Rural field engagements are on-the-ground visits, listening sessions, and collaborative gatherings that Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group organizes to build trust, learn from local leaders, and elevate community-driven solutions. These engagements bring together funders, policymakers, and practitioners to see firsthand the assets, challenges, and innovations shaping rural places. By centering local voices and lived experience, rural field engagements inform smarter investments and policies that align with the values and priorities of the people most affected. Learn more about our recent rural field engagements:
Thrive Rural Open Field
Thrive Rural Open Field sessions are relaxed virtual gatherings where practitioners and leaders from rural and Native nation communities can meet, share stories, swap lessons, and build community.
Join us to hear practical techniques and get all types of rural resources from seasoned practitioners you can implement in your work. Sign up for our mailing list to make sure you’re invited to our next gathering!
Shifting Funding to Meet Community Needs
Insights and learnings from rural practitioners and funders on how funders can work to transform their thinking and action to better support their communities.
Strategies to Address Rural Flooding
Insights from practitioners in rural places experiencing repeated disasters on what it will take to for rural communities to drive their own solutions.
From Competition to Cooperation: Rural Wealth Creation
Insights from rural practitioners who are advancing equitable prosperity and economic development in a way that embraces and strengthens the unique assets of rural regions.
How To Organize a Rural Action Infrastructure
Discussion with rural leaders about working together across interests and regions to take advantage of opportunities.
Growing Equitable Outdoor Recreation Economies
Discussion with rural leaders on the opportunity equitable outdoor recreation economies pose to rural areas.
Advancing NextGen Rural & Indigenous Leaders
Insights and tips to identify, establish, and sustain youth leadership in rural and Indigenous communities.
Ensuring Rural Communities Welcome Everyone
Resources and best practices to ensure that each and every person is welcomed to the community, feels connected, and is able to exercise and influence power in community decision-making.
Building Trust Through Rural Media
Insights on how we can promote accurate rural narratives and increase local media to build trust and new relationships across geography.
Improving Rural Capital and Credit Access
What are some of the major capital and credit trends right now for rural practitioners?
Stewarding Land and Growing Rural Prosperity
Rural and Native communities have been stewarding the land for generations. Many are using new ways of growing nature and…
Rural Environmental Justice Practices & Resources
Practitioner insights and resources on rural environmental justice, including ideas on just and equitable energy transitions.
Building Capacity in Rural & Indigenous Communities
Insights and learnings from rural practitioners on how organizational capacity and technical assistance can be carefully and intentionally strengthened to grow economies, health, and livelihoods for each and every person in their regions.
Disaster Planning and Rural Resilience
Flooding, tornadoes, drought, wildfire, and other extreme weather events cause major disruption and damage wherever they occur and have potential…
Thrive Rural Case Studies
Thrive Rural case studies, What’s Working in Rural, highlights success stories from practitioners on the ground. We break down important topics and provide tips for implementing a practice in your community or organization.
Safe Drinking Water: Rural Economic Justice Case Study
Learn about the barriers rural communities face to accessing safe drinking water, and how they’re working to develop clean water systems.
Building Funder Capacity to Work with Communities
This short case study has insights and tips on how funders are shifting gears to learn communities’ processes and practices, enabling more equitable partnerships and impactful projects that meet community needs.
Rural Environmental Justice: Community Flooding Case Study
This short case study has insights and tips on addressing the causes and conditions contributing to flooding in rural places, as well as to envision and build thriving futures of equitable rural prosperity.
Communicating to Connect: moving beyond neutrality
This short case study has insights and tips to move beyond neutrality and still communicate effectively across the political spectrum.
Using Relational Leadership to Build Power Together
This short case study has insights and tips on how communities that have been historically and systematically excluded can develop authentic and effective leadership that builds power to challenge the status quo.
Translating Federal Opportunities into Local Resources
This short case study has insights and tips on how rural communities with limited staffing and resources can understand, prepare for, and compete for finite federal funds.
Broadening Authentic Leadership: Student Action with Farmworkers
This short case study has insights and suggestions for how rural-serving organizations can effectively welcome and truly empower leaders from all backgrounds.
Thrive Rural Action-Learning Exchange
The Thrive Rural Action-Learning Exchange (TRALE) is an integral part of generating insights about what works and what’s needed to propel policy and practice toward producing well-being for more rural people in more communities and regions across the nation, especially in areas of concentrated poverty.
In the TRALE process, Aspen CSG convenes a wide-ranging set of rural practitioners, advocates, policymakers, and others to address an “action gap” that stands in the way of changing systems and/or behavior critical to driving rural progress.
Quickly tapping on-the-ground insights and experiences helps generate breakthrough thinking about what works and what’s needed to push rural policy and practice forward. Each report has resources for rural communities, including a list of recommendations for practitioners.
Measurement
Our first TRALE process focuses on six principles for measuring rural development progress to open and deepen conversations about better ways for funders and investors to design programs that consider lower-capacity communities’ realities, needs, and goals.
Measure Up: A Call to Action
Today, we have a generational opportunity to strengthen prosperity and equity in communities and Native nations across the rural United…
Measure Up: Call to Action — Executive Summary
This is the Executive Summary for Measure Up: A Call to Action. It highlights six principles for measuring rural development progress to…
Annotated Resources for Measuring Rural Development Progress
This Annotated List of Resources for Measuring Rural Development Progress is part of Measure Up: A Call to Action. It was developed and…
Natural Disaster
Our second TRALE process focuses on five principles to move rural and Indigenous communities away from a costly “patch it again” cycle and focus on advancing community prosperity outcomes — even in the face of more intense climate disasters.
Through Natural Disaster to Prosperity: A Call to Action
Need actionable steps in your equitable disaster preparedness or recovery work? This report highlights best practices from the field.
Through Natural Disaster to Prosperity — Executive Summary
Executive Summary document for Through Natural Disaster to Prosperity: A Call to Action. Get quick takeaways and recommendations for action.
Outdoor Recreation
Our third TRALE process focuses on five principles to create an equitable outdoor recreation economic strategy. As new rural outdoor recreation economies take root, we can meet this moment by improving how we do outdoor recreation development to better support rural families, businesses, and workers, create more sustainable and equitable economic systems, and improve local health and wellbeing.
Mapping a New Terrain: Call to Action
As new rural outdoor recreation economies take root, we can meet this moment by improving how we do outdoor recreation development to better support rural families, businesses, and workers, create more sustainable and equitable economic systems, and improve local health and wellbeing.
Mapping a New Terrain: Executive Summary
Executive Summary document for Mapping a New Terrain: A Call to Action. Get quick takeaways and recommendations for action on equitable outdoor recreation development.
Grantmaking
This report was created in partnership with Partners for Rural Transformation and highlights four principles to shift policy and practice so that funders deploy more flexible investments that better meet the needs of organizations serving low-income and persistent poverty rural regions.
Funding Rural Futures: A Call to Action
What it will take to make more flexible and responsive funding available to rural development organizations serving low-income and persistent poverty rural regions?
Health
With federal investments and renewed attention, we can do rural development and rural health differently—moving collectively toward equitable rural development with projects grounded in place and a people-centered vision of community impact.
Rural Health and Economic Prosperity: Executive Summary
Read our report on how the rural development and health fields can adopt approaches from one another to improve rural health and economic prosperity.
Collaborative Strategies for Rural Health & Economic Prosperity
Insights and recommendations to do rural development and rural health differently—moving collectively toward equitable rural development with projects grounded in place and a people-centered vision of community impact.
Reimagining Rural Assistance Network
The Reimagining Rural Assistance Network (RRAN) is a focused, nimble, diverse coalition of rural development advocates, experts, and practitioners that came together in March 2021 in response to the significant expansion of federal funding. The group is composed of organizations such as Appalachian Community Capital, Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group, California Center for Rural Policy, Communities Unlimited, Inc., The Brookings Institution, Housing Assistance Council, Region 5 Development Commission, Rural Community Assistance Corporation, and RuralOrganizing.com Education Fund.
This work led to the creation of Aspen CSG’s Federal Resources page, which provides timely updates on federal resources and stakeholder input opportunities.
While RRAN works to support the Rural Partnership Program (as part of a smaller, negotiated Build Back Better or part of the 2023 Farm Bill), RRAN is also engaged in the potential reauthorization of the Economic Development Administration (EDA).
How to help this effort? Add your capacity building story to Reimaging Rural Assistance Network (RRAN)’s story bank. The collaboration is working to better define and distinguish capacity building and what it means in rural communities.
Resources for rural communities: Rural Opportunity and Development (ROAD) Sessions
The ROAD Sessions highlight and unpack resources for rural communities that promote access to inclusive economic opportunity and long-term resilience. ROAD Sessions feature stories of on-the-ground practitioners with experience, wisdom, and savvy to share. The series reflects and emphasizes the full diversity of rural America, spotlights rural America’s assets and challenges, and lifts voices and lived experience from a wide range of rural communities and economies. Each Session includes an added opportunity for peer exchange.
Overall, the ROAD Sessions aim to infuse practitioner stories and lessons into a rural network of narratives, policymaking, and practice across the country and to strengthen the network of organizations serving rural communities and regions.
The ROAD Sessions are virtual exchanges co-designed as part of Thrive Rural – an effort of the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – and in collaboration with the Housing Assistance Council, the Rural Community Assistance Partnership, Rural LISC, the International Economic Development Council, and the Federal Reserve Board.