At the Aspen Institute, we believe that leaders can come from anywhere. But realizing that vision requires us to rethink where—and how—we search for them. Two leaders who embody this expansive approach to leadership have dedicated their careers to working in rural communities—places where great community leaders are often overlooked.
Donna Daniels is the Executive Director of the Brushy Fork Leadership Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Chris Estes is the Co-Executive Director of the Community Strategies Group at the Aspen Institute, a program committed to fostering rural communities and Native nations as healthy places where each and every person belongs, lives with dignity, and thrives.
We brought Donna and Chris together for a conversation about finding and fostering leadership in rural places, the deep connection between leadership and place, and why the practice of welcoming is essential to building strong, thriving communities.
Donna, the Brushy Fork Leadership Institute has a connection to the Institute’s work in Aspen, Colorado, which itself was quite a rural place when the Institute got started there.
Donna: There’s a little bit of an interesting story that Aspen folks may not be aware of, and that is that when Brushy Fork was founded 36 years ago, John Stephenson, who was then president of Berea College said, I really want to create something for Appalachia that’s a little bit like the Aspen Institute. So, our founder had a deep appreciation for Aspen from the get-go, and really felt like this region needed that kind of think tank for Central Appalachia.
Chris, can you speak to your take on the Institute’s core idea of leadership: that leaders can come from anywhere?
Chris: This particular distinction about leadership is important because leadership is often thought about in a very hierarchical and very major metropolitan area kind of way. What are people’s training? What’s their education? What positions have they held?
Aspen CSG did a case study on how Student Action with Farmworkers, a North Carolina–based nonprofit organization whose mission is to bring students and farmworkers together to learn about each other, does leadership, training, and development in their work. Most folks wouldn’t think of these two groups of people as having leadership qualities, but they’d be wrong. Each and every person has unique lived experience and valuable expertise to bring to the table.
So I offer that a little bit as a background of Institute programs like Aspen CSG really trying to explore and highlight leadership broadly and not be sort of caught in those more big city corporate buckets of leadership.
Right, because historically, most people have defaulted to using those more traditional qualifiers of leadership. Donna, what metrics do you use to identify leaders in your work instead?
Donna: From its very beginning, Brushy Fork has believed that community leaders are made and not born. Leadership isn’t some kind of personality trait.
For the last 36 years, we’ve used a team-based, community-focused model for leadership development. For our purposes, we define a community as a county. So, we think about geographic diversity in a county. Are we getting people from all over that county to think about what needs to happen there? We look for racial diversity, age diversity, the amount of time that people have lived in the place.
And if you’re looking for these kinds of community leaders, you can’t just go to the Chamber of Commerce and ask around, can you?
Donna: We knock on a lot of doors as we’re recruiting, actually. You have to be on the ground in these places. We talk to folks at extension services [educational programs that offer resources and information]. We talk to public libraries. We go to volunteer fire departments, where folks are often community-oriented and interested in working. We talk to schools and civic clubs. We also ask people in leadership positions, “Do you know somebody who might be interested but they haven’t quite stepped up to that role yet?” It’s about going in with an open mind in terms of who you’re gonna be talking to and who is identified as a leader in the community.
Chris: Another essential element of the work is centering the assets of the region and the people and their wisdom as a form of leadership. It doesn’t necessarily mean that somebody has to take on a formal leadership role. Being community-led is a really important concept in Aspen CSG’s approach to leadership. We think about value from an asset framework—this community’s got a lot of human capital, social capital, cultural capital… Then we’re asking ourselves, “How do we tap into that? How do we help?”
Let’s move to welcoming, which is such an interesting and powerful idea. Donna, will you define it and describe how welcoming operates in your work?
Donna: The way we define welcoming is that we are creating places that afford a quality of life for everybody that lives there already or moves there. So it’s not always about welcoming new people. It’s also identifying the people who are marginalized in some way and saying, “How are we creating a place that is welcoming for them?”
The idea actually came to us from a colleague who is a woman of color and grew up in the mountains. She began to see that businesses and industries and remote workers were trying to relocate here, and as part of their assessment as to whether they wanted to locate in this region, they were looking at social and physical infrastructure.
They were asking questions like, “How is your community providing opportunities for leaders of color? Are you welcoming to migrants who are coming in? How is your community welcoming people who may be English language learners?”
She started saying that being welcoming is a critical economic development tool, social infrastructure is a critical economic development tool. So we created our program as a way to provide opportunities for people to consider how they could create welcoming places.
We connect welcoming to economic development because that opens more hearts and minds. Yes, it includes diversity, equity, and inclusion, but it’s actually much bigger than that.
Chris, how do you think about welcoming as a framing for Aspen CSG’s work?
Chris: If you look at our Thrive Rural Framework, one of the building blocks is “Welcoming All to the Community.” And the framework’s ultimate outcome is for everybody, every community to thrive and for everyone to belong. So what we’re really doing is merging welcoming and belonging together.
I think it’s important to understand that when some people talk about welcoming, it’s a recruitment approach like we want people to come here, but that’s not the same thing as belonging here. Belonging involves a deeper commitment, and that’s how you get to leadership, greater equity, and opportunity for all. If you’ve been able to exist in a community but it was only on the other side of the tracks or down in the floodplain, you aren’t really able to belong. You aren’t welcome to participate. Our definition of belonging and leadership is about people considering themselves represented in decision-making.
Dig Deeper
Follow these links to learn more about the ideas and organizations mentioned in this conversation.
Brushy Fork Leadership Institute: https://www.berea.edu/brushy-fork-institute
Donna Daniels: https://www.berea.edu/brushy-fork-institute/staff/donna-daniels
Community Strategies Group: https://www.aspencsg.org/
Chris Estes: https://www.aspencsg.org/staff/chris-estes/
Thrive Rural Framework: https://www.aspencsg.org/thrive-rural-development/
