more like-minded communities and create a community of practice where rural leaders could learn from each other. 

With the support of the Economic Development Administration, we found rural communities across the country of every typology that had come to the same conclusion about their economic future. Out of this we created the Rural Innovation Network, which currently stretches across 18 states across the country. Committed to the ongoing process of embedding racial equity through all our work, we’ve made sure communities in our network are home to diverse racial groups, ethnicities, and cultures.

We are building economic equity across geography through jobs and enterprises that provide the greatest potential for economic mobility (and resilience) for individuals and communities. This work has the potential to change the lives and futures of millions of Americans and is critical to achieving true economic equity in our nation. The greatest potential impact exists for the 10 million BIPOC individuals who call rural communities home, and who continue to experience the most unequal economic outcomes compared to their white neighbors. 

CORI was founded to address the challenges facing rural America head on, by helping build digital economy ecosystems in small communities across the country. Across rural America, there are local leaders already working to advance digital economies. However, these leaders often lack access to the resources and connections they need to make real progress. CORI helps them accelerate their work by providing:

1. Assessment of current opportunities, gaps, challenges, and needs.
2. Strategy & technical assistance to help define and build their digital economy strategies.
3. Funding support to help ensure they can execute on their strategies, include strategy for applying for Federal funds and connections to leading philanthropists in this space like Reid Hoffman, David Siegel, and Ashton Kutcher. 

CORI is currently directly serving 70 rural leaders in 18 communities, with our ecosystem model potentially benefiting the 1.2 million people living in our Rural Innovation Network communities. A year from now, we anticipate serving at least 125 rural leaders annually in 30 communities, with plans for reaching 50 communities by the end of 2023.

By 2030, we want rural America to have 15% of digital economy jobs, distributed to match the gender and race demographics of each region. We will achieve this goal by supporting the creation of digital economy ecosystems in rural communities, accelerating this work by pursuing systems change and narrative shift around rural. 

Our efforts will be successful if we reach a critical mass of communities that are diverse, equitable and inclusive from the start, shift the national narrative on what is possible in rural places, and generate a sustainable level of revenue to continue our work in the long-term. Ultimately, we will reach our goal by building the capacity of rural communities through technical assistance, connecting communities to national caliber resources, delivering data-driven tools to provide insights to community leaders, and creating a community of practice to allow our network of communities to be a place for learning and sharing best practices.

Our work lines up closely with the UN’s indicator 8.2 “Achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including through a focus on high-value added and labour-intensive sectors.”

Over the past year, CORI has experiencedan unprecedented level of growth as the pandemic and its economic impacts, combined with growing social and political divides, have drastically increased interest in our mission. In just a year, we have grown our CORI team from one person to eight, as well as almost doubling staff at our sister organization, RISI. This growth reflects both our impact and the growing need for our work — and, yet, it presents unique financial and organizational barriers. Over the next year, we need to build the financial and organizational infrastructure pieces necessary to support CORI in the long-term. While we will continue to pursue our mission-based goals with our usual focus and intensity, we now also need to ensure that the pieces are in place to cultivate a healthy, growing organization. To this end, we are in the process of hiring additional staff  to support finance, operations,and culture, and we anticipate that these will be areas with additional barriers to overcome in the coming year. Winning the Elevate Prize, with its flexibility and capacity building support,would be critical to helping us build out the systems we need to meet our programmatic impact goals in the long-run. 

We know that, on its surface, digital economic development can feel impersonal and nebulous. We would use Elevate’s larger platform and audience to humanize our work and share the personal stories and photographs we have collected on the ground in our communities. 

People will not believe in rural America until they can see rural America. It’s one thing to know there is a burgeoning tech economy in Durango, CO. It’s another thing to see Jeff, CEO of Agile Space Industries, walking through the rural desert on his way to launch a rocket while talking about the incredible quality of life he has found since landing in the rural community of Durango. 

Our work is human-centered and we would use this incredible opportunity to introduce America to what is really happening in rural communities so that they can believe too. 

This larger audience would have an exponential impact, bringing new supporters and advocates both to CORI and to our partner communities.

A core value of CORI’s work is advancing the narrative that rural America is not white America. We know this from data (22% of rural Americans are BIPOC) and we know this from experience...the personal experience that our team brings, and experience on the ground in our partner communities. 

With the values of innovation and inclusion in mind, I conceived CORI as a relatively flat organization. What this means is that, even as we grow and add some inevitable levels of hierarchy, we do not operate with a traditional leadership team structure and make every effort to welcome voices from across the organization into conversations. As such, our DEI work thus far has not been top-down but rather led by a working group of staff empowered to identify resources, priorities, and strategies that will help CORI grow into a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization. 

In 2020, we articulated the following high-level goals related to DEI:

• Hire staff to ensure our communities can effectively engage BIPOC citizens in their work

• Diversify our board with a wider array of rural voices

• Actively recruit more majority-BIPOC communities into the Rural Innovation Network

As a leader, I bring strong rural roots combined with experience seeing technology jobs and companies succeed in rural. I also have experience deploying national scale programs at AmeriCorpsVISTA and Google, policy and communications experience to lead systems change strategies, and experience in higher education to facilitate partnerships with these critical institutions during our first wave of communities. From my time at Google, I also bring strong experience in fundraising and corporate philanthropy to support our growth to date and into the future.

Across CORI’s leadership team and throughout the organization, we have emphasized bringing in talent with deep personal experiences living and/or working in rural America. As a national organization, nearly all of our leadership team members currently live in rural communities, and we have team members residing in a number of the states we currently serve, including North Carolina, Vermont, and Michigan. While our work is inherently guided by the expertise and experience of our staff, we also rely heavily on the insights of the rural leaders who are part of our Rural Innovation Network. 

When we launched CORI, we thought we would ride a powerful wave to scaling a solution to the epic challenge of our time. 

The 2016 election had laid bare the rural urban divide in our nation. With my background at Google, I thought this would be a no brainer. Large tech companies knew they were losing public favor, particularly in rural areas where their amassing of wealth felt far away. 

Deep skepticism about whether technology could happen in rural America, or even a fundamental understanding of who lives in small towns, however, caused funder after funder to pass on supporting our effort. 

What did resonate was that there was a problem and we were the only ones putting together the data to explore it.There remained skepticism that we could build digital economies in rural places, but the data tools we used to tell the story were intriguing. We became a data organization. 

While not the anticipated route, our flexibility in pivoting to data as our bridge helped build our organization roughly as planned. Now, four years later,we have diversified revenue supporting most aspects of our strategy. And data is infused in everything we do making our work much more powerful. 

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CORI has been successful in raising philanthropic funds to support our work, but many of these funds are restricted to specific programmatic activities and cannot be used for much-needed capacity that will position us to have an even greater impact down the line. Funding from the Elevate Prize would provide us with critical organizational and systems capacity to continue our growth trajectory as we build new revenue streams for our work, bring new communities in the Rural Innovation Network, and transition the network to a paid membership model on our way to our goal of reaching 50 communities (or 10% of all micropolitan areas in the nation) by 2023. 

Across our Rural Innovation Network, we partner with communities on the ground to build, fund, and execute their digital economy ecosystem strategies. These partner organizations vary from community to community but often include local institutions of higher education (particularly community colleges), chambers of commerce, and economic development organizations.

We also partner with other organizations working in similar or overlapping spaces, such as digital skills training providers like Generation and Udacity, rural service organizations like Rural LISC and Heartland Forward, and others.