Funding Rural | Episode #19 | Season 2: Ben Winchester “The Rural Brain Gain”
Narrative plays a critical role in what funders support, and unexamined narratives can create unintended consequences. We often hear about the brain drain in communities as young talent leaves, but Rural Sociologist Ben Winchester offers facts around an alternative narrative—the brain gain— a demographic that is moving back into rural communities. Ben works in the Department of Community Development at the University of Minnesota Extension and he’s fascinated by all things rural.
“One of the key messages I have for the philanthropy field is that your narrative dictates how you help people, and people define themselves by what [they] fund.” – Ben Winchester
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More about Ben Winchester
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 in the Extension Department of Community Development at the University of Minnesota. His conducts applied research on economic, social, and demographic topics surrounding a theme of “rewriting the rural narrative”. He received the international Rural Renewal Research Prize in 2021 for this work.
“I work from a very simple premise, which is, if you believe our small towns are dying, then why can’t I find a home to buy? You can’t find a home to buy because we’ve been highly desirable for decades.” – Ben Winchester
Discussion Questions
- Make a list of 10 known problems you’d like to solve in rural spaces. Separately, make a list of 10 ‘asks’ from rural partners. Where do these lists intersect? More importantly, what do you notice about where they differ?
- To turn the tide on negative narratives, Ben suggests starting with the newest members of a rural community. Why did they move there? What ideals and opportunities are they seeking? How can funders embrace these aspirations in their narratives and decisions about what to support?\
- Ben talks about a lack of housing stock in rural, and the idea that private assets are a public good due to the demand. What creative ways could philanthropy support populations aging in place so that when their homes pass back into the free market, they are still sturdy, viable housing for others?
Resources
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Transcript: Episode #19 | Season 2: Ben Winchester “The Rural Brain Gain”
Erin Borla 0:00
You’re listening to Funding Rural. I’m Erin Borla with the Sisters Oregon based Roundhouse Foundation. Ben Winchester is a rural sociologist in the Department of Community Development at the University of Minnesota Extension. He’s fascinated by all things rural, how we define it, how demographics are changing. We met when I read a study he put together discussing how many people it takes to run our towns. So many folks look at the number of nonprofits per capita, or how many city or county government positions are available. Ben looks at that and quantifies it in a way that helps us understand what it means. How many people does it actually take to do that work? Ben’s research stretches beyond just those numbers. He looks at how rural communities are dealing with challenges like housing shortages and worker shortages, and more than that, he’s looking at how communities see themselves, how they are revitalizing, or looking at their own assets through new eyes. He’s a fascinating guy, and I’m so excited to share our conversation. I started off asking him how he defines the term rural.
Ben Winchester 1:12
Rural areas aren’t always defined by something they are. They’re defined by something they’re not, and they’re not urban, and then you’re rural. So then what is rural? It’s, you know, not impersonal. It’s personal. It’s the opposite of urbanity. So in many ways, that’s not always the correct way to look at it. You can have both. You aren’t just one thing or another. So I guess my own interest here is just trying to demystify what is rural and to show that rural places aren’t these places long gone, passed by, like we’re part of our own society and have been for decades, and we’re still here, and we’re desirable and durable. So I just love to share the story that we’ve got, that our narrative is actually pretty good right now.
Erin Borla 1:53
Well, and that’s how we got connected, is you had been doing some research around like, what it takes, how many people it takes to run a community, and as we talk about sort of influx of new folks moving to rural spaces, and the term that so many people use is that brain drain, which I know you have feedback on as well, but we were connected around that research that talks about how many people does it take to run a community, can you tell us a little bit about where, that research started?
Ben Winchester 2:21
Yeah, no, it’s very interesting. It’s a very simple question. I think even when I first started being involved in the rural development industry, we heard a lot about how, you know, rural people are more involved. You have to wear multiple hats. You know, the implications of city on the council are drastic. If you make a decision for your residents that they don’t agree with, and you’ve got immediate reactions to that. So there are some inherent kind of challenges and opportunities within our small towns being a leader. So getting back to kind of this brain drain and how I got started, because this, this leads a pattern to this leadership question that I had, which was, I do research around the Brain Gain is what I call it. And that is, you know, since the 70s, there’s been a consistent pattern of people in their 30s, 40s and 50s, moving to just about every rural community in the country. And this has populated our rural places. It’s really filled up our homes. In the 90s, they got very filled up. And I think I work from a very simple premise, which is, if you believe our small towns are dying, then why can’t I find a home to buy? You can’t find a home to buy because we’ve been highly desirable for decades. And so right now, I look at what we call the Brain Gain. And so rather than talking about the brain drain, which is the loss of your high school kids after graduation, and small towns do lose 40 to 60% of your young kids after graduation. But that’s not a distinctly rural trend that happens in urban communities as well. The kids like I want to get out of here, you know, and go experience somewhere else. So we do this research around the Brain Gain. We looked at all these reasons why people move in, and we tell a really positive story about our small towns that were highly desirable, right? But then I would get this question all the time, which is, you know, if we do have all these new people moving in, like, where are they? They’re not involved in my groups. And I say, well, right, they’re not always involved in your groups. They’re involved in theirs, and you don’t know where they’re spending their time. So we need to stop this kind of cross talk, which ultimately leads to a conclusion that these new people don’t care about this town because they don’t show up at your meetings. So anyway, I started to ask this question about and with the help of West Central Initiative out of Fergus Falls, Minnesota here, which was, how many people do we need to run our town? And so I lived in the small town of Hancock, and you can count the number of groups right that exist in town. And so how many people do you need to run your town? It’s a it’s an aggregation of the public. You know, government agencies that you’ve got, so city council, county commissioners, so and Water Conservation districts. So you’ve got all these government entities that require representation and need leaders in elected and appointed positions. But we also have this very strong nonprofit sector, and this was the area of research that really got me going maybe 15 years ago, the National Center for Charitable Statistics has this database from IRS data on nonprofits, and it showed that, you know, there’s a narrative out there that small town social life was dying, but in this data set, it showed that the number of nonprofits was going up by 10 to 15% every five years, and that meant people were creating groups. And, you know, groups don’t just show up. People have to have an interest in your town. They have to find other people with that interest. You have to create incorporation papers. I’m talking about official 501c3’s that have been created. It’s a lot of work to do that, but people have been doing that. So on one side, we see a growth in this, these groups that require leadership. And what we find is that Minnesota, for example, it’s like one in 25 people need to be involved in a small town or a rural place as a leader in our most rural counties, that’s one in five. One in five people need to serve as a leader in either a government, elected or appointed position or a nonprofit group. So again, like we have all of these opportunities for engagement in this view, they it looks different. So we have transitioned away from, you know, play space groups to interest based groups. So while people may not show up at the Eagles club, they’re going to the regional, you know, Snowmobile Association, and they’re that group is big, and they’re doing things regionally, but meanwhile, we have a competition over time, over people, over funds. So really, I just called this, you know, initially I called it like the maintenance costs of our small towns, like, how many, how much social maintenance do we need in terms of positional leaders? But that was, you know, not a really fun term to use, social maintenance costs. So I just call it, how many people do we need to run our town and and that’s where we kind of arrive at. This data that tells us, you know, we do have a lot of positions that need leaders. People are currently involved. Our Brain Gain research tells us that these newcomers, they do have a theme of service. They tend to want to be involved. But it’s, you know what? What does that involvement look like on the ground, when somebody shows up in your town? How are they welcomed? Are they treated like a warm body, or are they looked at as a person with, you know, capabilities and knowledge and talents that can contribute to our community? So on one hand, you can say they just need to learn how we do it around here, that might be a melting pot approach, right? You’ve got a culture here that these people just need to melt into. But our culture has changed so much in this community, in this in this country and in our communities, that really, you know, you’ve got people in academics who would argue that there’s almost no rural culture here in the US. It’s just, you know, aggregations of people who happen to live together over short periods of time, and even today, the people we have in our towns today are vastly different than the people who were there 100 years ago. We’re not the same families. There may be a few, but a majority of new movers are not from your communities, and have been that way for decades. So our communities are filled with people that don’t live there, and we’re not from there. It previously. And this is a recognition, again, is your community a construct of like, place based things don’t change here, or are you in the conglomeration of spaces within which we all live and cross boundaries with each other? But I may never know you, because I don’t ever cross your boundary. And this is, you know, kind of a stereotype we have, too, is, you know everyone, which you don’t, you know, you know of people, but you don’t really know what they do and where they spend their time all the time. So these are part of the the pictures of rural I like to paint. That is, you know, it’s on one side, you could be like these people aren’t showing up, but on the other side, when you see where people are spending their time, you see this vibrancy around where people spend their time, their money, their leadership capabilities. So in many ways, it’s very rewarding for us to connect these groups to show that there is still a vibrancy for all of your region here. People are moving in for what they see here today, and you know what you will be tomorrow. And while you may have had challenges in the past, like nobody moves in to help you out, like people move in for their own hope and opportunity. So I’ll stop there.
Erin Borla 9:04
Yeah, and that seems like an interesting segue to, like talking about tension points, right? I mean, I know here in in Oregon, where we’re based, we talk a lot about, well, if you’re here for 25 years, then maybe we’ll consider you a local. And I was talking to some folks from the rural, kind of central eastern seaboard, and they were saying, Oh no, we have born here’s and come here. So what are some of those tension points that you’ve heard that that are and where? Where’s the solution? How do we bring those folks together? What does it look like in the in the middle?
Ben Winchester 9:35
Yeah, so great question. This is, this is what we call resident recruitment Otter Tail County, Minnesota, they have the nation’s first resident recruitment coordinator. Their county hired a rural rebound coordinator, is what they call this position, and so what he’s helped coordinate is a number of different efforts across the county, but one of the things that they do is they have a program called Grab a Bite, and that is the moment there every small town. In this large county has an ambassador, and the moment they hear of a new person moving in, they take that person out for a meal. And the point is, we just need to point to connection for these people to make them see that there’s someone locally that’s here. But the number one thing is the Ben Winchester Rule, which is, you can’t ask them for anything, not like, oh, Erin, you’re new in town here, you ready to join the chamber board? Like, what? Like, I don’t know. Like, no, like, I don’t really, I don’t know. We treat people these newcomers like warm bodiea, many times, without actually getting to recognize who they are as a person, as their talents and who they are bringing themselves there. But I will say that trans the returnees have a challenge here too, because returnees are coming with like, familial baggage. Like, I moved back to the town I grew up in, and I moved back, and the first thing I hear is like, Oh, Ben, you move back. That’s great. Like, oh, I remember when you broke those elementary school windows in fourth grade. Like, I’m 49 like, I don’t remember like, I yeah, I remember that, but like, it’s not my defining self. I would like to think that I have moved past that. So again, when you’re a returnee, you come with your own struggles about identity and seen as a person for who you are, away from that family name sometimes. So I do. We do talk about, have these newcomer suppers. Like you want to find out who your new people are. Again, talk to your city clerks, your property managers, your real estate agents, because they know immediately who moved in. There’s always people moving in and out, always people moving in and out. So we do talk about like, how do you welcome these new people in? We say, have a newcomer supper. Like, one thing you can do is have supper, and it’s just for the newcomers. It’s not for all the newcomers to get gawked at by all their existing residents. It is only for the newcomers. And that, you know, we do an ABCD, asset based community development approach, which is just, you know, stand up and introduce yourself and tell us what you like to do. Right? It’s like, oh, hey, my name is Ben, and it’s my wife and my kids, and we like to go, you know, fishing and, you know, mount bike riding, and I like to fix computers. And there’s always people in that room. They’re like, oh my gosh, I love mountain bike riding. I’m gonna connect up with Ben in this like, you end up providing a platform upon which people can connect. You do not need to dictate why people are getting together outside of the meal, you really are just providing a platform on which these human beings, which are social creatures by nature, allow themselves to connect to each other, because we don’t have these places all the time for third places, right away from home, away from work, that we can go, that aren’t like politically charged environments in some way. Right? How can we just have a meal that talk about our common values living in this town, and you find out they’re not political.
Erin Borla 12:44
Well and there’s something to be said about that invitation. I my son, recently had a music performance at the school, and they were trying to use it as a fundraiser, and we talked a lot about how how to engage the staff at the school, and it’s asking a physical ask for the student to go to their teachers and say, I’m performing tonight. I’d love it if you’d come. And the fact that that never happens independently is fascinating, and I think we see that in community as well. Of like, hey, I’m having an event. I’d love it if you come, rather than just hey, the ads in the local paper or it’s on the group Facebook, you know, page, it’s that personal invitation to participate. There’s so so much to be said in that. I have a good friend of mine that always says it’s hard to hate up close. It’s like being able to get connected. I love that.
Ben Winchester 13:39
No, I totally agree. I mean, I want to hit on two things you touched on, which is the personal invitation. The idea is like, Hey, Aaron, you’re new in town. You ready to join the EDA and you’re like, what like it is? It is really like, Hey, we’re flipping burgers for the firemen on Friday. You want to come and help us out. It is the first step to engagement. Is a small request, and it is not a big thing. It’s not a city changing event, it’s not a committee, it’s not a Robert’s Rules of Order meeting that they have to sit through, and which is a whole other concept about how unattractive our general structures are for engaging our formal community groups. Like we need these formal structures. But that doesn’t mean we should use Robert’s Rules of Orders every time, like, use that if you have a failure in trying to communicate your group, don’t have that be the rule. So that’s one thing, but the other is like, how do you get the word out when you do want to have community events like this? So it is like, how do you find these new people? Like, half of the newcomer households we know have kids, so your school knows you can, like, leave a postcard in those kids boxes and be like, hey, invite your parents to a meal that we’re gonna offer newcomers this fall, or whatever it is. But then, like, how do you, how do you otherwise get the word out in such a complex society, it’s like, well, yeah, our community supper, we put it on the website. Like, which website did you put it on? Or, No, we know it’s on the radio, like, on the like, Pandora. Or what are you talking about? Out there, right? Are we put on the newspaper like it is on the front page of the website at that point? Or is it like Facebook? You’re over the age of 50, like, I mean, you just have all of these different mechanisms for getting the word out. But the bottom line is, like the most effective method of communication is a text message that we have found, and that is but what predisposes a text message is a relationship. You have to actually know somebody. It can’t be this cold call kind of thing. So we know the personality of small towns is paramount. I mean, you know, change happens at the speed of relationships in our small towns. Jeff Yost, with the Nebraska Community Foundation’s very fond of saying that he’s probably trademarked that term. I should be careful, but it is. It’s been very rewarding when you work from a asset based approach that you have resources that you need locally, we just need to help, you know, put people in the right direction. So it’s been very rewarding on that side, yeah.
Erin Borla 15:52
The focus of this show is primarily around philanthropy. You know, 7% of philanthropic dollars go to rural spaces, point 5% so less than 1% to Native American communities, which are often included in our rural and remote spaces as well. And how do we encourage our philanthropic partners to be able to invest in those communities, recognize the projects and opportunities in those spaces? And I do at some point, want to talk about sort of, what are those steps? What do those steps look like? You know, it all begins with relationships. It all begins with trust. That sometimes means you got a little get a little bit closer, get to know people a little bit better. But what were your thoughts on, on engaging philanthropy?
Ben Winchester 16:35
Yeah, so great question. I’ve been working with a lot of philanthropy organizations over the past 10-15, years. Maybe philanthropy has made a big turn over the past, especially 20 years, in terms of like being somewhat reactive to being more proactive in economic development, community development, housing like all over the place. So, um, that’s very rewarding. One of the key messages I have for the philanthropy field is that your narrative dictates how you help people, and then people define themselves by what you fund. So if you believe that the way to help communities is to help solve poverty or to deal with homelessness, like that, is a problem based definitional approach, communities, then have copy and paste language for their problems, like for their poverty rates for that right, you’re trying to make your case to acquire resources, but at the same time, my point is, when we use that deficit approach, like, who’s going to invest in doom and gloom? Yeah, why would I give any money if you truly this so narrative dictates everything for me. If you believe small towns are dying, why would I bother giving money for a new water system? There’s for the people, few that are going to be here, and then this town’s going to shrivel up and die. No, we’ve been highly demanded for 50 years. Five zero years since 1970 there’s been a rural rebound. So again, our homes are full. So now, again, communities, you know, communities define themselves by what you fund. So now, if you look at the portfolio and you see that everything is a problem support, like, which is, you know, what is the role of philanthropy? Is it to help, like, fill in the gaps on the social sector that aren’t, you know, we’re not meeting those through the market or through capitalism, and we’re going to help solve that? Or can you actually work on asset based things like, and so my point is, it can be both, and it should be both, because right now, communities don’t have copy and paste language for the things that are going well. We have copy and paste language for our problems, and that becomes a problem in itself, because then if that problem definition overwhelms any other definition, nobody’s going to give you resources. This is the major struggle I’ve had. And so when we’re trying to portray ourselves in a positive way, it’s not pollyannish like we’ve got, you know, talk to all the people why our homes are filled here. It’s crazy. So people work doesn’t get a lot of attention because it’s community development work, right? They want to see outcomes. Everybody wants outcomes, right? And so what does that mean? What is it okay to do all this people work to ensure your retention rates are high, right? When you’re doing welcoming activities and community development and resident recruitment activities, it’s different. It’s this is a whole economic development strategy, because if all you focus on in economic development is industrial recruitment, like, hello, 1920 like, that is the so antiquated as an approach we went through, like, all these epochs of entrepreneurship and clusters and right now, like it is all about resident recruitment. Like, if all you do is create jobs, like you’re just creating more jobs that you can’t fill. Yeah, so now the job of economic development is to create a place for residents to get a job. So now that can be called place making, space making. There’s all sorts of words to describe that type of activity, but it is a conglomeration of community development, economic development, and really for tourism too, because a lot of the resources that are the tourist resources are also your resident resources. The reason people come and move here, right? But then that’s all the tourism people take care of that park out there and like, that’s a resident recruitment tool as well. So just trying to delineate how we talk about the future of our towns through the narrative that we use can dictate all of your strategies. If you believe your town is dying, you’re trying to stem the bleeding, and all you’re doing is dealing with the problems. But I would actually argue that many times, some of the problems that we’re trying to solve are not solvable. They’re inherent in society, societal inequities, inherent in capitalism. But we don’t really want to talk about that. Like, at what point do you say your job is done? So if that job is never going to be done, do you want to sink everything into that? Like, I mean, there is a social good to be served from that, but it can’t be again. The only narrative we talk about because these people moving in are uplifting our communities. They’re changing this narrative every day. But it’s up to us, whether or not you choose to hear them. Many times, we have school children who have never heard anything, but you need to get out to succeed, there’s nothing here for you. The best days are behind us, but the moment you put them in front of a newcomer household, they’re like, Man, I love this town. We just moved here last year, and there’s like, this park up there that we go to and like, It’s bonkers. What type of narrative exists, and the breadth of a narrative that can exist in a community. So part of my job is really just to give you the ammo to fight the negative narrative. Like my last name is Winchester, so I’ll use that, like the ammo thing. But when I’m not related to the thing, I would have never had student loans if I was ever related to that. But it was like, you know, we have to have, we have to have actual ammunition behind our arguments. Because right now, and this is part of my own background, is that even when I started to be involved in this field, like our field, is filled with the problems the brain drain, looking at the impact of economic restructuring, like school consolidations, there are all these things that happen to us without a recognition of what we’re doing today. So that’s where I you know found about the Brain Gain and that the nonprofits are growing. Our homes are filled like and everybody knows this. And so in many ways, for people that are choosing to move to small towns and rural places, it’s confirming, like I knew we weren’t dying, like I thought we weren’t dying, this place is actually pretty nice, like people move to a small towns for hope and opportunity. They don’t care where your towns have been, they’ll come to find out. But nobody moves in and wants to hear the first thing that your best days are behind you.
Erin Borla 22:22
Yeah, so as you start to bring folks together, there’s naturally some tension points, right? You mentioned, like, those that have, this is how we’ve always done it. Oh, this is how we should try it. And, you know, those types of things. How do you what? What are the main tension points, and what are the opportunities for folks? I would imagine it’s things like remote working or wealth disparity or housing. I mean, all we’ve touched on those a little bit. But what are how do you get through that? How do you say yes, we acknowledge and.
Ben Winchester 22:54
I think schools provide one of the best examples to do community development work, because rural schools, especially, everybody’s got to go to school there. All kids, all incomes, all races, all ethnicities, have to go to that generally, that one place in a rural district. So for me, the school districts become the avenue for seeing how the community changes. And so again, if we’re going to have a senior center that’s connected to our school, it is that point of, like, letting people see the change that’s occurring every day. Because right now, communities are very isolated from one another, and it’s I talk about, it’s another unsexy term, but it’s non overlapping interaction orders. And the idea here is that you live your life and I live mine, and we don’t really overlap all that much, like you actually shop at different times, and even people that work on different shifts, like you live your whole life on different times. I don’t see you, you eat, you shop, you sleep, you work, you live your life on a whole different schedule. Are there truly opportunities for us to interact, and where does that potentially happen? So this is a recognition, again, that when you work from the assumption that you know everybody already, there’s no work to be done when you have to work from the assumption that people are not showing up here. And how can you vaguely see who those people are? Your school kids, because their parents are, they showing up at these meetings. You know, this is, for me, the point of change. Half of the newcomer households moving into small towns and rural places have children in them. So on one side, it’s like, every time there’s a newcomer household with kids, they’re easy to see, like, it’s my there’s new kid, my kids class, and there’s their parents. Like you can welcome them in. You can say hi. You can see them right away. But I’ll remind you, every time there’s a newcomer household with kids, there’s another that doesn’t have kids. So now where are they and how do you see them? So um, so this, for me, becomes an interesting way to connect and lift up the voices, not just of the newcomers, but the existing population. But you need a platform on which for that to happen. So these tension points tend to be around barriers to entry for these types of events, for me, and that is people that have kids. How are they showing up? People that work second shift. How do they show up? So you’ve got once you get childcare, so once you alleviate barriers to entry, that’s one of the big concepts I’d like to think about, which is, you know, barriers to entry of kids playing in hockey, like you better make a good income, or my kids never play in hockey. Basketball has a lower barrier to entry, right? So you can have a lot more kids playing basketball. So that is just one example of how do people gain entry to social opportunities in your community? Do you have to spend money to even show up at these social opportunities? Because a lot of times that you do, it costs money to interact in today’s society. So for us, it’s, how do we how do we lift up the conversation to the level of community? And when communities differ, and it’s not just your town. It is your town and your neighbors, and your neighbors businesses and all of us that live in this region that are trying to make this happen. So how do you lift up a whole narrative of where you’ve been in a way that doesn’t they’ll conflict with the narrative of where you are today? And there’s things like one easy one is the role of agriculture in our small towns in the Midwest, and there are people who truly believe that AG drives the rural economy. And it’s not true, in my view, like economically, less than 5% of rural people today are engaged in ag or an ag related field. But if you believe that rural drives or agriculture drives rural that dictates all the solutions you have too you want to do rural community development, it’s going to be through agricultural education. If we don’t understand who we are, we can’t change what we do. So part of this is like, you know the acknowledgement that you barely see the changes your kids go through, because day after day just passes, and then all of a sudden, five years pass, you’re like, oh my gosh, they’re so different. This is our small towns like unless we have some semblance of some mechanism to actually see ourselves occasionally in a different way. We’re not going to because we live our lives day to day in our habitual ways. So getting out of our grooves.
Erin Borla 26:55
What else is philanthropy missing? Where are some other opportunities that they that folks could step in?
Ben Winchester 27:01
Well, I will say that the housing field is wide open, really. And I look at the existing housing stock, I’ll stay nobody. My key message is nobody is responsible for all the housing in your town. The HRA may be responsible for your section eight stuff, and like, even your low income housing has a huge spotlight showing on that. I’m talking about all the other housing. What about my grandmother, who lives in the house? She’s not low income, but that house is in terrible shape. She’s on a fixed income. So meanwhile, I look at our houses as a point of continuity, as I mentioned before, because they persist. They were a home. This house was a home to someone before, that house is a home to someone today, we want that house to be a home to someone in the future. But for me, it’s a conversation with the seniors in these homes about, what are your intentions? What kind of shape is this house in? Maybe we could do pre sale, free pre sale inspections, so you’re not surprised when you have to move in emergency mode and then sink 20 grand into your home that you didn’t know about, that nobody is concerned with these housing transitions right now. So meanwhile, we do, I would argue our senior, I have a whole housing presentation, which I argue that our seniors have a policy of best intentions, and that is, I’m going to live in my house forever. It doesn’t really work out like that. And in fact, we have a whole age in place industry helping people stay in these homes, and which homes are they in? The four bedroom, two bath place. And then I talk about, like, well, you know, your bathroom upstairs doesn’t work. And they’re like, that’s fine, because we don’t go upstairs anymore. That doesn’t make it better. So right now, I would argue that the largest amount of productive work to help your community would be around helping seniors transition their homes. Find out what needs to be done. You may have you may have people in low income homes right now that are eligible for home weatherization programs, but they’re too proud, or they do not even know about it. You can help programs that you know right now. You’ve got seniors paying for the gas to heat their home, going right out the windows, because the windows are in terrible shape. So what are they not doing? They’re not taking care of the the house. They’re not taking care of themselves, right? So the house is down the list here. So I do talk about, what is the shape of your housing stock in town, there’s a lot of demands, like you just need to build workforce housing. That’s not even an option for me. I look at small towns, we have a finite number of homes. You better make sure those homes are going to be around as long as possible. So it is like, hey, I’m going to work with your mom to sell her home. But you know, you have nobbing to wiring in there. You can’t even get insurance on that, so you got to replace that wiring, and you better replace the paint, because there’s you got some peeling paint, and you know, there’s no first time home buyer eligibility if there’s any peeling paint on the home. And now mom’s like, well, I’m not spending $20,000 on this house. I just spent $10,000 on the ramp last year and putting up the bathroom. Like all those things that we’re doing for our seniors are livability expenses. They’re not true. Equity builders for our homes. So entering the field of housing is wide open. There’s a lot of paralysis and a lot of finger pointing right now, but I would say, work with your older population. This is the people work to talk about, what are their plans for their home? And not just with them, but they have to get their kids involved too. Because right now I do talk about the kitschy little story, which is like, you know, I could be like, Hey, mom, it looks like you’re not getting around very well. And then my mom’s going to be like, Oh, shut up, Ben, I’m getting around just fine, right? But then she goes to the doctor in the afternoon, and she’s like, man, I can barely get up and down the steps. My hip just is not cutting it. Like, why didn’t you tell your son that in the morning? Like, we don’t we want to have these conversations, because at the root of it, your house is a private asset, but at the same time, that house is a public good. So this is the rub for me. How do we do public good work in a private asset without it seen as like, well, I’m not helping Erin’s mom out. Like, that’s our private home. Yeah, yeah. Well, if that house gets demolished, then you don’t have anywhere for labor to live, for wealth to live, leadership to live wealth, any of this. So what does your community look like if you don’t care about your housing stock anymore, and it’s going to be trouble.
Erin Borla 31:12
In the future? What are the big things that you’re looking to research? What’s your next big, big future research that you’re so excited about?
Ben Winchester 31:19
No, it’s all about the revival of rural America. I mean, really, 75% of our homeowners are baby boomers and older. 75% they’re gonna turn over, like, literally, you have to talk about death through all of this. And so when they turn over, we know from our research on the Brain Gain, these households are three to five people. Half of them have kids. They’re not all taking a job locally. So again, more and more demands for your housing stock like, again, imagine your employer in town is like, I just watched three people retire, and I can’t even replace them because the people moving in have remote jobs or other. So your housing stock is under considerable stress right now. So that’s the only I look at housing transition studies is my area of interest right now, and that is, you can go to your county assessors, or you might have a Cadastral System statewide. I’m not sure about Oregon there, but it really is like, what, what is happening with the property transitions in your community? Do you go from having a home that was locally owned to now somebody non locally owned? Or do you have like, like, Joanne Solem, and now to the estate of Joanne Solem, like, right? It’s like my mom asked me to hold on to the house because she’s going to move back in after she gets out of the facility. That never happens, right? Or mom wants us to hold on to the house so the kids can come and visit every year while she lives in this other place. So look at the, look at the transitions that are occurring in your housing and there’s a lot of speculation about Airbnbs too. That tends not to be huge, but that’s always in the mix. But look at your own data. You’ve got data that’s gathered. Have a report from your city clerk. Again, those people who are moving in and out every day, they could be giving you enough data every month, really, at your meeting. So I’m all about the change. Again. There’s a lot of change coming, and now you can’t say you don’t see this coming.
Erin Borla 33:05
And we’re glad that there’s folks like you that are studying it all the time, and that data is available. We do have landing pages for the for the podcast, so we’ll definitely put links to all those studies that you mentioned. So certainly appreciate it. It’s been really fascinating. Thank you for spending time today. I just I love people that are passionate about rural and it’s just been such a gift. Thank you.
Ben Winchester 33:27
My pleasure. If I didn’t love my work so much, I’d hate my job so.
Erin Borla 33:44
Rural communities are facing a lot of change, and communities across the country are also facing housing shortages. I appreciate the way that Ben is thinking about it. It’s from an aging perspective. There’s a natural transition, and it’s underway as the older generation passes on. Philanthropy can help ease that transition. Oftentimes, when I’m in conversations around housing and how philanthropy can support housing crises, we talk about it in the same way, how do we do infill? How do we do bigger developments? But Ben talked about it in a way that I hadn’t heard a lot about before. Rarely has the conversation been about shoring up existing stock, making sure that the bones of the current homes that we have in community and the structures continue beyond our lifetime, is that our next investment in housing. Philanthropy has the opportunity to step in in that transition, and I think it’s taking place in communities across the country. Ben talks a lot about people work as well. I really want to highlight that, because I think supporting civic engagement opportunities and places where established and new citizens can come together and build relationship and find common ground will really help to move communities forward. Philanthropy can have a role in bringing those folks together and helping communities develop their own new narrative based on those assets, not their challenges, and maybe asking those incoming residents what brought them to the place to start is a great way to kick that off. We’re going to link to Ben’s research at FundingRural.com. Thank you so much for joining us for season two. We’ll be back with more conversations about how philanthropy can better serve rural and indigenous communities later this year.
