Rural Economic Conference: Session 2

So Neil, it's all yours.

[APPLAUSE]
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: Thank you very much. And a very nice break. I think the pretzels were a nice touch, Martin. I appreciate you baking them this morning.
I'm Neil Sheridan. I'm the President of the National Association of Towns and Townships. We have about 10,000 member communities. We're especially strong here in the Midwest.

I'm also the Executive Director with the Michigan Townships Association, where we have 1,240 townships.

And I even brought one of our board members here, who just happens to be engaged to Lisa Leedy from the first panel.

It is an honor to be on the Rural Issues Steering Committee, but I also want to point out, I've been involved in many different state and local government roles over the course of my career, and that started by being a college student at a conference very much like this. And I am so glad to see you all here.
Is your professor here? Who's the professor? Up-- stand up.

[APPLAUSE]

Oh, there we go.

So we want you to leave here empowered to start to get involved, as Lisa was pointing out, but also to know that you are responsible for taking back what you learn today and start to apply it to better your communities.

Hopefully, sooner rather than later.

We have three excellent participants in this panel. I'd like to start off by introducing Lisa Miller. Lisa is the Director of Partnerships and Engagement for the Michigan Office of Rural Prosperity. As the Director of Partnerships and Engagement, Lisa focuses on connecting rural communities with resources that advance their priorities, and ensure that rural voices inform programs and policies.

Prior to joining the Office in 2023, Miller worked for the Grand Valley State University and Michigan State University-- Go Green. Thank you. A little bit of silence over there from our friends from Iowa State-- launching innovative programs and strategic partnerships that accelerated community, economic, and workforce development initiatives in small and rural Michigan communities.

Lisa.

[APPLAUSE]

LISA MILLER: Well, that was a lovely introduction. And I will also introduce myself by saying I'm a geriatric millennial, who is a boomerang, and now is back where I grew up, and raising my family for all the reasons that folks pointed out earlier.

So let's see if I can make this technology work. Note, the boomerang part. Here we go.

OK, so I'm going to set the stage and try to do this within about 10 minutes to tell you a little bit about our office, to tell you a little bit about rural Michigan, and then to share some innovative strategies that our office is engaged in, in supporting rural communities to address some of the challenges and issues that we're talking about here.

So our office was formed in 2022. I actually met our director right after she was brought on at this conference, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a couple of years ago. And we were formed by an executive directive from Governor Whitmer to serve as a rural liaison, to put a rural lens on policy and programs, and to really serve as a front door for rural communities as they access the resources that are available to them.

Sometimes people think of Michigan as the manufacturing HUB, and we are, but we are also a deeply rural state. 20% of our population, 94% of our land is considered rural by various definitions. And we also have a choose your own definition in our state, which I can talk about later if you're interested.

It encompasses 12 federally recognized tribes, over 1,400 local units of government, and 70 counties, and so we have our work cut out for us. We are a small, but mighty team, and spent the first two years really traveling around the state, listening, learning, and delving into the data to inform the strategies that we wanted to put forward and the programs and networks that we wanted to create.

So to tell you just a little bit more about the state, rural Michigan is really experiencing a lot of what the rest of you all are experiencing. We have the same challenges and opportunities, and our number one concern right now, our number one challenge, is population decline.

The orange is-- well, this map is 2010-2020. And the orange-ish colors are signifying decline, and much of that is in rural communities.

Where you see some growth, in the blue, that is largely focused on populations aged 65 and up, so you can imagine that there are some workforce challenges inherent in that. And that's all exacerbated by child care crises that we are experiencing, as well as a housing shortage.

And while the state is really being intentional and proactive in addressing those-- by, we have a statewide housing plan, which is looking to build 115,000 homes within the next five years, we put $100 million into child care investment over the last few years-- we know that those are long-term solutions to attracting workforce and to maintaining that, and that in the meantime, our rural communities are experiencing less tax-base revenue, have challenges offering services, and so we really need to do some things right now.

It's not all Debbie Downer and doom and gloom, though. Especially in our office, we really believe that Michigan, rural Michigan, which has been the canary in the coal mine for a lot of these issues our state's dealing with, can lead the way to statewide resilience.
 
This map is a one-year snapshot, and you'll see a lot more population growth. It's 2021-2022, and that is coming out of the pandemic.

And echoing what we've heard a lot so far, as more people in the workforce are getting to choose where they want to live, and are able to live in places that are really aligning with some of their values, which are outdoor recreation, climate stability, deep community connections, we are seeing more and more folks moving into rural Michigan.

We also did a study in 2023 that talked to folks about why they chose to live in or relocate to a rural Michigan community, and those same things bubbled right to the top. It was really all about quality of life and quality of place.

One of the other things that was pointed to, though, was community planning initiatives. So we had some qualitative questions and open-ended questions, and folks were really saying, hey, we see initiatives that are taking place in our community, we can feel that, and they point to that as one of the reasons that they think their community is moving in the right direction.

And 2/3 of the respondents said-- and these were rural residents-- said that they thought that the community was moving in the right direction.
So this is music to our ears. Our mantra, if you know our office, and we do have some Michigan colleagues here today, we are all about planning and collaboration. That is what we talk about all the time.

We've seen success in communities that plan in a way that really activates their unique assets, and then collaborates in a way that bolsters capacity across the board. Because we know that there are challenges with distance between-- in terms of geography, fewer people, and fewer resources.

So we also realize, though, that this approach requires investment. And although we work across the state, we also really try to push investment into our own programming, and that is what I want to talk a little bit about.

Our signature program was born of the funding that came with our office when it was created. We had $1.5 million to structure in a grant program, and we did that in a way that would allow tax-exempt organizations that are serving rural communities to qualify for up to $50,000 to support collaborative planning by providing funding for development readiness activities, project and partnership development efforts.

So really, we like to say in our office that we are topically agnostic, that we want communities to pick the topics and the priorities where they place their efforts on what really is going to be most meaningful to them to advance their priorities. And we've seen a lot of really cool projects in the last two years. And I want to share just a little bit about a few of them because it really hearkens back to some of what we heard about in the first presentation.

So we've seen some really interesting projects on building critical and collaborative support methods and models to really advance that infrastructure that Lisa was talking about, that provides workforce support in terms of the services that are needed to recruit workforce.

So child care. We have a Rural County Community Foundation that receives a grant to do some planning for child care for the ecosystem, but didn't have any money to activate that plan afterwards. And that's something our office was able to step in and do. They've got strategies that are moving forward now.
 
Behavioral and mental health and access to those services is a huge need in rural communities. And we have a group of providers in the UP-- the Upper Peninsula-- which is our most remote region, that wanted to enact some best practices and develop a hub and spoke delivery model. We were able to provide some support to be able to continue that coordination, to launch those sorts of efforts.

Housing, we've all talked about housing. There's housing dollars available for housing projects lots of times, but not all rural communities know what sort of housing they need.

So we received a lot of grant applications for things like housing studies. Help us figure out what we need, a need assessment, a strategy plan. So we were able to support numerous communities to develop those.

And then for communities that were a little bit further along-- and this echoes some of the educator shortages that we were talking about. And I have to just tell this story.

We have a group of school districts, both private and public, that couldn't hire teachers. They came together. They were talking about this, why can't we? They found out they were losing applicants due to housing issues. They realized that they have one asset in common, and it's land. And they decided to come together and activate that land and build educator housing and do a collaborative model.

They came together. They'd been meeting a lot. They applied for some pre-development work to get some engineering drawn up for this. We were able to support that.
They've now drawn in over $10 million of support to be able to actually build this and serve as a model across the state, as ways that we can support educator housing. So it's been kind of fun to be a part of some of these where we're providing those real specific, unique niches that move the needle.

I've got two minutes, so I'm going to go fast here, which has never been a problem with how quickly I talk.

The other thing, when we ask communities what they need, everybody says they need capacity. And lots of times, it's capacity to access grants and access grant writing, grant support.

And one of the things that-- some innovative ideas came out of our application process that I wanted to share with you. We had six local units of government that came together and said we need help writing grants. And they got a grant writer who would work with each of them to write one grant-- identify and write, but then also develop a learning community to teach them how to write their own grants, find their own grants, and manage their own grants. It's going to last for a long time.

We had an EDO who realized that they aren't able to attract into some rural communities because they don't have the benefits, the amenities that they need. And their organizations. nonprofits in the community weren't able to draw down grants to go after some of those projects.

So they decided they were going to write a grant. They were going to teach these nonprofit organizations how to do this grant writing. They've secured lots of grants in the process and have lots more EDO memberships now. So it's been kind of an interesting, innovative way to take a look at how this goes out.

Just in those couple of projects alone, with the grant writing, we had $1.5 million. Those communities alone have drawn down over $14 million in grants. So really small investment for a really big ROI, so we're really excited about that.
 
I'm happy to talk a little bit later about a new project that we are launching with support from Resource Rural. It's our Rural Readiness Network, an opportunity for communities to come together, share their projects, collaborative projects, local readiness teams that come together and say, this is what we want to do. We are able to assemble a team on the back end of state, federal, non-profit, philanthropic providers to do some matching, but also to connect them with their peers.

We have our first convening the day after the election, where we will be doing some kind of intakes on those programs, talking about what they need next. And we're really excited to be able to provide some community coaching, grant navigation, and micro grants that will come out of that project.

And finally-- and I won't-- I will let you read this if you want to. It's 50 full pages. I promise, I won't read it to you-- last year, we wanted to put all of our thoughts into a guiding document, all of what we've learned. And this is Michigan's first rural-focused strategy document.

It's the Roadmap to Rural Prosperity. We will use it as a way to guide our work moving forward. We see other state agencies already adopting some of the practices in it, which is great. There's something in it for rural communities. We had a huge group of rural practitioners that helped guide it.

And so we're really proud of this, we'll be using it for many years, and there's lots of little tidbits in there. Happy to chat with anybody or everybody about Rural Michigan later on.

[APPLAUSE]

NEIL SHERIDAN: Thank you, Lisa. The roadmap really is an excellent tool.

Our next speaker is Janie McNabb. Janie was recently named the CEO-- the Chief Executive Officer-- of Networks Northwest, a 10-county regional organization serving the talent, businesses, and communities of Northwestern Lower Michigan.

She has worked in various capacities for the Public Workforce Development System in Michigan for more than 20 years. She's collaborated with partners and supported the economic and community development across the region. She has filled several leadership roles in the region and statewide, including as the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for the tech incubator 20Fathoms, and as a Trustee for Northwestern Michigan College.

Janie

[APPLAUSE]

JANIE MCNABB: Hi, everyone. Thank you.

So for this session, we're getting into creative strategies for attracting and retaining laborers, so my presentation is going to get a little granular.
But I want to start by setting the stage, first of all, talking about child care. We've heard about child care as a high need really is a crisis in many areas.
 
Let's see, how do we do this? There we go.

So I want to tell you a little bit about Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Before I came on as CEO six months ago of Networks Northwest, which is in the Lower Peninsula, I was doing work across the state and helping to convene a regional child care coalition across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

So you'll see that rabbit-shaped landmass up there in Upper Michigan. So it is extremely rural, 16 counties, 16,000 square miles, population of 300,000. The most urban center has 18,000 people in it, and that's Marquette.

And what you're seeing here is a map that shows licensed centers, licensed family homes, and licensed group homes pointed out on the map. So up in the Upper Peninsula, there's a real shortage, a very clear shortage, there.

In 2022, the Workforce Development Board, covering that entire region, called for a task force to look at addressing the child care crisis. Now, that's remarkable because it means that employers-- workforce boards are private sector-led-- employers are actually paying attention to this crisis.

10 years ago, I was involved in writing a grant to bring child care support services to a workforce program. And the employers that we were recruiting to be part of that project said, "What do you mean child care is a problem? They'll just figure it out."

Now, they're hearing about it. They know it's an issue, and they're paying attention.

So what we did as a coalition was first of its kind. All 16 counties in a real diverse representation across employers, workforce development, education, municipalities, post-secondary, and so forth-- there we go-- we came up with our Best Bets for Child Care Solutions, which came in five categories.

Educating communities, engaging employers, increasing support for more home providers-- because in that rural area, the facilities, like child care centers, just weren't as desirable for families, and they weren't as viable-- promoting career pathways to get more individuals interested, and facilitating access to spaces for child care centers and homes.

But I want to talk a little bit more about local policies at the community level. So our regional planning organizations across the UP did an audit of municipal policies across 51 communities in the Upper Peninsula. They found that 6% of plans addressed child care. Like, even identified it as a need or a priority.

They found that only half were compliant with state law, because the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act states that each family child care homes are permitted use in a residential district, and yet many of the policies required special land use permit or were outside of that aspect. They also layered on those zoning-- also layered on a lot more regulation that were beyond the state requirements.

So this whole audit really helped to educate the municipalities across the region, and our recommendations out of that entire coalition, in addition to educating those communities about the child care crisis, updating policies, they shared language, and considering ways to reduce the fee, and use administrative site plan review for site plans.
 
So another aspect that we really focused on was getting employers involved, because, like I said, they were really paying attention. And so we found ways to bring them together, identify solutions that they could implement, either individually or as coalitions of employers, that ranged from a more labor intensive on-site childcare all the way to real, just, flexible scheduling, and allowing their employees to do things differently and share schedules.

So we had a webinar, we created a solutions program for them to access and to look at, and that has identified employers of choice. We have found that companies that offer solutions for child care are more likely to attract and retain their employees.

OK, a couple other things. The state of Michigan has a child care program that splits the cost between employers, the family, the employees, and the state. And then another thing that is happening in the UP is apprenticeships that help create a career pathway for people to get into the field and move up.

Considering our time here, I'm going to keep going.

The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is accessing the hidden talent pool. So we know that demographically, the state of Michigan and probably many Midwestern states, we aren't having as many babies. We just aren't going to have as many work-- as big a workforce. So we have to get creative about who we're helping to get into the workforce, and the hidden talent pool usually refers to populations that tend to go underappreciated, under-looked, under-accessed for workforce opportunities, and they tend to have higher unemployment rates.

So one example of an effort to access the hidden talent pool was working with people affected by the opioid crisis. So working with addiction treatment, the Northwest region, which is where I'm at now, accessed a grant to identify-- to provide disaster relief employment to individuals, dislocated workers, who are affected by the opioid crisis.

We created life coaches to help individuals get back into the workforce, used a family stability assessment, and worked on creating recovery-friendly workplaces.
Another hidden talent population is returning citizens. Individuals exiting the prison system. Our Returning Citizen Program in Northwest has dedicated an AmeriCorps position to recruit landlords to offer housing, transitional housing, to individuals returning from prison.

We have also put on a jail and release simulation for employers and public officials so they can recognize some of the barriers that returning citizens face. And we are integrating the use of change theory into our work with returning citizens, and helping them recognize the turbulence of change in their lives.

And then another example of accessing the hidden talent pool is our veterans. We have a robust apprenticeship program in the Northwest, and every person on our team is VA-certified to use the GI Bill towards apprenticeship costs. So veterans who aren't going to use their GI Bill benefits to go back to a traditional post-secondary experience can put that towards an apprenticeship, and come out with an industry-recognized credential.

So all of that to say, in rural areas, it's really a scattershot approach, because no one solution is going to address all of these issues. Whether it's child care or the hidden talent pool, you're going to hear about immigration in a minute, we know that we can't use the same strategies as an urban center.
 
In an urban area, accessing the hidden talent pool would probably start with finding those partners that work exclusively with those populations. A Chamber of Commerce specifically dedicated towards refugees. Those don't exist in rural areas.

And all of the things that I just went through are only going to help a handful of people, but collectively, it's going to make a real difference in retaining and fulfilling our job opportunities.

Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: Thank you, Janie. Marie Barry. Marie Barry is the Director of Community Economic Development at the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative, where she leads the cooperative's efforts to utilize one of the rural communities greatest assets, their hospitals, as a driver of economic development.
Marie previously worked for two Senators in the Wisconsin legislature, and successfully shepherded bipartisan bills, from drafting into signing, including during a split party period of control of the legislature. Marie.

[APPLAUSE]
 
MARIE BARRY: Thank you very much, Neil. So I'll start by sharing a little bit more about the organization that I work for.

So I work for a true cooperative of 40 rural hospitals. When we formed, we took dairy cooperative bylaws, crossed out farmer, wrote in hospital, and just kept on trucking. So we have very rural and very Wisconsin roots.

And our purpose is to help hospitals collaboratively work on things that are better done as a group than they are independently in order to stabilize rural health care organizations. And I help our hospitals with economic development projects, which is normally when I start getting, like, glazed looks from an audience, because that's an unusual combination of things.

But what we have learned over time is that if your community is struggling, if employers are leaving, if you have really challenging demographics, that equates to it being really hard to keep hospital doors open. Your payer mix struggles, you can't recruit the talent you need to take care of people in the hospital, and so it's in the best interest of our hospitals to really act proactively and upstream and shore up the economies of the communities that they're really intrinsically linked with. So I just wanted to provide that background information for you guys.

So Neil asked us to send him a couple-- three or five highlights we would talk about today. And when I was trying to think about my highlights, I think the first one I came up with is you are not special.

I sit in a lot of conversations in different rural communities where people talk about, well, if this magic pool of people that are somewhere else just knew how great it was here, they would come. And I find that conversation challenging because what we know and have heard about rural demographics today, repeatedly, is that many rural communities have shrinking populations. It's not just in one county. It's not just in one town. This is kind of a systemic challenge in many rural areas in the United States.

And organically, we have more deaths than births. There are no magic babies coming to fix this problem. So we have more and more communities competing for this shrinking pie.
 
And so one strategy that we have seen kind of rise to the top in many of the communities I work with is thinking about being more inclusive of immigrants. And there is some very interesting data. I'll just give a shout out to Kenneth Johnson, at the University of New Hampshire, who is a demographer, and has really interesting maps around population growth in rural communities that is derived from non-Caucasian individuals, essentially.

So when we think about this from our hospital's perspective, I'm going to talk a little bit about labor externally, and then also a little bit internally. So externally, thinking from a community-based perspective, the vast majority of our hospitals are engaged in all of the quality of life initiatives we are talking about here today. So be it housing, child care, kind of quality of life, downtown reinvigoration, et cetera. But also, many of them have taken a special interest in this idea of making their communities more welcoming and inclusive.

So one specific example is a community, Lancaster, Wisconsin. They're in Grant County, so they border Iowa, so really southwestern Wisconsin.
And this effort came out of a conversation between local HR leader and a hospital CEO talking about the communities all around them, and how they were seeing those communities able to attract more immigrants into the communities. And they were growing, and their workforces were being augmented because of that. So they were able to tap into new sources of labor as immigrants were moving into their communities, and they were noticing that their community was not doing that.
And that was a big red flag for them because they knew that the viability of their organizations in these rural communities moving forward was really dependent on labor. That was the make or break for these businesses. If we can't get the labor, we cannot remain viable in these communities.

So they decided to change that. They decided to take on this uphill battle to make their community more inclusive.

And to Lisa's comment, I think they probably had, what many would call, a scattershot approach, but it has produced results over time. So they've partnered really closely with their Technical College to focus on English language learners, and making sure that their businesses are able to support English language learners in the workforce.

We actually just had a very interesting tour last week, where one large manufacturing plant that has kind of been ahead of the curve on this topic, brought in 20 other business leaders from the community to showcase how they incorporated English language learners into their workflows and daily operations. And it was really interesting to see the shift in the community over the last two or three years, because when some of this work started, there were some, I'll say, disparaging comments about why is this a topic of focus, why is this important?

And to see that shift and see 20 individual separate business owners take time out of the middle of their workday to come and learn how to integrate English language learners into their own workforce was a really big shift in where that conversation was in that community two or three years ago.

The other thing is that we've seen this same sentiment happen in multiple communities in southwestern Wisconsin, and it's looked different in every community. So one of our communities, their County Sheriff, really kicked off this initiative. They had a couple incidences where immigrants in the community had negative interactions with County Sheriff members, deputies, and they decided they wanted to change that.
 
So they did a proactive community engagement approach to bring immigrants in to talk with the Sheriff's Department about their perception of those interactions, and to share information back out into the community about the responsibility of the Sheriff's deputies, and how those interactions could be improved.

In another community, we saw the school district really lead the charge. So they saw huge, dramatic changes in their student population, and from those changes, were motivated to work with community partners and build a better system to support those families within their communities.

So out of this kind of piecemeal work happening in communities, we actually just banded together as a region and applied for and received an Economic Recovery Corps Fellow, that's focused on immigrant inclusion in the Southwestern Wisconsin region.

So the goal of this individual is to help us share best practices from community to community, because the vast majority of these groups are super grassroots, super informal, not super professional, and just trying their best, using the resources they have to make their communities more welcoming. But we feel strongly that if we're able to better share learnings across communities, we can replicate welcoming tactics in a quicker manner, and have more success as a region.

So we're very excited about that. He's been on board now for about five months, and will be in our communities for 30 months total to help spread and kind of systematize that immigrant inclusion work.

Interestingly, we're also starting to see this pop-up in some of our BRE data. So Steve talked about earlier, many of our community economic developers still do business recruitment visits-- retention visits and talk to their largest employers about, how is your business doing, how can we keep you here, what support do you need, et cetera.

In Green County, Wisconsin, they just finished their BRE visits in July of this year. 73% of the employers they visited-- they visited over 40 local employers in a very rural county-- reported an increase in Latino workers. So they're seeing it on the ground, both in employees and in students in school districts, that these efforts are starting to take hold, and those immigrant populations are growing, which is really demographically positive for these rural communities.

As I mentioned before, the technical colleges have been great partners, and they're also starting to offer many of their credentials in Spanish. So individuals don't necessarily have to have English proficiency prior to gaining the credential.

So over the summer, as an example, they did a mobile micro-welding program, so it was not like a full welding program, but you would get one credential to start your welding career. And they were able to move that all the way around the region, and offer it in Spanish. So that's just one example.

They've partnered with a number of manufacturers to offer on-site English language learner classes. And honestly, just their attitude about it all is probably the best part. They're so helpful. If you call them and say, hey, we want to figure out how to get these people plugged into our workforce, they're, like, "So do we. How can we do it together?" And I think, sometimes that is almost more important than any of the tangible things.

And then finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about internal efforts, which people hit on earlier, too.
 
But in the past, we kind of posted jobs, and we sat politely in our offices, and waited for applications to roll in, because we were special, right? People wanted to work for us. It was great. We're good employers.

And that's not necessarily how things are working anymore for health care organizations or for anyone else. And so a lot of our health care organizations have flipped that narrative on its head and really thought about cultivating talent that they already have in their building for the skills that they need in order to advance their operation. A lot of investment in Earn While You Learn opportunities.

Just a couple of quick examples. One of our hospitals is doing a two-week phlebotomy course, where individuals are paid at 75% of their starting salary through that two-week, super intensive training process, and then can start immediately at the hospital afterwards.

Other hospitals have partnered with technical colleges to bring CNA, MA, LPN, and RN training in-house, so people are taking technical college credits while working at the hospital. And some of their nurses are, like, dual- employed as technical college instructors and nurses at the hospital.

A group of our hospitals got together and partnered with a technical college to double the capacity of their nursing programs. They used to only start classes in the fall, and now they start them in the fall and the spring.

And a number of our hospitals are partnering to ensure the staff they already have are cross-trained into other departments. So just one example is, like, massage therapists that also can work as physical therapy assistants.

And finally, there's a really intense focus on what I would say kind of, like, the squishy elements of culture within our hospitals. So a focus on making sure that employees and leaders within organizations are emotionally intelligent, and cultivating cultures that retain employees and attract employees into organizations. Really investing in leaders, and acknowledging just because you are a really great physical therapist, that doesn't mean you're going to be a really great rehab manager, because that's a whole other skill set, that's a leadership skill set. You have all these great technical skills, and so we put you in a leadership position, and then we wonder, why you're not great at leadership too, magically.

And so our hospitals have spent a lot of time in investing in leadership training, culture improvement, and really becoming kind of employers of choice in their community. And acknowledgment of my theme, they are not special, as most employers are not in the current labor market.

Yeah, that's what I've got.

[APPLAUSE]
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: Let's open it up for questions. And I'm going to start off with the idea of the capacity.

Grant writing, grant winning, grant management, that body of capacity that we talk about is absolutely crucial. And I was glad to see that it was touched on several times because it enables-- our communities are paying taxes in one way or the other. What grants really are is it is a return of either the tax income to the communities to reinvest in a way you get to help dictate, or in some cases, it's philanthropic. So people who have a tie to the community or an interest in it, they are supporting that growth.
 
What else can we be doing to ensure that there is a ready pool of people who seize opportunities and competently address them and win them for the community?
MARIE BARRY: One answer I have to this is leveraging the capacity of anchor institutions within your communities. So maybe it is a library, maybe it is a hospital, maybe it is a strong civic organization. It looks different in every area, but whatever organization within your community has capacity to take on projects like that, partnering with them. I think, a lot of times, we look at really under-resourced local governments and say, do more. And they're, like, with what?
So just one example. One of our hospitals has partnered really closely with the food pantry, the school district, the local municipality, the EMS district, and a number of other organizations in their town. And they have written the grants, the hospital staff have written grants, for community organizations. And they've leveraged millions of dollars in a town of 1,400 people.

And that hospital, I mean, to be blunt, is not rolling in cash. They couldn't fund those projects themselves, but they can leverage the human capital within their organization to have a larger economic impact. We've seen hospitals do the same thing, leveraging their IT staff to write broadband grants or sit on broadband committees.

And it doesn't have to be hospital staff, right? Every community has some sort of institution that holds them together. Sometimes they're really informal, but tapping those organizations to step up, I think, is one way to build capacity in rural areas.

LISA MILLER: I totally, 100% agree. And I'm glad that you talked about that because I think kind of asset mapping to where those capacities live is really, really important.

Grant writing is really important, but I also think that it would be unfair to not point out the fact that we also have a lot of short-term solutions to some of these issues. Building grant writers is a long-term solution, identifying relationships is a long-term solution, but we're in a world where we have a gazillion grant programs, and we have to go after those.

And now, we realize many rural communities have struggled with that, so we have a gazillion technical assistance programs, which is also great. But if you are the unpaid person or the quarter-time person in your office who does everything within your township, you don't have time to apply for the grant, much less apply for the technical assistance to get the grant.

And so we are also thinking about how do we build short-term solutions, like some of our grants that we think will build on that, but also think about long-term solutions, and look at New models for really consistently funding things like rural regional planning organizations that kind of have, I don't want to say, jack-of-all-trade, but can really serve as those community conveners, can do the planning, can do the convening that's necessary to build long-term capacity, and do it in a consistent way, so folks aren't just continually chasing $1 or putting out a fire, but can actually develop a plan, and then work towards that plan.

We are consistently seeing in rural communities that we don't have pipelines for projects. And when a funding opportunity from the feds come out, and you've got six weeks, you aren't ready for that.
 
And so really trying to think, how do we fix this right now, how do we support communities so they can take advantage of this unprecedented moment in time? But also think, how do we build those relationships, and then fund those programs so that we can do that going forward?
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: Janie, I was fascinated by this idea of your background with Michigan Works, which is our statewide workforce development group that has the local outreach, the idea of employer engagement, underscoring how they have to understand that they have a role in developing the talent pool. And we've talked about how difficult it is to attract-- Steve, thanks for laying that out for us.

But growing our own and the returning citizens, the apprenticeship programs for the VA, these are all very interesting strategies. What is the role of the engaged employer in making those things successful?
 
JANIE MCNABB: Yeah, I think it is critical, and it is an opportune time, because, like I said, employers are paying attention, they're recognizing, they're actually hearing what is getting in the way of hiring and keeping a talented workforce. And as Marie said, they're willing and able to put forward their capacity.

So the engaged employer no longer has to be convinced that they have a role in it, but will step forward and make a role for themselves and partner. We need so many more of them, but they are especially critical in rural areas, because there aren't enough resources in the workforce system, in local communities, and townships, in the education system.

And also, when business speaks, legislators listen. So their role makes a difference at a policy level, it makes a difference at a community level, and it makes a difference for those individual workers.
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: Great.
 
AUDIENCE: Do I get a microphone?

NEIL SHERIDAN: Yes, we've got a microphone en route.
 
AUDIENCE: This would be a question for Marie. With all the programs and attractions of Latinos to the hospital industry, have you seen any impact on, like, it's helping out the industries too, because you're trying to help the hospitals to increase the different professionals and laborers and jobs. But have you seen, like, they brought their families, or others that actually helping other, like, retail, other hospitality industries, and--

MARIE BARRY: I probably should have-- I maybe was not totally clear. So most of the collaborations I talked about, hospitals are involved, but it is broader community partnerships. So we're talking about engaging those individuals in the broader workforce, not just the health care workforce.

What we have seen, anecdotally, in Wisconsin, is that oftentimes immigrants come to our communities in order to work on dairy farms, and then other individuals follow them, be it their kids or their wives or their friends, and then we see broader engagement in other sectors of the workforce, if that makes sense.

But I would say, yes, we have seen a noticeable change in the number of Latino workers engaged in multiple workforce sectors, be it manufacturing, retail, hospitality, et cetera, in a noticeable way that is impacting the labor force within small rural communities. Does that answer your question?
 
AUDIENCE: Yes. So the health cooperative, so do you include other businesses, other than hospitals?

MARIE BARRY: So our organization formally is 40 rural hospitals. The work that I do with our members is all community-based.
So it's helping our hospitals form local partnerships and make grassroots change on economic development issues.

So most of my-- I can't really think of any project I do with our hospital where I only work with the hospital, and I don't also work with local government, nonprofit employers, et cetera. So it's very community-based work.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

MARIE BARRY: Yeah.
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: So a word to our students. You've got these three highly recognized, competent leaders. What questions do you have for them?
And I'd like to say that I have worked out an arrangement for extra credit with our professors, but I have not. So no extra credit.
Let's hear from our students. What's a question you'd like to ask about developing the community? There we go.

AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Anna, and I had a question.

I'm an immigrant, and I come from a community that feels like they are being forgotten. How do you build trust with the immigrant community that feels like they feel forgotten, or they fear the police? How do you build that trust in a community that you want to outreach?
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: I didn't-- the trust with who?
 
AUDIENCE: With immigrant communities.

NEIL SHERIDAN: So new immigrant communities joining into the region, the communities.
 
AUDIENCE: Yeah, how do you build that trust because they feel forgotten?

MARIE BARRY: Yeah, it's a huge challenge, and I think rightfully so, because a lot of times immigrants haven't had great experiences in rural communities. And that's real, and we should give voice to that.

I have sat in really ugly community conversations about immigrants in rural areas that were not fun to be a part of. And so I think that trust building is really important.
Things that we have done that have worked. One, valuing the lived experience of immigrants in communities over everything else. So using lived experiences of immigrants to determine what work is going to be done.

We have on one of the committees I mentioned multiple immigrant members on the committee that help steer it, and we do focus groups every year where we specifically outreach to immigrants within the community to hear about what would be most helpful for them.
 
Two, we go to where people are instead of asking them to come to us. Because to your point about trust building, like, hey, do you want to come to a meeting at City Hall? A lot of people don't, and that's reasonable, right? So we've conducted focus groups in ELL classes, on dairy farms. We literally had a meeting earlier today, I was listening to on the way here, about how we're going to do our next one in November, and our strategy is, like, where can we go to where people already are versus asking people to come to us?

Translation and making resources culturally relevant, I think, is huge. We just had a really interesting conversation in one of our communities about the County Human Services Department was being called with questions about child welfare when really what they were experiencing was cultural differences in parenting. Like, viewing parenting as more of a communal effort versus an individual effort.

So making sure that we don't just take what works for people that are already in a community, translate it into Spanish, and say, this will work for you too, because everyone is unique and different.

And honestly, I would say, you can probably answer this question better than me. You should tell us.

JANIE MCNABB: I'll share an experience we had at the Workforce System. Had an individual from the Ukraine coming into our English Language Learning program at our Adult Education Lab, in the Workforce Center. Discovered he was a highly skilled professional in sewing, and so we connected him with a manufacturer in the region that specializes in creating all kinds of tents. So they do a lot of fabric sewing and so forth.

But we took the extra effort to make sure the culture of the company was welcoming. And that particular HR director we had worked with quite a bit, and his take on it was, I can't tell my CEO that I've tried everything to fill these open positions if I'm not open to new groups of people.

And he and the CEO cultivated a culture in the organization that welcomed and supported this individual, and he is now a big part of the team. And they have Ukrainian food fests, and that kind of thing. And it is a true immersive experience for that organization to be exposed, to be-- so there's just learning on all sides of the equation.
But that is really key, that those employers are engaged and willing and welcoming.

NEIL SHERIDAN: Steve.
 
AUDIENCE: There was a community in Northern Wisconsin that saw a large increase in the Latino population, and it created a lot of conflict. So when you're describing your work in Lancaster, I was thinking of this community, Sparta. And it turned out that the-- who really kind of stepped up to the plate and started the community conversation was a group of ministers, because the one thing that a lot of the immigrants felt like they belong, it was a safe place, was their local churches. And that was really strong bonding social capital there.

And the ministers kind of saw this conflict that was occurring. And these ministers never had a tradition of working within the larger, broader community, and it was-- they were kind of hidden leaders. And how do you find these hidden leaders and encourage them to take a leadership role?
 
Now, Sparta actually has a sister-- it turns out that a lot of-- they were coming from a particular set of villages out of Mexico. They now have a sister city program, and they actually do exchanges with this village in Mexico. Now, there's downtown businesses that are aimed at the Mexican population. They have a Mexican Heritage Day Festival.

But it was those hidden leaders that kind of stepped up to the plate. It wasn't the elected officials. It wasn't the Chamber of Commerce. It wasn't your traditional leaders. It was these-- how do we encourage those leaders to take a more proactive approach?
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: So we designed this session to fit very tightly with the one before it, which talked about strategies. And this was meant to be tactical in nature. I think you've heard many good ideas.

You also heard a reference earlier to the Iowa Township Project. I'm looking forward to looking at taking a look at that, too. But of course, the mission--
 
SPEAKER: One more student.
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: All right. Sorry.
 
AUDIENCE: It's OK. My name is Keely. So outside of being a student at the University, I'm also a supervisor at a child care program. And one thing I feel like we're kind of struggling with is just getting noticed by the employers in the community. And I'm just wondering if there's any strategies that you guys do with that community, with the child care crisis, because we actually are struggling with the numbers of enrollments, because we're a small nonprofit organization.
And so I was just wondering if you look at the numbers of the actual centers while also getting that support for the child care crisis?

JANIE MCNABB: Did you say you're struggling with enrollment because you can't fill--

AUDIENCE: Yeah. Like, we go to events, we publicize our program, but being a nonprofit, like smaller group with our child care, we just aren't getting the interest from the people in the community.

JANIE MCNABB: Wow.

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

LISA MILLER: You probably have people that commute there.

JANIE MCNABB: Yeah, I don't know what to say.

So I guess, my take on it would be to find the employers, the people who are desperate for workers, because you have them, and help them understand how the child care crisis, the lack of available, affordable child care is impacting their ability to attract and retain skilled workforce.
 
And help them see, their workers are really in need of quality child care. I mean, the stories we hear of the desperate lengths to which parents will go is very disturbing. And to know that there is a great place that they can take their kids, rest assured that they're safe, that their brains are being developed, that should be communicated to those community leaders.

I will also say that speaking the business's language is really helpful. And one talking point I've often put forward is every business you talk to wants people with soft skills. They want people who will come to work on time, who will communicate well with others, who will play well in the sandbox. All of that gets started in early childhood. So if they want that workforce, they need to be supportive of early childhood development.

LISA MILLER: I just feel like I need to share this one little piece that I had experienced in a previous role working with manufacturing employers. And they weren't having a hard time hiring, so they didn't see child care necessarily, until they started realizing who was missing work. And they weren't having women or men in their 20s or 30s missing work.

What they realized is they had a grandma problem, is what they called it. And it was because a lot of the women who were in their 50s and 60s were calling in sick or weren't able to work, because they were being the child care backup for their children. So they were doing the grandma thing.

And these businesses rallied around that because what they realized, after having conversations, they're, like, do you realize that you're going to lose your job? And they said, yes, but if my daughter loses her job, she's going to come live with me, so it's easier for me to lose my job than to have her lose hers. And suddenly that was a different way to get them engaged.

So I guess, the point is that the demographic might not be the demographic of childbearing years that folks are thinking about. It could-- it's really a systemic issue.
 
NEIL SHERIDAN: Well, I'd like to thank the panel, put a lot of work into preparing for this, and we'll all be here for the rest of the day in case you have follow-on questions.

[APPLAUSE]