Funding Rural | Episode #11 | Season 3: Maria Sykes “It should be a privilege, not a burden, to fund rural”
Green River, Utah (population 900) can be seen as a waypoint in the desert with more hotel rooms than residents. Or it can be seen through the eyes of locals like Maria Sykes. She’s the director and co-founder of Epicenter, a nonprofit in Green River that focuses on housing and fosters creativity and art in the community. Maria did not grow up in the region, instead she came by way of Americorps, and in the 16 years she’s lived in Green River, she’s contributed to its vibrancy, livability, and iconic neon signs.
“It just feels like, if we’re going to talk about America, that’s it: being able to choose the life that you want and have it be achievable.” – Maria Sykes
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About Maria Sykes
Maria Sykes (she/her) earned her architecture degree from Auburn University just as the 2008 recession paralyzed the nation. Given the uncertain times, Sykes leaned into her lifelong love of and experience in rural places and community service, and she decided to join a colleague who was
volunteering with AmeriCorps in the small town of Green River, Utah. The plan was to spend a summer in Green River before buckling down to launch
her professional design career. That summer turned into her own yearlong commitment to AmeriCorps, which then turned into a second year, with Sykes always thinking she’d eventually move back home to the American South.
What she hadn’t planned on was falling deeply in love with the place and its people. To wit, nearly two decades later, she remains not only an enthusiastic Green River resident but also an invaluable leader. In 2009 she co-founded Epicenter, a community design nonprofit that over the years has
served Green River in a number of ways, from offering low-cost home-repair services to elderly, disabled, and low-income homeowners to publishing
books and exhibits and rehabbing an abandoned community park. Today she remains Epicenter’s executive director.
Sykes’ own artistic vision drives Epicenter’s work, but she has also established a pipeline that guarantees a steady influx of fresh creative visions from both outside and from within the community. Sykes has welcomed scores of artists and designers from around the country and as far away as Australia to come to Green River and engage with the community in creative, respectful and galvanizing ways. Sykes has been working in rural investment for over a decade and a half, both locally and abroad, and her work has been honored many times, including by the Governor of Utah.
“…Man, what I could do with unrestricted, multi-year investment… not having to be writing a six-month or year-long grant every month and reporting on it. I could give that time to doing the real work.” – Maria Sykes
Discussion Questions
- Low-population, remote cities like Green River have specific needs. If you’re intending to fund rural spaces, how can you set up time and processes to gather information from the local community about their needs as a first step to support?
- Maria talks about how her organization does multiple things for the community and how that same versatility can limit Epicenter’s funding. Does your funding organization have a narrow focus, and if so, when can you expand the aperture to allow for different nonprofit support?
- Epicenter’s impact on the local community is directly tied to Maria Sykes’ vision. Can you name five visionaries and their projects your organization supports?
Resources
- Epicenter
- Maria Sykes
- Maria Sykes – UNCSA
- Rural and Proud: An Interview with Maria Sykes of Epicenter – Dovetail
“It should be a privilege, not a burden, to fund rural organizations. It shouldn’t just be writing that check and checking a box of, ‘We did it. We helped rural’. It should be challenging, and it should be involved.” – Maria Sykes
Transcript: Episode #11 | Season 3: Maria Sykes “It should be a privilege, not a burden, to fund rural”
Erin Borla 0:00
Erin. It’s funding rural I’m Erin Borla with the Sisters, Oregon based roundhouse foundation. Green River, Utah population 900 is a waypoint in the desert with more hotel rooms than actual residents. You might stop there for lunch or stay the night on your way to the Grand Canyon, and like so many rural towns, if you’re just passing through, you might not see that it’s a vibrant, creative community in its own right. Maria Sykes has contributed to that vibrancy in the 16 years that she’s lived there. She’s the director and co founder of epicenter, a nonprofit in Green River that focuses on housing and fosters creativity and art in the community. Maria is originally from the south. She went to architecture school at Auburn University in Alabama and graduated during the recession, she joined AmeriCorps and ended up working with a nonprofit in Green River. And she never left.
Maria Sykes 1:01
And it’s for me, it started as just a summer, and then we were able to convince a local couple, an artist and a rocket scientist, actually, to let us buy their old building for a whole $5,000 to kind of transform that into a housing Resource Center. And so I got sucked into that rehabilitation out of, you know, adaptive reuse project. And as we started doing that project and working on the building and getting to know the community, I think we’re like, I think we’re creating jobs for ourselves and just really falling in love with the community and getting to know everyone who lived here. And so here I am, 16 years later, still, still working on that building sometimes, but doing a lot of other work as well.
Erin Borla 1:46
That’s so amazing. And I love it. Talk about a rural place, right? The artist and the rocket scientist comes together to do affordable housing. This such a fantastic story. And I love that housing is sort of centered to the work. So talk a little bit about where, what epicenter is doing now, it feels like you’re doing a lot of different
Maria Sykes 2:06
things. Yeah, I think, yeah. I think a lot of people look at the work that we do, and some days I feel like this too. Oh, we’re doing we’re doing a lot, we’re doing too much. But I think that’s what’s really unique about our practices. I don’t think you can look at affordable housing without looking at the economics of the place and working with small businesses. And I think that art and design is often like a bridge between these traditionally siloed sectors, whether that’s like tourism or housing economic development, whatever it is. And so right now, our primary focus is on a project called canal Commons these four acres that are right in the heart of Green River Utah, we were able to work with the city to acquire that land and to start developing affordable housing. When I say the project that we’re working on right now, but really, as anyone who works in rural spaces knows, this project has actually been over 10 years of working in our community to prove that affordable housing needs to be developed, right? Like, there’s this sort of, you come into a community and people are like, we need housing. And what does that mean? What’s the what’s the actual data? You know behind that, beyond the like, the kind of community knowledge of, hey, we need housing. We need to bring the kids, you know, who’ve left back to the community. We need to grow a little bit, or our housing is our housing stock is very old, and we need some some improvements. So we started to really dig into that, probably after we’d been here for a couple of years, like, we immediately got to work, of course. But I think we really took, I think it’s probably in like 2012 that we stepped back and we said, Okay, what’s like really going on here? So that we can actually go after some legitimate funding, and we basically were able to collect our own data. That’s what we had to do. And so for anyone who lives in a rural place or works in a rural place, you know that the census data is kind of worthless. I mean, when you’re talking to for a town of about 900 people, when it says a margin of error of like, 30% on some of the statistics, you’re like, how is how is this helpful for us to, you know, understand our community? And so we started gathering data. We started looking, okay, how many housing units are there? How many are vacant? What condition are they in? And really understanding that. And so obviously, we’re driven by by passion and the stories of the people who live here, and they’re very real, lived experiences, but we wanted to back that up with data. And so what we found is, there were, there’s this little piece of the pie that were homes that needed repairs, and that wasn’t something that we had thought that we would get into, but we developed a small home repair micro loan program that we ran for about five or six years. Did 50 or 60 of those small projects. We learned a lot through that in terms of, you know, what’s great housing to people in Green River, and what are the what are the needs and wants here? And after we. And that program, which is called fix it, first, we started developing a prototype for mobile home replacement called the frontier house. And we built one of those units. And like 2016 2017 and after all of the that effort of building that one house and the cost, we said, Okay, we need to, we need to build more of these houses at once, and we need to be like working with contractors, and we need kind of bigger financing, and so that’s, that’s kind of where we eventually got to, to canal Commons and getting the land from the city and the financing. And we’ve, we’ve designed the houses, and we’re acting actually as developer. If you had told me that I would have been an actual housing developer 10 years ago, I would have laughed at you. But it’s so hard to convince someone from outside of our community that the need is here and it’s not necessarily profitable to develop affordable housing. Obviously, we’re not looking to make make a dime. And so no one was wanting to step up and do that. So Epicenter said, All right, we’re doing it. We’re going to become developers. We’re not just going to be designers. And so we have, right now, we have five, five houses that are under construction, which is really exciting.
Erin Borla 6:07
You talk a lot about art and design, and I think that’s even how we got connected, right was through your partnership and grant, through the National Endowment for the Arts around art and design. Talk to me about the philosophy around that,
Maria Sykes 6:20
yeah, I think art and design is, it’s the connector, right? It’s the kind of like glue between all types of things. And it’s, it’s a way for communities to explore different futures. It’s so many different things. And I think one key piece for us is these kind of smaller, I say smaller, but they’re really important, like design or art projects that we do with visiting artists through our frontier fellowship program. In a lot of ways, those are like research and a way for us to better understand our community, because on a daily basis, we don’t have access to everyone in the community. They’re living their lives. We’re living our lives. But when we do a project that’s specifically community engaged, especially when it is focused on maybe a sec, you know, a piece of the community that we hadn’t engaged yet, whether it’s senior citizens of Latinx community, whatever it might be, it allows us to gain understanding of those folks, and how are they living their lives? What are their dreams for Green River? What are they struggling with? What do they love about this place, and then we use that information, that we that we learn. It feels icky to say used, but we do use it to inspire the work that we’re doing, literally, like in the the design of homes, but also in, like, what’s Epicenter going to do for the next 10 years? Right? Because that shouldn’t be determined by just the organization that should be coming, obviously, from the community, the primary community that we’re serving,
Erin Borla 7:42
using that community feedback. I think it’s so interesting how sometimes we want to silo arts and cultural projects into their own entity, but the intersection where art sits and an architecture in itself is an art, right? But I think recognizing the value that arts and culture bring to community, one as a community builder, two, as this opportunity to inform direction, right?
Maria Sykes 8:10
Yeah, absolutely, we and we like, really epicenter, really confuses funders, because they’re like, Okay, are you wait? Are you housing, or are you an arts organization? Are you doing economic development? I’m like, yes, all of these things. And so it can be like, hard to understand if a funder is like, you know, have they have siloed, you know, what their efforts are. And so it’s really exciting when we do find someone who gets it, or will at least fund a portion of what we’re doing with the understanding that, you know, arts and design is going to be a component of it, or that there is some economic like, we believe that housing is economic development, for example, but yeah, it’s, it’s all, it’s all integrated. You know, art is, it’s culture, it’s heritage, it’s, it’s all of these things,
Erin Borla 8:53
yeah, yeah. So you have the frontier fellowship program, and that’s bringing arts and artists to the community. What do you think the biggest achievements or benefits beyond having just the presence of art? What does that fellowship really bring to the organization?
Maria Sykes 9:14
You know, I think the our visiting artists and designers are very unique. They usually don’t just kind of do a fellowship and and leave. We certainly have artists who, you know, we don’t continue to work with, like that happens, but often they join on a staff, or, in the past, AmeriCorps come on as board members, and so they they really engage in in a deep way, sometimes for many years with our community, and they’re bringing outside expertise, they’re bringing a new perspective, and they’re really investing in the community, getting to know, like, going into the schools and, you know, presenting to the students there about arts and design and like, you know, what are the future possibilities? Like, what could you. Do as a career outside of Green River, and maybe you bring that back to the community, and then also, like, beautification projects have been a really huge one, and I think that that’s really important, both for the community and for epicenter. And when you’re doing this work, a lot of it’s so long term, whether it’s your your goals for you know, a more vibrant community, or developing housing, which takes so long, it feels like having those like little wins along the way are like, what gives us life and the community as well, to kind of see, sort of like tangible things. And so for us, you know, that’s been, you know, creating an exhibit about about the town, and short films or publications that highlight community members or local traditions and lore or whatever it might be. Sometimes it says literal, literal beautification projects, like the artist Lisa Ward did this really gorgeous neon welcome sign for the community, which engaged a lot of young people in the design and then a lot of local contractors and folks to help us build it, and a neon artist down in Albuquerque, but that sign has, you know, become an icon for the community. It’s something to look towards in terms of, right, we can have beautiful things and like, things that people are excited about, that they want to pull off the road, and, you know, take a photo with that’s not a block you know, what’s, what is a block away, which is a lot of abandoned and blighted buildings, which we we struggle with that, and I know a lot of other rural communities do. So I think those moments of vibrancy and brightness and celebration of the community, they’re huge in terms of the, you know, achieving our long, long term goals. Talk a little
Erin Borla 11:37
bit about the the changing demographic we’ve heard about the, you know, the different industries. And that’s a common thing that we hear from rural places, right? The coal mine closed, or the timber industry went out. And so the whole demographic changed, or shifted. What does that look like in Green River?
Maria Sykes 11:55
Yeah. So for Green River, you know, a lot with a lot of these service industry jobs and agriculture, we’re seeing more Latinx people moving to the community, which is really exciting, because who else would be filling that gap? Because we, you know, a lot of folks who live here are leaving there’s either there’s not enough housing, or they want more in terms of a career, and they’re, you know, kind of sick of having this day job, whatever that might be. And then, yeah, like folks who are graduating from high school here, not sticking around, but all of that being said, I think, like many rural places, you know, I think there’s this the misconception of brain drain, because what we found is that there’s actually a lot of people who are coming back to the community, or people who are just moving here from another rural place, and those folks are usually kind of in their late 20s, anywhere to their 50s, and that’s all types of folks.
Erin Borla 12:53
So this shows a lot about philanthropy and philanthropic investment in rural and remote places. You epicenter is doing so many things. Talk about your experience working with philanthropy to bring support to your community or to projects that you that you’re doing,
Maria Sykes 13:12
yeah, you know, I think the private philanthropy has certainly been inconsistent and not enough, but it has been clutch when it has come in right for us, most of the funders and their priorities are up on the Wasatch Front. So like the Salt Lake City area, which is most of the population of Utah, and Utah focused, and so it’s been challenging to, you know, convince people why they should invest specifically in this kind of community of 900 people, and they’re kind of like, well, that’s not a great bang for our buck. You can only max out at 900 people there. If I invested in XYZ and Provo, that’s couple 1000 or, you know, whatever the kind of justification is. And I usually like to say, well, if we’re talking in percentages, we could potentially get, you know, 100% of this community where that’s not achievable. And in an urban situation,
Erin Borla 14:06
a buddy of mine that was from Texas, that was in philanthropy for a long time, it worked in rural always talked about scale being numerator over denominator. That’s it. So if we really want to talk about impact, rural places is where we can see that impact. Yeah, absolutely.
Maria Sykes 14:21
And I think, you know, when I think about government funding specifically, maybe at the state level, though, it’ll be like, well, we can only give a percentage of your budget. And I’m like, Hmm, so I’m competing with, like, the Salt Lake opera, and they have, they have access to wealth and resources that I couldn’t even dream of in Green River, and yet where you have the same, you know? So that can be, that could be pretty challenging to kind of, like, not a battle I want to fight, necessarily, but on a few times I’ve taken up the mantle. But, yeah, I think it’s also just, like, really challenging to find private funders who fund rural in general. Like, we’ll find funders that was like, Oh, wow, everything they’re talking about is what we’re doing. And then, like, specifically, like, not not rural, or not Utah, or whatever it is. And so I wish that, like, some of these just boundaries, could just just go away and focus on the work more generally. That’s certainly been a challenge. And again, the inconsistency, whether it’s a family foundation and leadership changes. And, you know, we’re talking to foundation that would give us $60,000 a year, either just out of the blue, not funding us because their priorities have suddenly changed, or a drop down to 10,000 and some of that, of course, is like market driven or impacted by, you know, the pandemic, but not knowing where the money is going to come from next year, in a lot of cases, is is terrifying. And it feels like, I mean, we know this, that like philanthropy, it needs to change. There needs to be people that are digging deeper and really trying to understand the needs of rural communities, you know, things like multi year investments and like general operating kind of unrestricted funding to trust that organizations are going to do what they need to do to make their community better. And like having that trust and taking the time to build trust with organizations doing this kind of work, I think that’s a really scary thing for philanthropists to think about but man, what I could do with unrestricted, multi year investment, you know, not having to be writing a six month or year long grant every month it feels like and reporting on it. I could give that time to, like, doing the real work.
Erin Borla 16:36
Yeah, doing what your mission is, right? And we say frequently that the grant partners on the ground are extensions of our mission, right? We can’t do whatever our mission is as philanthropic organizations without the organizations on the ground. So, so how do we better support those that are doing that work, that mission aligned work, and that is through trust based practices, and, you know, multi year opportunities and getting to know people on a relationship level, where it feels like that trust is then built, right? So it doesn’t feel like such a risk to take that, that leap?
Maria Sykes 17:10
Yeah, absolutely. And I think also, like, there’s this idea of just technical assistance, right? That’s that kind of rubs me the wrong way in a lot of ways which I my organization, has certainly benefited from technical assistant providers, but I think it should maybe be rethought as maybe more of accompaniment, yeah, working alongside funder and provider nonprofit, like working working together, accompanying one another through the process and and making this work better, easier to do better, serving the communities, whatever that might
Erin Borla 17:41
be. Say more about that? The technical assistance side?
Maria Sykes 17:45
Yeah, I feel like often it’s kind of, you know, it’s very focused on, okay, here, here’s the goal. This is what we’re going to accomplish. We’re going to create a plan. And very rarely is there implementation like, a true implementation plan, like a real understanding of, okay, we helped create the strategic plan, or this economic development plan, or whatever it is. And like now let’s actually help them through the first stages of the implementation of this and connecting to resources, whatever that might be. So it’s kind of this, like helicoptering in, checking a box, and then helicoptering out is often what it feels like. And so I think that could could certainly be thought of in a different way. And also sometimes the like technical assistance feels like it falls very much on the community to do the work. And so, like, maybe with a company meant, I think that, like those resource providers should be bringing in people to actually do some of the work, whether that’s creating a fundraising packet or, you know, some sort of strategy for for fundraising. Yeah,
Erin Borla 18:51
that’s super helpful. I think those are things that, you know, as funders, we look at like, what else? What’s beyond the check, right? What? What else can we provide? And is it that strategic planning support? But then what is really needed? And again, it comes back to listening right? Who’s doing what on the ground and why, what is actually needed? Because sometimes, as from the funders perspective, we hear from an organization on the ground that they’re saying maybe what they think we want to hear, rather than what’s fully honest, of like, no, actually, what I really need is somebody to draft this fundraising plan, because I don’t have time.
Maria Sykes 19:26
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the ways that I think about it is that it should be a privilege, not a burden, to fund rural organizations. The it shouldn’t just be writing that check and checking a box of like, we did it. We helped rural. It should be challenging, and it should be, yeah, like, involved and again, like this idea of accompaniment, it is a privilege to serve rural places, not a burden.
Erin Borla 19:53
So I have a question, and if you’re not comfortable answering this, that’s totally fine, but you mentioned you were in AmeriCorps. And that AmeriCorps staff members have been a part of the sort of Green River fabric for a long time. Are you comfortable talking about what the loss of AmeriCorps means to your organization and your community?
Maria Sykes 20:12
Oh, absolutely. I am an AmeriCorps stan for life. I think it is such an incredible and important program. I think, you know, like with many programs, there can absolutely be improvements, but for for our community, it’s been huge to be able to have AmeriCorps VISTAs come in, and they truly are building capacity for our organization, and whether that’s through through design or, you know, rethinking our programs, creating new programs, creating new programs, just connecting us better to the community. Understanding has just been massive. Think two years ago we had a team, AmeriCorps team, come in and do all of the irrigation for our new public park, expanding that irrigation, planting those plants, all of that, everything’s just gonna have to be delayed, or we’re gonna have to pay someone to do that work, which is really hard. We don’t have that expertise necessarily locally, to do that specific type of specialized irrigation. So, you know, it just like things like that, that. And when projects get delayed, it has an impact on the morale of the community. People start to volunteer less. They start questioning everything. It feels like when things are stagnant, and, you know, especially in the world that is, feels like it’s ever changing, and there’s constantly something happening that feels like it’s going to stop the work that we’re doing. Having the AmeriCorps coming in was just critical and keeping that momentum going forward. So, yeah, I mean, when one team comes in, you know, that’s 10s of 1000s of dollars of investment kind of into the community, and that’s we’re not going to be able to fill that gap.
Erin Borla 21:51
So if I am to call you back in 30 years, do you think you’ll still be in Green River, and what do you think the you’ll be excited to share about the community at that point?
Maria Sykes 22:01
Oh, yeah, good question. I think, I think I will still be here, at least in one way or another. I’ve lived here for 16 years, and that’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, and it’s always been, do I do I keep living here? My family’s kind of far away, and then I always get drawn back in because of the work or the community, or just getting to know like new people and getting like you think that I would know everyone in town, but I feel like every year I make a new friend, or just some sort of new connection or something and so. And speaking of that, my my fiance, his family, has been here for five generations. So I think even if we were to move away, for some reason, I think we’re always going to be deeply tied to this place, both of us in different ways, but especially because of of that family connection now and then, in terms of, like, what I hope Green River will be then, I really hope that it’s a place where people have options. I think right now, it feels like people do what they have to do. This is the job I have to take. This is the house that I have to live in. You know, there’s even like, options for what if there were two events on one night and you had to choose between them, right? Like, I think just some of that vibrancy and options would be really, really lovely for Green River. Whether it’s like, I want to live an apartment or I want to own a home like those things are both achievable for me and my family, whatever that looks like. And that probably sounds really simple, but I think that it goes to like freedom, right, in terms of being able to make those choices for yourself and not being forced because of economic conditions or government restraints or whatever it might be, right?
Erin Borla 23:39
Yeah, now I love that’s really a beautiful sentiment of that freedom for choice, even in the simplest of things.
Maria Sykes 23:47
Yeah, it took me, I’ll say it took me a long time to recognize that too, right? Like when people would ask me, What, what’s your vision for the future of Green River? And I think it’s simply some, some options and freedom for the people, people who live here and choosing to live here rather than either, like, having to live here because you can’t, you know, move up in the economic ladder or whatever it is that you see for yourself. And so I think that’s, yeah, that freedom is so important. And I just feels like, if we’re going to talk about like America, like that, is that, is it right, being able to, like, choose the life that you want and have it be achievable. Yeah,
Erin Borla 24:25
it’s been really great to get to know you. I know we sort of met by happenstance, and I just love all the when you are sharing, it’s like, Oh, I feel that way. Oh, my gosh, I’m hearing those same things. So I really have appreciated getting to know you, and thank you for being willing to share your story and the wonderful work you’re doing at epicenter. Really, really appreciate you.
Maria Sykes 24:46
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for for making the connection and and bringing a lot of what you’re talking about on this podcast to light. I don’t know anyone else who is really having these conversations, especially at this this level in depth. So really, really. Appreciate that
Erin Borla 25:12
Maria is pretty fantastic. I feel so privileged to have crossed paths with her in this most random way. But really do love that we have connected. And now I want to go back to Green River, ultimately, and check out all the cool things that they’re doing, not as a visitor, but as someone with this keen eye for all of the great work that they’re doing. And I think that’s something as funders we need to do, even when we’re out traveling, spending some time really looking at what people are doing and what communities are doing to drive them their projects forward. We never should underestimate the potential of these remote, low population communities to make the change that they need. They’re working internally and trying to figure all these things out. Sometimes they just need that listening ear. You know, you’ve heard us all communicate on this show so many times about breaking those silos in our funding areas, because oftentimes in rural places, things aren’t just one focus area. They cross those different bridges. Of, is it an art program? Is it a housing program? It’s all of the things. So being able to really hear what the community is trying to do, I think, is such a benefit. I love that she really encourages funding folks with a vision right communities everywhere are often led by visionaries. If we can find those individuals and inspire them and fuse some capital into the projects that they’re working on, we can really drive projects forward. Thanks so much for listening to funding rural. Head over to our website, funding rural.com. For more information, show notes and everything else that you’ll need.
Unknown Speaker 26:41
Thank You.
Transcribed by AI. Please excuse any mistakes.
