Reframing Rural &
Breakout - Living in the Middle of Everywhere
Breakout Session 6
Presentation Date: Tuesday, October 29
Presentation Time: 10:50 - 11:40 a.m.
Location: Tundra E-F
Handouts
Rewriting the Rural Narrative - Keynote
Living in the Middle of Everywhere - Breakout Slideshow
The rural brain gain migration Website LINK
DESCRIPTION:
Does the notion that rural residents live “in the middle of nowhere” continues a negative narrative that is not based on the reality of community life. Modern life is complex as we live, work, shop, and play in a wide region. At the same time, most of our planning is done at a city or county level. The implications for tourism, marketing, transportation planning, resident recruitment, and housing will be discussed. We can then better understand this web of regional activity as it varies by age and interest through an Asset-Based Community Development exercise that has some simple, but deep, learning outcomes.
PRESENTER: Ben Winchester - Rural Sociologist and works for the University of Minnesota Extension
Ben has been working both in and for small towns across the Midwest for over 25 years. He lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota with his wife and two children. Ben is trained as a Rural Sociologist and works for the University of Minnesota Extension. His conducts applied research on economic, social, and demographic topics surrounding a theme of “rewriting the rural narrative”. He recently received the international Rural Renewal Research Prize in 2021 for this work.
Winchester received his B.A. in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Minnesota, Morris (1995) and M.S. in Rural Sociology from the University of Missouri, Columbia (2001). He was a founding employee at the Center for Small Towns, an outreach program at the University of Minnesota, Morris and specializes in community development, demographic analysis, data visualization, and moving communities away from anecdata.