Episode # 1 | Season 3: Leading Locally with Ash Hanson & Winter Kinne

Funding Rural | Episode #1 | Season 3: Leading Locally with Ash Hanson & Winter Kinne

Recorded live in Minneapolis-St.Paul on June 11th, 2025 at the Council on Foundations’ nonprofit funders conference, Leading Locally. Ash Hanson of Department of Public Transformation and Winter Kinne of Community Foundation of the Ozarks took the plenary stage for a conversation about funding the urban-rural connection with show host, Erin Borla.

“Something that my predecessor said a lot, which I carry with me, is I’ve never met anyone that didn’t want their community to be better. Literally, no one in 20 years of doing this work.” –Winter Kinne

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“If I meet somebody in a rural place that has vastly different ideas or values than I do, I’m always looking for how to get at what’s the thing behind the anger? What’s the thing behind the fear, and often it’s grief and loss. That’s a place where we can connect, and that’s a place where we can start to build and heal together.” –Ash Hanson

Ash Hanson: Creative Executive Officer (CEO) at Department of Public Transformation

 

Ash Hanson (she/her) has over 20 years of experience working with rural communities to activate stories, connect neighbors, and exercise collective imagination. She is the Founder and Creative Executive Officer (CEO) of Department of Public Transformation, a nonprofit working at the intersection of creativity and civic life with rural communities across the country. She is the founder of PlaceBase Productions, a theater company that creates original, site-specific musicals celebrating small-town life and exploring imagined futures. She has been an embedded artist-in-residence with the City of Minneapolis and the Southwest Minnesota Housing Partnership, integrating creative community engagement strategies into urban and rural planning processes. She was named an Obama Foundation Fellow and Bush Fellow for her creative civic leadership work with rural communities. She was a member of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice Leadership Circle and holds an MA in Applied Theatre with a focus on Rural Community Development from University of Manchester (UK). She is a Leo, an outdoor enthusiast, and a lover of magic and adventures who believes deeply in the power of sharing stories on front porches, karaoke as an organizing strategy, engaging in radical acts of play, and the overuse of exclamation points!

“What we need right now is a lot of great storytellers breaking the spells that have been put upon rural America. And fortunately, we have the privilege of working with a lot of powerful witches out in rural places, making some cool spells happen.”  –Ash Hanson

Winter Kinne: President and CEO at the Community Foundation of the Ozarks

 

Winter Kinne is the fourth president and CEO of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks which was founded in 1973. She is responsible to the board to carry out the mission of the CFO to enhance the quality of life through resource development, community grantmaking, collaboration and public leadership in its 62-county southern Missouri region.

Kinne joined the CFO in June 2005 upon graduation from Drury University where she earned degrees in English and writing. In August 2010, Kinne completed her master’s in business administration at Drury. She has held a variety of roles during her tenure at the CFO, most recently as the vice president of development.

Originally from Mount Vernon, Missouri, Winter is currently a board member for Philanthropy Missouri. She is a Fellow in Charitable Estate Planning. Winter also co-chaired two successful citizen-led school bond campaigns in 2023 and 2019 for Springfield Public Schools.

In 2024, Kinne was selected as 12 People You Need to Know by the Springfield Business Journal and received the Missouri Lt. Governor’s Women of Achievement Award. In 2012, she received the 40 under 40 award from the Springfield Business Journal.

Kinne resides in Springfield, Missouri, with her husband, Marshall, and two ornery and fantastic children, Walker and Kate.

“…You have to be curious. You have to show up with an open heart and an open mind. And sometimes being curious is hard.” – Winter Kinne

Discussion Questions

• Building on the idea Winter shared, that she’s never met anyone who doesn’t want to improve their community, make a list of 5 other unifying ‘wants’  that could move stakeholders and funders to common goals in rural places.
• Given a history of extraction in rural places, which Ash mentioned on the show, what long-term funding avenues could you create that would build trust, allow for learning and agility over time?
• Find 3 models of rural funding that you would like to replicate, or participate in, or just learn more about. If you don’t know where to start, check out Roundhouse Foundation’s strategic initiatives.

Resources

• Council on Foundations
• Leading Locally 2025 | Council on Foundations
• Community Foundation of the Ozarks
• Winter Kinne – Community Foundation of the Ozarks
• Department of Public Transformation
• Staff & Board — Department of Public Transformation
• No Hate in My Holler — Art by Lacy Hale
• https://www.cfozarks.org/resources/coover-regional-youth-mental-health-grants-2025

Transcript: Episode #1 | Season 3: Leading Locally with Ash Hanson & Winter Kinne

Erin Borla 0:00
You well. Hi everyone. Thanks for being here. Welcome to all of us being at a live recording of the funding rural podcast. This is the podcast that explores how philanthropy can better serve rural and indigenous communities. I’m so glad to kick off season three of the show here in Minneapolis at the 2025 leading locally Summit hosted by the Council of Foundations. Conferences like these. They’re unique opportunities to gather as philanthropic professionals, to share and explore together how we center communities in our work. I’m Erin Borla. I’m the executive director and a trustee of the Roundhouse foundation. We’re based in a small town called Sisters in Central Oregon. I created funding rural two years ago, because I felt like there was a lot to talk about when it comes to inspiring systemic change in communities that are often overlooked by the philanthropic world. Now, my listeners have heard me say this, and many of you here in this room may already know this, but philanthropy in the United States has a blind spot. Well, 97% of the land mass in the lower 48 states is considered rural, and close to 20% of the population lives and works in these areas. Just 7% of philanthropic dollars go to rural and remote communities, and even less than that point 4% that’s less than one half percent goes to indigenous LED or serving projects in tribal communities. I think we as a society naturally create these divisions because we’re looking to build connections with others that are like us. But the truth is, especially as we talk about rural and urban and Metro communities, there’s so much overlap in terms of need and both access to and barriers from receiving services, no matter where folks live now, my friend win Rosser, I hope some of you know him, was a guest on Season One of the podcast when he was the CEO of the tll temple foundation in East Texas, and he said something that stuck with me. The word divide is used a lot, but the more we look at things, the more we realize that core urban issues are often core rural issues. So today I invite each of you, both here in the live audience and our friends, listening to the podcast, to listen deeply, close your eyes. Listen to our guests describe challenges and successes within rural communities that they work with, and find the parallels with the communities that you all serve. Can you hear those folks saying similar things? So there’s a lot of work to be done, and I’ve always felt that that work begins with relationships, visiting, breaking bread and getting to know one another so we can shape a new narrative together. So it’s an honor and a real treat to get to do that with all of you today. I’m thrilled to have two incredible guests with us, Ash Hanson, the CEO, and that’s creative executive officer of the Department of Public transformation right here in Minnesota, in Granite Falls and winter. Kinney, the President and CEO of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks based in Springfield, Missouri, serving over 60 counties in that state. So today, I’d love to start by having you each briefly tell us about your organization and maybe what keeps you up at night with excitement or dread. Ash, let’s start with you.

Ash Hanson 3:41
Great. Thank you so much, Erin. It’s such a pleasure to get to be on this podcast, and thank you for picking up that drum beat, because I feel it with you being a constant voice for advocacy for rural funding and the challenges and joys of being a rural practitioner. So yes, I’m Ash Hanson, Department of Public transformation, not portation, and that’s on purpose. It’s a fun play on words, so that we can join, join tables with other departments and say, Hey, arts and cultural workers are essential infrastructure as well. So yes, our work. We work to develop creative strategies for community connection, civic engagement and equitable participation in rural places, we tend to the intersection of creativity and civic life by activating places of possibility in rural communities, supporting individual rural arts and cultural workers through resources and networks, connecting rural artists with municipal and community Leaders and nurturing the rural arts and culture field through advocacy and storytelling efforts. I’m also a theater artist, and I am the director of place based productions, and we tell stories as well through original, large scale, site specific musicals with and for and about small towns. So I have a lot. Experience kind of being a practitioner, an administrator and an artist and an advocate. As you mentioned, our organization is headquartered in Granite Falls. Minnesota, population 2700 US rural folk love to tell you how many neighbors we have. So we always follow our town name with how many people live there, and that’s nestled in the Minnesota River Valley on Dakota homeland. And I myself have lived and worked in rural places most of my life. And I’m from rural Minnesota. I now call rural Utah Home, and I’m really grateful to get to be here. There’s a lot of folks that could be sitting in this seat, you know, as an interloper, one of my the nonprofit interlopers in the room here, I bring a lot of those voices with me, to this chair, to this stage, to this microphone, to this podcast. It’s an honor to get to be here representing the practitioners in the room in this important conversation. So thank you, Erin for having me here. Thanks.

Erin Borla 5:56
How about Winter? Tell us a little bit about the Community Foundation of the Ozarks. You have this really unique model, too. I think people should know about

Winter Kinne 6:02
I do. It makes most people want to run. But here we go. Okay, winter Kenny, President and CEO of Community Foundation of the Ozarks, as Aaron mentioned, we are a regional Community Foundation based in Springfield, Missouri, which is in the southwest corner, if you’re not super familiar with the state, but we serve all 63 counties south of the Missouri River. We have 55 affiliate community foundations, which in a room of Community Foundation folks is usually when people kind of panic on our behalf and the but also on top of that, we have 600 nonprofit agency partners that have at least one fund with us. Some of them have multiple or even 100 funds with us. And then we also partner with 100 rural school districts as well. So our work is complicated and intertwined and never the same, which is why I love it. I too, grew up in a rural place and still have rural connections. Rural Missouri is all I know. It’s the only place that I’ve ever worked and lived and Erin you commented about what keeps us up at night and or that we’re excited about. So I’m actually going to take both of those. I’m excited that rural is in the conversation again. I am a little bit cynical that it won’t stay for forever. And the thing that keeps me up at night being about 18 months into this role is trust, because as the leader of a community foundation, you have nothing if you have trust or don’t have trust, nobody leaves you their planned gifts, their estates gives you their money. And grantees don’t come asking for grants or scholarships if they don’t trust your organization. And one misstep could unravel 52 years of history. So that’s what I worry about,

Ash Hanson 8:05
and I can jump in on the what keeps you up at night as well, besides perimenopause and the fall of American democracy and, you know, hypochondriac and all of those things, I would say is the year 2027, and I think I say that because, you know, the impact of what’s happening right now in our nation is big and loud and hard, and I’m really worried about the shock waves to come. And I think especially as it’s related to to rural urban solidarity, which is part of the conversation here today, and the zero sum game that I’m already feeling play out with some of our funding partners, and worried that that’s going to intensify over the next couple of years, and that our idea of kind of leaning into this abundance mindset starting to feel crunched. And I’m a little bit worried about, not little, I’m worried about two years from now.

Erin Borla 9:02
No, and that’s very fair. I think those are things that we all think about right, even on the funder side of what does that look like in responsiveness? How are we responding to the moment? How are we thinking strategically? But when our communities are in crisis, it’s hard to ask them to think strategically as well. So I really appreciate you both sharing. I am also dealing with all of the other things on top of those, so I’m glad that we’re all in the same space. So I want to start today with a hard ball question. Normally, I try to stay really positive and not dwell on all of these difficult things, but we live in a really divisive and divided time. You mentioned that earlier, whether we’re talking about political divides, socioeconomic divides, racial divides, or those of us up here, our least favorite term, the urban rural divide. So I’m curious about how each of your organizations are working to bridge those divides and build connections with the communities you serve. You talk about building trust.

Winter Kinne 9:57
I can start with that one, and I. I immediately go to I kind of don’t even we have to acknowledge it, so let me start there, but then I don’t lead with it, or I don’t start because we want to start. Our organization wants to start from a place of strength with all of our affiliate community foundations and what’s going well in those communities, so not the deficit thinking for them, or to Ash’s point of a zero sum game. And something that my predecessor said a lot, which I continue to carry with me, is I’ve never met anyone that didn’t want their community to be better. Literally, no one in 20 years of doing this work, we might not have the same idea about exactly how to get to the community being better, but that if you stay centered in that’s what folks want and are after and want a better life for their children than they had or for the next generation. And you just keep coming back to that the rest of it, it doesn’t go away, but it continues. It just keeps that at the center and that at the top, so that you don’t get stuck in all of those other pieces. If that makes sense,

Erin Borla 11:14
yeah, it makes sense. Ash, I’d love your thoughts on that. Yeah.

Ash Hanson 11:17
You know, I think that with the kind of social fabric disintegrating, and I think feeling that really acutely in rural places, specifically with the loss of community gathering spaces. I want to highlight one of our programs activate rural which works to transform underutilized spaces into creative community gathering spaces. So for us, it’s really about resourcing the people who are trying to find ways to bring people together, and not telling anybody how to do that, but saying, like you know how to bring your community together best we possibly have some tools or access to resources we can channel through to get you to a place where you have more community gathering spaces doing it the way that you know how to do best, in the way that you want to do it, to bring folk together again, leading not like What winter said as well, like from a place of divide, but building things together, rather than sitting around in dialog conversations, discussing our differences with saying like, hey, let’s work towards a shared vision, something that we feel we’re all excited to see. This building on Main Street, for example, transformed into something that’s community driven or community led is going to, I think, bring us together a lot more quickly, but also more sustainably, solidly, build a stronger foundation in our communities. And I think, you know, I’ve seen a trend in philanthropy recently to move away from supporting individuals or having funding organizations that are supporting individuals, and just to say that, you know, in rural places, it’s those, it’s those individual folks or a small group of people making things happen, more so than organizations. So releasing some of those, those tight strings around getting resources to the to the person, or the people making those big movements to bring folks together, I think, is a huge need in the field right now.

Erin Borla 13:03
So with your background in arts and theater and the focus of your organization’s work as arts and culture, workers really being the center, it’s all about listening to those stories that rural people and communities tell about themselves, the stories that are told about them as well, in an episode last season with Andy mink, who’s the director of the Smithsonian Institute’s rural initiative. He used the phrase belonging in security. He was a previous middle school teacher, and I used to work in middle schools as well, and so we made that correlation of like, oh my gosh, how we feel as middle schools middle school students is often how rural communities feel where they just don’t know the stories that are told about them, helps design who they are, as themselves, or who they what they think of themselves. So I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about where I when identity is tied together, and how people hear the stories of themselves, making them think that story about their community, maybe examining the narrative a little bit

Ash Hanson 13:57
Absolutely, this is one of my favorite topics. I wish we had a bottle of whiskey and a bonfire and we could go for a long time. But here we are with a with a smoke machine, which is great. Close, right? We’ll pretend. So you know, this is why I love being a theater artist, and this is why I love working with artists, is that what what we’re often doing is, showing different perspectives of the same story. And you know, I think the damaging narratives that are put upon rural places that have permeated our psyches are real and really hard to overcome. One of my favorite storytellers. His name is Martin Shaw. He’s an amazing mythologist, and just kind of like deconstructs folk tales from around the world. He has this quote, good storytellers cast spells, great storytellers break them. And I think what we need right now is a lot of great storytellers breaking the spells that have been put upon rural America. And fortunately, we have the privilege. Of working with a lot of powerful witches out in rural places, making some cool spells happening. And so I think the you know, the benefit of working with artists. And so I’m in rooms like this, and I’m talking about rural and I’m talking about arts, and often the eyes glaze over and I don’t understand it, because I’m like, hold on, we do have a magic wand. You know, we do have a tool that y’all could really you’re like, how do we get people together? And how are they having fun? We’re like, we know how to do that. And especially in rural places, like we get relationship. We know how hard it is. And yet, there’s often this kind of like, oh rural, oh arts. Like, that’s not really my lane, but this, this desire we to stoke the flames of desire to learn from ruralness, and not the other way around, because we are, we are doing that hard work of breaking the spell that has been put upon us. And I think that that is essential to shifting what’s happening in this fracturing of our country, or blame placing that’s happening, especially when it comes to the propaganda and the national media about who’s responsible for what. So there’s some great spell casters. There’s some great storytellers, and shifting that narrative is something we’re thinking about a lot. But whiskey and a bonfire, I think, is where we go next.

Erin Borla 16:19
I feel like that’s where we should start every conversation with scan of on fire. So winter, you’re doing a lot of narrative work. And when you when folks come in to Missouri and they want to do wonderful work in the communities that you work with, that maybe worked in another place, what’s your go to when you work with people that are like, I have the next best idea for Missouri. How do you work with folks like that?

Winter Kinne 16:38
No, no. I don’t start with that. I did come up on the development side of things and Community Foundation. So before I stress anybody out, Missourians should create the next best thing for Missourians, or they have that they know. And so though I grew up in a rural place, I live in the regional hub of 200,000 people. So even now, when I appear in our affiliate places, I have to be careful of what I say. And in the ethos of our organization is we don’t come here to tell you what to do, or what to make your community better, or how to make your community better. We come with the resources and the structure to help make it happen, but you all need to decide in your place how to make this better. So if I would love, and people are moving in to rural Missouri, but they need to build the relationships and go to the arts events and all the other things that are happening, to learn about that community and the culture and the people there before any assumptions are made. That seems so very obvious to me, but I know that it’s not, it’s not for everyone, and in 55 affiliate community foundations, every single one of those has a different personality. And so we it’s five and a half hours to drive from one part of the state to the other part of the state, and those, they look vastly different. So my short answer is, no, let’s not do that. But there are ways to invite people to be a part of the conversation and again, wanting to make the community better, and

Erin Borla 18:30
some of that comes from connection, too. So just because we don’t want to replicate the exact same thing in the exact same way in each community doesn’t mean we can’t connect those those folks, right? So if you’re working in childcare or in food distribution, and you’re working in a silo because you’re working in crisis in your community, that’s 503,000 5000 people, there are other people that do that work. So building those bridges between community, between foundations, is an opportunity for all of us to step in and say, Hey, I see that you’re struggling. We have a community in northeastern Oregon that I went to visit, their brand new food bank facility. It was 8000 square feet, and they had just bought a mopping machine, and they were so excited, and they’d been there for two years and been hand mopping an 8000 square foot warehouse, because they just didn’t know a mopping machine existed. So those types of things, we can have connections and be able to say, Hey, I think we have some solutions for you, and maybe we can pay for that mopping machine for you. So I know that’s various, very much a simple, sort of excellent explanation, but it is that moment of, how do we build collaboration and connection, right? And I know we use this phrase a lot, but the rural is not a monolith. Everyone now Monolith is everyone’s favorite term, but there is this rural ethos, right? There’s a set of values that bind rural and remote communities together. So what values do you all see leading Rural. People, how are they different from urban values? How are they ranked? Do we have similar values? What do they look like? How does philanthropy better understand and connect with those values? Winter, let’s start with

Winter Kinne 20:12
you. So I immediately want to turn to anybody in the room, although I can’t see you, and say, if you’re from an urban area, I don’t know what your values are, because I’ve never lived in an urban place, so I also can’t and shouldn’t make any assumptions there. But rural, resilient, extremely resilient, want to take care of their neighbors themselves. They don’t want anyone to come in and tell them how to do it, or what to do. And in Missouri, there’s a reason we’re called the show me state. We’re a little bit cynical, and I’m ozarchian to my core, and so I’m a little bit cynical of things, so that that’s where that good old show me comes in and hard work, right? I mean, my mom is both extremely proud of me in this role and career and life I have built, and also there’s just a little bit of her that also thinks I’ve maybe gotten too good for her. And that’s an interesting dichotomy that comes, at least in rural Missouri that we have to work through.

Ash Hanson 21:26
Yeah, I think what comes to mind when you’re talking about that is the poppy syndrome. You all know this, when the one Poppy grows too tall, that’s the poppy that gets the head chopped off. And I think humility is a is a better or more accurate way of saying that like we’re doing, we do this together. And if you stick your yourself out above or you know in any way that should like I’m better or I know better, that’s just not a strong value in rural places. It’s much more about humility and doing it together. So how are we, you know, working with our aunties and our grandmas and doing this together and not saying, like, here’s where we go. I have done that, and I have learned my lesson. And, you know, I you know, the like moving with rather than moving ahead of anybody is is really a long game. And our mission for a department of public transformation, our vision, rather, is 150 year vision statement, and it’s generational work, and we know this so well in rural places. And you know, I think that this idea of, if you really do want to partner up with folks in rural places and make long term impact and change, like, how cool would it be if you were like, yes, and we’re gonna go on 150 year long journey with you. We’re gonna fund this work, or this region or this idea, or this way, you know, and adjust with the times when robots take over and everything else, they’ll be a whole different system. But for now, looking ahead and looking backwards, both and in our remembering and imagining what’s possible. Building Rural Futures together takes a long time, and I think it takes even longer when we’re talking about, you know, the long, the long history of extraction, and you know, having been done to for for so many years, a lot of the wealth that is existing in the endowments in this room. Of course, we’re built off of black, brown, indigenous and rural folks, and how are we getting that money back out? And how are we doing it in a way that is going to sustain these communities into the future? It’s going to be a long road of healing, but it starts now. It starts now. Yeah, yeah. In

Erin Borla 23:39
addition to our grant making in Oregon, we own and operate a 260, acre working ranch on the urban rural divide, which means we’re behind the tire shop in town. But I would go to different events and meet with other ranchers. We do a lot of work in regenerative farming. We do all sorts of things like that. And I’ve had people tell me directly, well, I’m a real rancher. Oh, cool. So the work that I’ve done growing up riding, you know, with horses and hogs and all the other things, you have to get to that point. So it’s building that relationship and showing up as your full self in those moments. So folks that are coming from philanthropy or coming from a larger community, that’s a that’s a big leap, and it’s hard to be in those places, and there is a barrier to break through. We’ve talked, we talked in philanthropy broadly about trusted messengers, right, those with the cultural competencies to understand nuances in different cultures, but oftentimes that rural competency, we kind of overlook. We overlook the values and cultural constructs that happen in those rural places that living in a remote community of 600 or 200 that you have to be able to understand and work through that. Why do you think that we don’t talk about those rural competencies at all?

Ash Hanson 24:49
I think that there’s a there’s a little bit of a mirror that we have. And when I’m talking about we, I’m talking about non Rural. Folks, like rural folks talk about all the time, but non rural folks, which, you know, is what I call urban and non rural folk. Like, there’s a mirror that has to be held up here, and it’s maybe an uncomfortable one to look at where you’re like, you know, the only thing that’s different between you and I is that I have fewer neighbors, yet I have a lot more hurdles and barriers to overcome because of the historic disinvestment in my in our place. And so I think it forces us to kind of have to really look at that and say, like, Wait, what is it about? What is it? What is it about this place that makes me so uncomfortable? Is it the wide open space? Is it like something biological in US, where we’re like, you know, I don’t feel, feel like I can hide anywhere here, like I stick out, I have, there’s no anonymity. But I think it does make us have to really be uncomfortable in a way that maybe we don’t really know how to, how to grapple with or understand, when we’re coming from a non rural place to a rural place, and I think our challenges, or I mean, our preconceptions, get challenged really quickly, and hopefully in a good way, and maybe sometimes in a way that affirms certain things. One way that I always like to talk about it in my theater work is calling it the you know, what’s the thing behind the things? So if I meet somebody in a rural place that has vastly different ideas or values than I do, I’m always looking for how to get at what’s the thing behind the anger? What’s the thing behind the you know, the fear, and often it’s grief and loss. And that’s a place where we can connect, and that’s a place where we can start to build and heal together. So if you’re really angry about you know the change that’s happening, oftentimes, there’s a story of what was lost in the family or in the community or by that person that is causing that anger to appear, but it takes a long time to get to that story, and I don’t think that in non rural environments, time that kind of time is available when we do get visited very rarely by, you know, funding partners or folks, rural curious folks, it’s usually a fast meeting. And that’s not how this works. Like it’s a it’s a long you’ve got to sit for a while, and that’s can be uncomfortable, or we just don’t have time to do it.

Winter Kinne 27:25
I think the only thing I would add there is that you have to be curious. You have to show up with an open heart and an open mind. And sometimes being curious is hard. But back, I really loved Ash’s comment about the time, because that the time being in the car and driving to wherever it is multiple times. I think of a tiny school foundation that we helped start 15 years ago, and it took eight trips from Springfield to Chadwick, Missouri, which is about 45 minutes down two lane roads, 45 minutes to an hour, and they finally opened a fund for their tiny little school foundation with $500 in it. And some people would say that wasn’t worth it, like, why did you make eight trips? Well, because we ended up helping get them a FEMA storm shelter that was a gymnasium because we knew we had access to resources that they needed, but it took eight trips because they didn’t really believe us that we were there to help and not do something to them. So it is the time investment, which is everyone’s like number one resource these days, is time,

Erin Borla 28:41
right? And it takes folks that live in those places. They’re making those drives daily, weekly, consistently, and we’re asking that of them, especially in the philanthropic side and in our government partners as well. We’re asking folks to come to us, and it’s an opportunity for us to get out into community and build relationship and really dig in and see what folks are working on. I wanted to highlight that you talked about historic disinvestment, and I think that’s another one of those parallels that we can look at in inner city communities and other communities where we see that there’s more common humanity between rural places and urban places than we give credit to and I really love digging in on that. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about barriers to services in general. Across the country, we talk a lot about loneliness and isolation, and they’ve become a health emergency, right? They say that loneliness epidemic is similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That’s a rough, rough epidemic that we’re in, and we are facing that, from our young folks to our elders across the country, it’s definitely a theme we’ll be exploring in this next season of the podcast with a variety of different populations. You know, Ash, you talked about grief and loss, bringing people together. I got to the airport yesterday on my way here. There, and I got through the security checkpoint, and my phone rang, and it was our victim’s assistant agency, and we lost a student. And that is so hard. It’s hard everywhere, but it’s so hard in rural This is our third student in two years in a community that has less than 1000 students in the whole school district. It is devastating and philanthropy. When we build relationships and community, we’re the first phone call. So how do we talk about bringing people together? What are you all doing to help build community and really dig in? So folks have people to lean on, and they know who they can call ash. Let’s start with you.

Ash Hanson 30:40
I’m really sorry that that happened. First of all, we’re all holding a lot and tragedy is every day, so I’m just really sorry we were discussing earlier about the Surgeon General, the former Surgeon General, talking about the loneliness epidemic. And I was at a gathering in DC a couple of years ago about community health, and the arts were a big part of that. And the Surgeon General said art is medicine and joy is vital to our to our health, something along those lines. I didn’t have the exact quote, but art is medicine and and, you know, I think earlier I said we have a magic wand, and I want to say, like, we have some magic maybe I don’t want to say we have a magic wand, because I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s a fix all, but I do think that we have a really powerful tool in working with arts and cultural workers available to us that has the capacity to bring folks together in a really meaningful way, and it’s always, often the first to go. And I think you know, where folks find healing or therapy or expression or identity or community around certain forms of expression or just hearing each other in forms of story or music or dance. There’s less places and opportunities to do that. So I’m not going to say that, you know, by investing in artists that we will then, you know, immediately solve all of our the mental health crisis in rural America. But I do think that when we’re working within different sectors like the health, public health services or mental health services or affordable housing or education, looking to arts and cultural workers to help discover new ways to engage with your community to bring new approaches, to bringing folks together, to allowing folks space and time to express and connect with each other in that way. It’s not frivolous. It is essential. It is essential, and it’s and it is, you know, we talk about it as like, arts are not the cherry on top. They’re the sugar and the ice cream and and it’s like if you bake it into the ingredients of the place and of the practice. What you’ll what you’ll have is is more fun first of all, but you’ll also just have more of a, I think, meaningful connection and a long staying connection when when folks are able to express themselves and share in that way. So my answer is, for the work we do, is we invest in those rural arts and cultural workers who are at home. So one of our programs, Ignite rural invests in local arts leaders to do their work with their people in their place and our beyond the clock podcast lifts up artists who are doing their work and their place, and trying to tell those stories, to trying to shift the narrative around what’s actually happening in rural places, and who are the people leading the charge, and what does that look like? And then again, like building helping communities create these spaces of possibility in creative community, gathering places, third spaces, we can just hang out and get to know each other. This is all. This is all vital. We are also a tiny little nonprofit with nine staff spread out across four states, trying to do, you know, partnering with a lot of other nonprofits. But it’s, it’s we’re doing. We’re doing what we can to redistribute the resources as best as we can to the people doing the good work. But I also just think, you know if, if you’re if, when you hear it takes time, or it takes trust, and you’re like, Oh, my God, my plate is so full already, I can’t possibly do that. I mean, I just want to, like, engage an artist to work with your organization, to help come up with some engagement strategies to help you all get to know the rural places in your service area better as well. Like you don’t have to do it all alone. There’s a lot of us doing this work. If you want to partner with us or partner with other folks that have those connections, we can point you in the direction of so many incredible organizations or individuals. You don’t have to do it alone, but it does take that, that effort and that outreach and that time. And and I do think that artists can be valuable, not only on the ground, but in that systems thinking work of how we are engaging with rural people and places in general, and having those conversations cross sector.

Erin Borla 35:12
When we keep looking at the same problem the same way, I think my grandmother would say, you keep trying to go in the door and it’s locked, and you turn the other direction, there’s a window, so stop trying the door go a different direction. And I just really appreciate that you’re bringing up cultural centers and the cultural pieces that are really critical, because we, you know, we look around and we’re like, how many of you are golfers and, you know, or tennis players. You play tennis once a month for your life or for a year, and you’re a tennis player. You sing in the shower, you sing in the church choir, you play guitar on your porch. You’re an artist. We have artists everywhere, and we don’t call ourselves artists because that’s there’s a fear of like, oh, well, I’m not a real artist. Okay, so then what is a real artist? Winner? Talk about some of the projects that you’re doing in Missouri.

Winter Kinne 35:59
I’m not a real artist. Loneliness, mental health. Earlier this year, we had a grant round $250,000 regional grant round, so Springfield agencies not eligible to apply, and which, that’s a side note. Sometimes our rural nonprofits, often they don’t have grant writers, so we design our grant opportunities where sometimes they’re just for Springfield, sometimes they’re just for the region, and then sometimes they compete against each other, but that’s something to be cognizant of if you’re working in a couple of places, because it’s not always apples to apples on grant applications that come in. So anyway, side note, $250,000 Youth Mental Health out in any of our counties, not Springfield, Green County. So 62 out of the 63 counties, we always receive more than a million dollars in requests for that $250,000 the subject area changes annually, but this year was youth, mental health. Most of the recipients were school districts, and they, one sticks out to me in particular, fair play, Missouri, K through 12, they have 350 students. I believe that’s right. And the counselor, there’s just one counselor, school counselor, right? Came to accept the grant check, and she and I will say, we do also, side note, we do this in person where we give the grants. But have asked those groups if that’s okay that they travel, and they do actually appreciate hearing from each other, so they travel to Springfield to receive these grant checks. But we have asked, like, Would you prefer if we just mail them to you? And like, No, we actually really like being together for this one. Okay, great, happy to do it. Then she got up to take the grant check, crying because it was $18,000 and that she said in front of everyone that that $18,000 means that no student in their school district will not see a mental health professional because of a co pay, which was what was holding a bunch of their rural students back ever, ever again, and we were all having a hard time keeping it together at that particular point. It’s one of the most impactful grant rounds and stories from the grantees that we’ve had in a really long time. And I didn’t bring the statistics with me, because I’m not always the best at statistics, but the mental health, rural mental health providers are really few and far between, and so access for anyone of any age, but particularly a student, you know, 21 and under, to have access to that is darn near impossible to

Erin Borla 39:06
find. What’s the cost to be the copay? $15

Winter Kinne 39:10
in some cases, maybe 50. But for some families, that’s choosing between food, medicine, utilities. You all know all this. It’s the grantees, day in and day out. But to have a school counselor, I could see that she already knew the like five students that this was immediately like she was making the list in her head. Is how you know? How can you be mad at this work ever?

Erin Borla 39:37
So I want to really take it, take it a different direction here, just for a minute, and talk about disaster relief and philanthropy. We talk about hidden disasters in rural places, because often the attention goes to bigger places that have we see mass impact. That’s where the news shows up. It’s where everybody wants to be and talk about but in rural places winter, I know this is top of mind for you, specifically because of the tornado. Across Missouri this last spring. Can you give us just a lay of the land? A little bit about how the Community Foundation of the Ozarks mobilized and worked with your affiliates?

Winter Kinne 40:10
This has been the most active spring tornado season that I can remember. And so just this year alone, we had, we have eight affiliates that were impacted in some form or fashion due to tornado or high winds. So eight community disaster funds that we help stand up, typically in 48 hours or less, Community Foundation of the Ozarks is fortunate to be written into Community Organizations Active in Disaster plan for our area. So we are the philanthropic response. So that’s not a question. So that would be something I would if your foundation is at all interested in in disaster or being a part of that, I would talk to your COAD group about being the philanthropic response. So there’s no conversation of who’s on first when those things happen. The challenge is always getting the money out. Community Foundation funds should never be the first line defense we are not, you know, providing the water bottles and the hotel rooms for folks who don’t are displaced from houses. That’s just not how or not how we believe that our work, we’re always in long term recovery, and so typically that looks like partnering with some of the other nonprofits in town that will need those resources again, those local folks making the decisions locally, not the staff sitting in Springfield in the central office making those decisions. It’s been tornadoes this year, some seasons. It’s floods in our area. Floods are the most hidden, in my opinion, and actually the hardest dollars to spend, or that’s been our experience through the years. So that can be kind of a challenge as well. We know a little bit more about disaster philanthropy than I wish we did.

Erin Borla 42:13
I think we all learn the hard way, unfortunately, with disaster philanthropy, so knowing that there are folks that have been through this work is really critical in Oregon, we’ve been involved with the Center for Disaster philanthropy for several years after our devastating 2020, wildfire season, and we’ve had consistent several years of horrific fires losing between 500,000 and a million acres of land to wildfires. At CDP, or Center for Disaster philanthropy, they have a saying that all funders are disaster funders, and I think that’s really important, because after a disaster, whether it’s a wildfire, a tornado, a hurricane or a flood, it’s not just about rebuilding the infrastructure and homes and businesses. There’s this layer of cultural preservation and restoration and community building that’s really critical ash. I know you do some work in that space. Yeah,

Ash Hanson 43:03
I was going to say, you know, we don’t do direct emergency services as an organization individually. You know, we’re all very active in our in our communities, and a lot of the artists that we work with are leading the organizing efforts around mutual aid efforts in their communities, and planning and preparing for disaster as a part of that. So I think, you know, making sure that y’all have those connections to the local organizers that are set up for those mutual aid efforts locally is what we’re hearing from the artist organizers in the communities we work with. I wanted to just share a story from one of our artist friends that was we just featured on our beyond the clock podcast and event series. Her name is Lacey Hale. She’s an artist in eastern Kentucky. One of her more well known projects is called no hate in my holler, which was a kind of action against a white power group that was coming into their region to recruit folks that mobilized a movement. And she became quite a voice and spokesperson for this, this movement that grew nationally and even internationally. No hate my holler. Check out Lacey Hill. Support her work. But you know, she said, after the last round of floods in Kentucky, what the thing that was the most devastating to her was seeing the comments on social media from folks outside of the region saying they got what they voted for, and that dehumanization of what’s happening in rural places of this, like, idea of like, that’s not my problem, or they got what they voted for. And just like, it doesn’t matter who you voted for, these are lives we’re talking about in this moment. And like, How dare you. But we’ve become so we’ve dehumanized the other so much in this country that we can say that is appalling, and we have a lot of work to do as a society to repair that, so that we do actually care about our neighbors across G. Geography. We are all one civic body. This is one country, and if 20% of our civic body has been disinvested in for generations. I mean, just imagine 20% of your body not being nurtured or getting the nutrients it needs. You would want to tend to that immediately. The atrophy there would be severe, and that’s what we’re facing. This is one civic body. We should not be pointing these kinds of fingers that say you get what you voted for. So I think in addition to being proactive in regards to how we’re supporting mutual aid efforts locally and organizers, artist organizers, we need to tend to this bigger issue as well, of how do we re humanize each other in this conversation, so that we can really care about our neighbors, regardless of how many people live in that zip code,

Erin Borla 45:58
well, and it brings us back to rural and urban being interconnected, right? Our food, our energy, our data centers, our warehouses, our shipping facilities are all based in these rural places. Oftentimes, they’re there. Many of those larger, newer items are there without a tax base because they’re there as part of an enterprise zone or or some other incentive to bring them to community. So local schools also receive and local emergency services are not receiving that same investment that we would see in other places. So I really appreciate you bringing that up as we as we get towards the end here, tell us a little bit. There’s a mix of folks listening. There’s a mix of folks in the audience. Some are CEOs, some are board chairs, some are program staff. If people are enthusiastic about serving rural and indigenous communities, what’s a great takeaway? What’s your what’s your go to? For them to be like, I’m getting to work tomorrow and it’s going to look like this,

Winter Kinne 46:54
get in the car and drive like the end. Just block it out on your calendar, get in the car and drive to whatever that place is, if it’s 30 minutes or two hours, and do it more than once, please. That starts the conversation. I am a working mom. My kids are eight and five. Efficiency is like the name of the game in my life, because it’s the only way to make all the things happen. So I love zoom. That’s all like, one of the good things that came out of the pandemic, right? When you serve 63 counties, is now you can talk to people via zoom, but it still doesn’t take the place of getting in the car and driving to the place. So the

Erin Borla 47:39
end All right, get dirt on your boots, right? Yes,

Winter Kinne 47:42
wear

Ash Hanson 47:44
my heels. Sorry, okay. All right, yeah, we thought we talked about that too. Like, come smell my place. You need to smell it. Like the sensual aspect of it. Like to really feel it. Since we’re talking to this particular audience, I would say, visit your funding portfolio, and whatever you’re giving to rural double it, and you still won’t be at that 20% if you’re giving zero. Do better.

Erin Borla 48:14
I love that. Well, winter and ash, thank you so much for joining me today. Winter Kinney is the president and CEO of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks in Springfield, Missouri, and ash Hanson, the creative executive officer of the Department of Public transformation in Granite Falls, Minnesota, I want to say, Oh yes, big Round of applause.

Erin Borla 48:41
A very special thank you to the Council on foundations and to all of you here live, our first experience doing funding rural live. So thank you so much for being here. Really excited to be at the leading locally conference in Minneapolis, St Paul. I’m Aaron Borla. Thanks for listening to funding rural. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai