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This report, titled “Communities in the Lead: The Northwest Rural Development Sourcebook” by Harold L. Fossum, published in January 1993, focuses on empowering community-based revitalization efforts in rural areas of the Northwest. The sourcebook was supported by the Ford Foundation and the Aspen Institute’s State Rural Policy Program. The document highlights two main areas:
- Capacity Building: This involves improving the ability of community groups to set practical goals, marshal resources, and evaluate their efforts. It emphasizes that while state and federal actions can provide thrust, communities themselves must lead revitalization.
- Value-Added Enterprise Development: This strategy aims to maximize local benefits by focusing on the design, processing, and marketing of goods, especially within natural resource sectors, to create more jobs.
The file also addresses several key challenges and strategies for rural economic development:
- Defining Rural: It explores various definitions of “rural,” beyond just population density, to include economic, social, and geographic profiles, and discusses how these definitions impact economic viability and policy targeting.
- Overcoming Myths: The document debunks common myths about rural areas, such as their sole dependence on natural resources, the exclusivity of community spirit, rural enterprise being economically handicapped, and the idea that rural areas are just “less urban.”
- Goals of Rural Community Economic Development: It presents multiple objectives for rural development, including employment, income, total wealth, sustainability, stability, vitality, quality of life, and distribution, noting that these are not mutually exclusive.
- Development Perspectives: It introduces two main perspectives: “responding to external needs” (recruitment and impact planning) and “responding to internal needs” (contingency and strategic planning).
- Rural Development Models: It discusses “growth and expansion” (economic base theory) and “maturation” (locally responsive strategies) models for development.
- Development Strategies for Resource-Dependent Areas: It identifies common obstacles faced by these communities, such as insufficient leadership, weak development capacity, limited infrastructure and human resources, and limited economic diversity.
- Local vs. Linkage Approaches: The document differentiates between local efforts that utilize internal resources and linkage approaches that leverage outside expertise and resources from regional alliances, state, federal, university, and private sectors.
Chapter 1 provides a detailed look at the development challenges in the rural Northwest, while Chapter 2 outlines small town strategies for building development capacity, including the “Extension Model for Community Economic Development” (emphasizing external resources and economic expansion) and the “Economic Renewal Model of Community Revitalization” (focusing on local people and sustainable development). It also discusses state-level strategies for rural revitalization and barriers to assistance, such as programs designed for urban scale or competitive processes that disadvantage smaller, less experienced communities.
