Rural Economic Conference: Session 3

And so we're going to talk about-- and we're going to talk about both sides of investment now. So we have investors and communities. What are they looking for?
What impact do they want to have? But then, there's the community side that needs to be considered. What do they want from people who want to come in and invest in them? How do they want to be engaged?

And couldn't think of a better person to moderate this panel than our own Susan Longworth from the Chicago Fed, who is one of our superstar policy advisors. So Susan, it's all yours. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: All right. Can everybody hear me OK? I'm going to get started. This is going to be really interesting.

And so as Martin said, I'm Susan Longworth. I'm a policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, based in Chicago. I'll let you be the judge of the superstar part. But hopefully, I'll live up to that.

And I'm just going to keep an eye on the time here for us. We have a really, really interesting panel here. And I like to think of it as sort of a bridge panel between these very concrete conversations we've had about labor, and strategy, and best practices, and then following this and leading up to the reception.

I like that this is a forward-looking group. We're already thinking about the reception. We'll get there in plenty of time.

But before we get there, we're going to be talking about housing. And again, something that's very concrete is about the built environment. And while those panels are going to deal, again, with these very concrete ideas, our concept of risk, this is the risk mitigation strategy, mitigating risk in rural economic development, this concept can be a little bit abstract.

But in many ways, sometimes, I think it's really the 800 pounds gorilla in the room when we think about rural economic development. And it's often that, yes, but in these well-laid plans and the best thought out conversations, so looking forward to getting into that.

I want to say that I'm not an economist. I was an English major who just--
 
AUDIENCE: [CHEERS, LAUGHTER]

SUSAN LONGWORTH: --thank you. Those are my friends-- and we discovered the storytelling power of data later in my career. Sometimes, getting the words out is hard, but I am a words person. I'm also the daughter of a journalist who grew up in Boone.
 
So for those of you not familiar with the area, it's about 45 minutes north of here. And so at my core, I believe in the power of narratives, and stories, and that those truths that people tell themselves about where they are and where they live carry an enormous amount of weight in how people perceive the world around them, and how they frame what is risky and what is safe.

So what is risk? So in simple but somewhat abstract terms, risk is the possibility of something bad happening. Risk is that uncertainty about the effects and implications of an activity with respect to something that affects people, that people value, often focusing on a negative or undesirable consequences.

I guess there's always the risk of something good happening as well, so that can be a motivation for us in our conversations. Many different definitions have been proposed. Perhaps, we can think about it in terms of opposites.

Some of the opposite words are things that are safe, harmless, predictable, certain words that sort of reflect the status quo in many situations. To make it even more, you often have to understand the perspective of the risk taker, the person or place or project that's going to be impacted by that risk. So our panel today is going to try and open this up through three really interesting perspectives.

I'm going to take, perhaps, more time than I usually do when I moderate to introduce our panelists. Often, when I moderate, I say we have wonderful panelists, which we do. You can read about their bios on the website. And then, we just get into it.

But what I think is really great about today's conversation is that the diversity of perspectives we have here. And that's important because risk is really in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. And so where one person sees a great opportunity, another person is going to look at something and say, yeah, that feels really uncomfortable and risky to me.

So then, that's really what all of you do so interesting and challenging. So I'm going to introduce our panelists. And then, we're going to turn it over to them to do their presentations.

But first, we have Dan Culhane, probably familiar to some of you in the room. He is President and CEO of the Ames Regional Economic Alliance. He leads a staff of 17, which is a large group for many economic development agencies, and also oversees many of their affiliate programs.

He's a graduate of Iowa State University with a Bachelor's in Community and Regional Planning-- one of those degrees I wish I had known about-- and also, a graduate of the University of Oklahoma's Economic Development Institute. He is a certified economic developer and a certified chamber executive. So all that to say, I think he knows what he's talking about. Yeah, OK.

Dan serves on numerous boards and is a current member of the YSS foundation, which is a foundation that provides hope and opportunity to at-risk youth in this area. He also served on the board of United Way and led their leading highest grossing campaign to date, so he knows his fundraising.

Dan also co-chaired Reggie's Sleepout in Ames to promote the needs of homeless youth, so obviously he has a strong commitment to our young people, which is wonderful. He also has led the Iowa Chamber Alliance, the Professional Developers of Iowa and the Mid-America Economic Development Council, which is a multi-state peer group composed of states from Iowa to the Dakotas, so a huge swath of territory there.
 
Next to him, we have Megan Weiler Green, who is CFO and General Counsel of Weiler, which is based in Knoxville, Iowa. She's also a general counsel for Weiler Forestry, based in Lagrange, Georgia, graduate of the Iowa State University and University of Iowa College of Law. She's worked for nine years as in-house counsel for State Farm Insurance companies in Bloomington, Illinois, so perhaps, knows a thing or two about risk. We'll invite you to draw on those issues.

In 2017, she returned home to work on her family's rapidly growing manufacturing businesses as council and procurement manager, led Weiler through a major acquisition as they closed on the purchase of Caterpillar's purpose-built forestry business in the fall of 2019, transferred from procurement to engineering, and most recently, moved into the CFO role in 2023.

She is a member of the company's senior leadership team, President of the Weiler Foundation for Charitable Giving-- and I know she'll talk a little bit about that-- and active in several community leadership activities that include serving on the Marion Board, Marion County Development Commission, and multiple apprenticeship and career readiness committees. As a mother of an aspiring welder, I look forward to hearing about those opportunities, and the board of two outside companies.

Finally, we'll hear from Nora Foote Westbrook, who wins the prize, I think, for furthest traveled, as she joins us from Vermont, where she leads the Rural Innovation Initiative team, where she works directly with communities to help them develop strategies for building thriving tech economy ecosystems. And we'll learn about what that means for you and the communities you serve.

She came to her role after having worked directly with community leaders as a rural initiative-- sorry, Rural Innovation Initiative Community Manager and having previously supported the Center on Rural Innovations-- Rural Innovation Strategies Operations team. She is a rural community enthusiast, so she's in good company, and loves getting to discover new and diverse communities across the country.

Prior to these roles, she's worked on numerous local and statewide campaigns as an environmental planning and consulting firm in the Pacific Northwest, so she brings that really a nationwide perspective, and in the communications department at a political action community. For the rest of our time together, our panelists are now going to tell us more about their work. Then, we're going to have a moderated conversation.

Then, we'll open it up for Q&A. And while I hope and I'm sure you'll have questions, I would also invite you to share your own stories of how risk has shown up in your communities and your experiences. We like to keep things concise, but also hope that this will be a learning exchange, as this is a topic that affects us all in different ways.

So we look forward to sharing those insights as well. So with that, I'm going to step aside and invite Dan to come up.

[APPLAUSE]

DAN CULHANE: Well, thank you, everybody. It's great to be here. I appreciate the invitation from my good friend Dustin Ingram.
 
If you haven't met him, he's sitting right over here. Dustin and I used to work together a few years back up in Ames, which is about 40 minutes north of here. And at that time, we were the Ames Chamber of Commerce and the Ames Economic Development Commission.

And in June, we changed our name to the Ames Regional Economic Alliance. And the reason we did that-- and I'm going to talk fast because I just heard that I'm a panelist between you and happy hour. So we're going to talk fast today.

AUDIENCE: One more in between.

DAN CULHANE: Oh, is there one more in between?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

DAN CULHANE: OK. Well, don't blame us then, all right?

[LAUGHTER]

We changed our name for much of the reason why you're here today. We work in rural Iowa. At one time, our jurisdiction stopped at the corporate limits of Ames. And that's changed over the last 15, 17 years.

I've been there 18 years. And we wanted to be more respectful and more inclusive of the smallest of communities in our region because they're part of our organization, too. And so the Ames Regional Economic Alliance was really built to support three counties. And I'll run through that.

There's my contact information. Please call me, email me, text me. That's my cell phone number. Anybody can have it.

If you've got a question after today, if you want to talk about community and economic development, I love talking about it. We clearly don't have enough time today to talk about all the things we should be talking about. I caught the last couple of panels.

They were terrific. Thank you guys for doing your work. But I would tell you that I'm lucky to-- is this the advancer here? There we go. Here we go.
AUDIENCE: For that, I think you brought a big, green button.

DAN CULHANE: Of course. So my marketing, one of my marketing people that put this together for me must have thought you were all site selectors and I had to tell you where you are today. Clearly, this is where we are. We're in the middle of the country.

You don't need to know what our demographics for our region. But I would tell you, this is the level of organizations that we currently operate. And sometimes, I feel like we're a management company. In many respects, we are.

We operate a lot of organizations. And some of the conversation I heard in the previous sessions, frankly, as communities struggle to have adequate resources to support themselves, and support their businesses, their child care providers, their housing stock, situations like that, we've coalesced and brought people together to do the work across the three county region.
 
And I'll tell you, what makes us different from a regional organization that's different from some others you might know of is that, candidly, we do the work. I put people in the smallest of communities, and we do the work. And we bring in other resources as experts to help support the work.

Because in Ames, which is just north of here, as I mentioned, Iowa State University is the economic engine. Most of our economic-- most of our economic development activity comes from that magnet, from that powerful magnet where a company says, we want to be closer to a researcher. We want to be closer to a piece of technology that's been developed at Iowa State.

Or probably most importantly right now, because of all you folks in the back, we want to be close to 8,000 to 9,000 students every year graduating, unemployed, looking for their first job. And so that's a powerful resource for our region. And we leverage that as much as we can.

And what I would tell all the young folks that are in this room today is that if you want to stay, we can help you find meaningful employment opportunities. I graduated from Iowa State many, many, many years ago. And I would tell you that if you were not an engineer-- which I wasn't-- if you weren't an engineer or someone with a finance background to work at Principal Financial Group in Des Moines or Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, there probably wasn't a lot of opportunities for you.
That landscape has changed. And I can tell you all about it later on, if you want me to. But that's the beauty of working where we work.

We've got the benefit of being in a large, tier-one research institution community with Iowa State University. But at the same time, we've got a lot of really cool small communities that we've got to continue to help them become even better places to live, and thrive, and raise your family, and send your kids to a small school district, if that's what you need. And so that's the cool dynamic I get to work with every day and our team gets to work with every day.

We're not only working with early stage research companies. We invested this morning in an early stage company that started up in Ames, Daisy brand. If you know the do a dollop of Daisy, the cottage cheese and sour cream people out of Texas, they're building an enormous plant in Boone, so we've worked on that.

We've got a vibrant farmers market every Saturday morning in downtown Ames that brings 5,000 people downtown. That's really cool. And the list goes on and the things we do.

And oftentimes, I tell my staff, I say we say yes or I say yes to just about everything. Why? Because if we don't do it, who will?

And so that's why we've grown to a staff of-- all these organizations and a staff of-- that's all the things we do. You can see that later, from engagement to entrepreneurship, programming, community projects, et cetera. But that's why all these people come to work at 304 Main Street every day in downtown Ames, because we want to do the work in the communities we serve.

And I have to say, we're really good at it. We're really good at it. And Dustin Ingram, when he was there a few years ago with us, he was really good at it, too. And I'm sure he's doing great at the Federal Reserve.
 
But I'm telling you that-- I'm telling you that the work we do is not hard. But you've got to have someone at the top that can be inspirational and put energy into people's-- gas in people's tanks. Because in some of our smallest communities, when we take them on, I'll say to the rest of my team, I'll say, hey, it's incumbent upon us to give them some positive self esteem because a lot of these small communities don't have that.

And as we've continued to work in those communities, and they have success, and we share success together, all of a sudden, they realize, hey, we're not that bad. We can do some of the things that Dan was talking about or that company was talking about. And so I'm going to stop there because I could talk forever.

And I have no script, which is really dangerous. So I'm going to stop there. And thank you all for letting me be here today.

[APPLAUSE]

MEGAN WEILER GREEN: All right. Well, after that, I'm feeling like maybe we relocate to Ames. I don't know. It's pretty-- pretty compelling stuff.
 
I am Megan Weiler Green. Dustin also has responsibility for inviting me here. He was at a presentation that I gave at our business down in Knoxville, which is about 40 minutes southeast of here, a couple of weeks ago.

A couple of weeks ago, I had 45 minutes. I have 10 today. Thankfully, I'm a fast talker. And we're going to keep this keep this short and sweet.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about our business so you can understand the growth that we've gone through and also just what we do. So we are a vertically integrated manufacturer, which means we can do all of it from design to manufacturing equipment, like you see here on the screen.

It is mostly asphalt paving equipment, almost all of that there, except for that drill in the top, middle. You see a road grader there, probably equipment that you're mostly familiar with. But we design all of that.

We have all the engineering capabilities right there in Knoxville and then do all the manufacturing ourselves. And I'll just give this anecdote for the Iowa State students in the room. Our oldest engineer-- so we are celebrating 25 years and a couple of months here-- our oldest engineer is 44.

So almost all of them have come through the Iowa State engineering program, including my dad, who started the business. And we have a very successful internship program, so tell your friends.

[LAUGHTER]

So I mentioned, we're very vertically integrated. We take raw material. We machine it/ we weld it. We paint it. We assemble it and out the door it goes.

So I want to talk a little bit about the growth at the facility when we talk about risk, and we talk about community investment, and we talk about communities taking risks to try and attract companies like ours. So in 1999, my dad retired from Vermeer. And I say retired. I think he was 38 at the time, so I don't know that we can really consider that retirement.
 
But he wanted to start a project that would keep him busy, that would be a hobby, that would allow him to incorporate all the things that he enjoyed doing without some of the things that he did not enjoy doing, which he has been excellent at delegating those things to me for several years now. But so he bought this spec building in 1999, 40,000 square foot spec building. The City of Knoxville put it up in 1996, so it sat for three years.

There was a lot of talk in Knoxville about, why are we doing this? I mean, who is this for? I mean, when my dad bought it, it was dirt floor.

There was not a lot of structure inside, which was great for him because he wanted to make it what he wanted. But that was a bit of a risk on City of Knoxville's part. And I don't think that they imagined it would grow to what it is now.

But obviously, that risk has paid off both for us and for the city. So in 2008, we added on 20,000 square feet, another 20,000 in 2009. In 2010, we purchased the 30 acres surrounding the building and put in those nice ponds that you see there, 2011, another 80,000 square foot addition.

2012, we added on the first half of the office. 2015, we built this 140,000 foot addition there to the east, added on the rest of the office in 2017. And just so you know, every time we do this, we say, this will take us another 10 years.

And then, another year later, it's like, where did all this stuff come from? And who are all these people that are working here? And it just gets bigger and bigger. And it's a lot of fun.

So then in 2022-- we actually just opened this in January of 2023, but we built a new building. That one was getting a little unwieldy. You really get your steps in walking across that thing, so we put our new building a little bit separate.

But that is a plate processing building. So it takes flat steel and laser cuts it into the parts that we need. As we've grown-- we've always had laser capabilities at our facility, but as we've grown, that was a major outsourcing for us.

And we are lovingly refer to ourselves as control freaks. We want to do it in-house if there is any way possible that we can. That wasn't feasible with the building that we had, but built onto that building.

I'll also say-- you can't really tell maybe from this angle, maybe you can-- but that building is taller than the rest of our buildings. Because when we built those buildings, we did not know that we were going to start making rock drills. And those buildings are not tall enough for us to stand the mass of that rock drill straight up.
And for all of you who are local, testing those machines in January outside is not great. So now that building is tall enough. And we have rock drill assembly happening in that new building.

So if you want a piece of Weiler equipment, which probably not many of you do, it is not a consumer product. But you would have to buy it through a Caterpillar dealer. And that's international.

We sell in 42 different countries, but you have to buy it through a Cat dealer. That is a great benefit to us because they are very well-connected. There's a huge service department, a huge parts department, all of those things.
 
We're supporting them. And they're supporting our customer. It also kind of creates these layers where we have to work really hard to get to that end customer, but that is our favorite thing to do.

And because we do everything in-house, including the engineering, the engineers can design a change to the part first thing in the morning, walk that print out to the floor, and have a new part by the afternoon. And the next one that rolls off the line can have that change incorporated. It's pretty cool to be able to go to a customer and say-- and sometimes, it's silly stuff, like every time my tallest operator turns, he hits this thing with his knee.

Great. We'll move that this afternoon. No problem. Or the big feedback that we get is, there's not enough USB ports on these things. I have a crew of 20 and not everyone can charge their phone. Great. We can handle that too.

I mean, some of the feedback is interesting that we get, but we wouldn't know unless we went out and talked to them. So I want to talk about employees. So we opened our doors in March of 2000. And that boy and girl are my parents who started the business.

So then 2005, we were at, I don't know, maybe 30 employees. It was not astronomic growth right there at the beginning because we were doing a lot of job shop manufacturing until we got up and going. And we started to buy IP for different products and then started to redesign those in-house and do the manufacturing for those as well.

So in 2010, here we go. 2015, a lot of growth and, 2020, a fair amount of growth. And then, 2024, we're at 725 employees now and one who's fallen off the end there. So that's been really exciting. It's also very important to us as a family that we keep the culture that we had when we were 2 now at 725.

So when my dad started the business, and then, I went to Iowa State. I got a finance degree. I went to law school at the University of Iowa, went to Illinois, worked in-house for State Farm at their corporate headquarters, no intention for me to come back, either on his part or on mine. Because I thought, I see what you guys do. I barely know what that stuff does, let alone would I be able to add any value to that.

And so then he did this very sneaky mind trick, as some of you fathers will appreciate, where he called one day and said, hey, I'm tired of paying outside lawyers. I think we're big enough. We need to hire inside counsel.

And I said, OK, sounds good. And I'm like, my gosh, I can't believe he's going to offer me a job. And he said, when would be a good time for you to come back and help me interview for that position?

[LAUGHTER]

And because I had never said I was coming back. And he had, I mean, they have been very consistent. We have to pull. They're not going to push anything. They'll answer any question that we have, but they're not going to feed us information.

So anyway, I called him back a couple of days later. And I said, I will come and help you interview. But is there a reason that I am not even in the running for this position?

And so he said, well, you never said you wanted to come back. And so I said, well, nobody would represent your interests and my interests better than me. So we came back about seven years ago.
 
And since then, my brother, who is a dentist, left dentistry and came back and worked for the business. He actually put up that laser plate cutting building that we have. And so that's kind of his baby.

And then, he transitioned into engineering a couple of months ago. That's just a core part of our business. And we feel like it's really important that all three of us kids know that.

And then, my sister was a professor at Iowa State for a number of years. She has a doctorate in civil engineering. And she came back two years ago. So teaching was not as much fun during COVID. And she's having a lot of fun doing what she's doing at Weiler.

So I'm just going to run through this really, really briefly. This is all the products that we make. This is what Cat makes in the paving space.

This is how we fill in that product mix. So I want you guys to understand when we talk about this relationship with Cat and how important that is to us, it's also really important to them. Because they cannot offer the depth and breadth of what they can offer with our product line.

OK, briefly on community engagement. So we've had a foundation since 2009. We divert a percentage of our profits to the community foundation. And then, we have some pretty narrow goals related to literacy, related to STEM education, and related to improving the communities where our employees live and work.

So a number of significant projects that we've done, revamping the library in Knoxville. We just made a $5 million donation last year to the Knoxville hospitals and clinics so that we now have 39 visiting specialists rooms at our local hospital, great for the community, great for our employees. They don't have to take off work to go up to Des Moines to get that specialty care.

We've donated a lot of equipment to local schools, again, great for them because they don't have to pay for this equipment, great for us because these students know how to run our equipment when they come out. And this is equipment like welding, lasers, lathes, things like that.

Local daycare-- and I can talk about this more later. I know almost out of time here. But our local daycare is a bit of a story, a longer story than I have time for right now. But we've been tightly integrated with them in the last couple of years, both to donate to their capital campaign and to provide a matching grant that they needed in order to get the child care solutions fund wage enhancement, which many of you are probably familiar with.

That's a State of Iowa program, and then working with the Knoxville school district to make sure that the employees that we have are sending their kids to a school that they're really proud of. And that's just a picture of the clinic. It just opened February, maybe, of this year. So that's been pretty exciting.

And then, for those of you who don't Marion County, which is where Knoxville is, is top 2% of the United States in counties that have manufacturing jobs, percentage of the employment that is in manufacturing. So we have Vermeer Corporation. We have Pella Windows.

We have Co Line. We have Weiler. We have PPI. We have LBJ. We have just a number of manufacturers really concentrated there, which is why this is really important. Because they are not going to drive by Vermeer, a nice welding job at Vermeer to get to Weiler and weld, unless we make that worth their while.
 
And we've done a number of things to get that going. And we can talk about those in more detail later too, but things like incentivizing people to move to Knoxville, changing our work shifts from five days a week to 4 by 10 and 3 by 12s, our employee assistance program, and a lot of on-site support for things like chiropractors and things that if they can see those specialists on-site, they don't have to leave work to do that.

And then, family day and quarterly meetings, those are just things that we do to drive employee engagement and to get their families really invested. Just a quick anecdote, we always said we were not going to do any merch because it's like our last name. And it feels really weird to see it like running around town.

We have gone away from that. We swallowed our pride and said, fine, do it. But it's really cool to see all these little kids with Future Weiler shirts on and everything, so that's been fun. But I will stop there and happy to answer questions later.

[APPLAUSE]

NORA FOOTE WESTBROOK: Good afternoon, everyone. I think I win the award probably for coming from the furthest and also the shortest at the mic, so appreciate your patience. My name is Nora Westbrook.

I am delighted to be here on behalf of the Center on Rural Innovation. I'm going to spend a little bit of time just setting context about the work that we do because it's a little bit nebulous and amorphous. But I think that this is really the right crowd and excited to hear your input and answer any questions that you have later.

So the Center on Rural Innovation was is an organization that was founded in 2017 by my friend and mentor, Matt Dunne. And our mission is to close the rural opportunity gap, which is something that I am sure that everyone in this room has experienced, and felt, and seen in some way, but is really important also for us to define when we're out there in the world trying to figure out how to do the work.

So what we're talking about specifically is what emerged in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession. And what we saw was that rural economies began to rapidly hemorrhage jobs and population. We know that, that continues today.

We saw a little bit of a spike around COVID, when there was a lot of uncertainty, and unrest, and folks were moving around. But that decline in jobs and population compared to urban places has continued to expand in the years since COVID arrived. So my boss, Matt, has a sort of wide-ranging career.

He grew up actually in the very same town of 3,000 people where I was born in Vermont, and actually where I'm very fortunate to have been able to move back in my early, mid adulthood. And he spent a number of years-- he went to public schools in rural Vermont and New Hampshire.

He went off into the world. He did a number of different things in the early 90s, landed a job at a software development company in White River Junction, Vermont, which is another small town where I went to high school because my high school doesn't have one.

And he ended up going on to spend some time in the Vermont State House and Senate, and then, led up AmeriCorps VISTA under both the Clinton and Bush administrations, followed by an eight-year stint at Google, where he started the community affairs department, and then led the community affairs department as they were rolling out Google Fiber. And that went, as you can imagine, from the West Coast to the East Coast.
 
When Matt was offered the job at Google, they said, great, when are you moving to California? And he said, oh, no, no, no. I live on a farm where I grew up with my wife and three kids. And we're not moving.

There's great fiber internet in White River Junction, Vermont, and would love to set up an office there if you are interested in hiring me, and otherwise, good luck. That was in 2006. And now, White River Junction has a Google office, and a Twitter office, and a number of other really awesome tech economy assets.

And that's just a small story. But in 2017 when we started, we really wanted to understand what was going on. And so we sort of took a step back and said, all right, what are the places in rural America that are actually doing well in spite of the odds? And what we found is that those places that had resilient economies were the winners of the tech economy.

And around 2008, in those early aughts, we saw this incredible concentration of wealth and economic activity focused on the future of technology and the economy all coming together in these big hubs, these Metropolitan hubs. And rural places began to be systematically left out. Automation came in, disproportionately impacted rural industries, like automation-- I'm sorry, like manufacturing and agriculture.

There has been an immense decline in entrepreneurship across rural America. It turns out when you talk to people in cities, they'll often say, well, entrepreneurship doesn't exist in rural. Innovation's not what rural people do. That's where we go for cheap jobs, and cheap labor, and cheap land.

And it turns out, that's also not true. Rural America has been the backbone of innovation in this country, really since the dawn of time. And so we realized that there was a lot more work to do than just connecting the dots between rural communities and the tech economy and a lot of paradigm shift and narrative shift work that had to happen.

And we figured that the only way to do this well is to do it in a way that is totally grounded in the data. So we have developed a model for helping rural communities to access the tech economy that's really grounded in a lot of the things that you've heard about today. We believe and we now know that you can't participate in the tech economy without high speed internet, so broadband infrastructure is the number one thing that we look for when we're exploring communities to work with.

It turns out institutions of higher education are super amazing anchors for being able to coalesce lots of real creative minds in rural places and think about creative solutions to the unique problems that most rural places face. I don't mean to be trite in this room. But once you've seen one rural community, you've seen one rural community.

And so we've set out to take this kind of multimodal approach to the work. So I'm going to skip over some of the details and just get into the high level, talk a little bit about the work that my team does. But I'm mostly going to share about a lot of the work that my colleagues do, my now 45 colleagues across the country.

And I know just about enough about all of that work to be dangerous, so I apologize in advance. But we have really developed this wraparound approach, so our model for tech-based economic development in rural. And to be clear, we are focusing on tech for a couple of reasons.
 
So the first is that they offer significantly higher than median wage jobs compared to most other traditional jobs that are sitting in rural and we know statistically are making up a large percentage of these economies. We are looking to expand tradable services that will allow rural places to export knowledge economy and import wealth. And we are looking to spur innovative, technology-based economic entrepreneurship in these places rather than your typical-- we're not doing corporate headhunting.

We're not saying, let's see how we can get Google to come here. Sometimes, Google is saying to us, hey, we're here. How can you help us leverage this amazing infrastructure and community to help inject the community with some sustainable and diversified economic energy?

And finally, we are focusing on creating a network of practitioners across the country who have access to one another and who can share best practices, share challenges, lean on one another, share resources across rural places that share some characteristics, even if some of those are unique and niche. And so we have a broadband consulting team that's working with states to set up BEAD and broadband implementation plans.

We have a mapping and data analytics team that's putting together fabulous maps to help folks understand how they might be able to access BEAD funding and then how they might be able to vet ISPs who are coming to them and saying that they have a really good plan. Well, are these really going to be responsible business people in these communities? Or do they see an opportunity to come in and then immediately jack prices?

So we have a broadband consulting team. We have a mapping and data analytics team. We have an amazing director of research who is a PhD economist, whose work focuses on the relationship between high tech infrastructure and quality of life in rural places. And then, there's my team.

And my team is focused on working directly with community leaders to access federal resources to be able to support the infrastructure around tech economy ecosystems in rural. And as you can imagine, we need to do this, at first, in places that have some of those core assets in place. So we're focused primarily working in micropolitan areas.

Our definition of rural is about a rack of four and above. We're very happy to work with folks from across the boundaries of rural, urban commuting codes, knowing that we have a lot of funny ways of defining these things. And through our program, we have helped communities raise over $40 million in federal funding to stand up technology incubator and accelerator programs, primarily through the economic development administration's Built to Scale program.

As of the end of this month, over 40 of those communities will be members of our Rural Innovation Network, which is a community of practice of folks from Wasilla, Alaska to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, from the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont and Waterville, Maine to Cochise County, Arizona, who come together multiple times a year to share strategies and struggles to figure out more innovative ways of diversifying rural economies towards more sustainable prosperity in the future.

I heard Megan say a few minutes ago that the hardest work you do is also the most fun. And I was really excited to hear that heading into this panel on risk. I don't have enough time to go into the details. And I'm not going to drag on.
 
But I think you all can probably hear some of the inherent risk in the work that we're doing. But what we also see is that there are so many amazing people across this country who are thinking in new ways in the face of new, and in some cases, inevitabilities of our economy. Automation is here to stay.

And if we do not come up with solutions and equitable ways of distributing federal and state resources to these places that have continued to lose jobs and population, our democracy is going to shrivel up and die on rural America's backs. So I'm so delighted to be here because I don't think that's going to happen. I think that this country is full of all of these people who are doing amazing work. And I'm really excited to learn from all of you and answer any questions you may have, so thanks a lot.

[APPLAUSE]

SUSAN LONGWORTH: All right. So I hope that tees up what I know will be a really, really exciting conversation. We have sort of a weird mic situation going on there. Every panel, we seem to have more mics.

So I'm going to share those out. I'm going to shoot you some questions from up there. But we will make sure that everybody has the capacity to speak and to be heard, which is always important.

So one of the themes that has emerged so far today is trying to get a better understanding of what is rural, which is sort of an abstract concept for some people. I'm going to kick things off today by asking our panelists how they think about risk and what that means for them in each of their individual contexts. So, Dan, how about I start with you, if that's--
 
DAN CULHANE: Great.

SUSAN LONGWORTH: --all right?
 
DAN CULHANE: So I think in Iowa, Ames is considered urban. Ames is not urban. It's a town of 70,000 people. It feels rural to me.

When I think of rural, I think of risk. Things are harder. It's riskier to build an apartment building in a town of 1,200 people than it is in Ames or in downtown Des Moines.

But what I think is really cool about the work that we get to do is we get to work with people that are unafraid of risk because that's where they're from. That's where they live. And so as we approach developers, and I'm thinking about risk in my business, I think about a large manufacturer who clearly has taken a lot of risk over the years to get where they are today.

You can see across the rural landscape of this country the number of businesses, organizations, and people that have taken risk. And so I think it's my job to inspire and encourage people to be unafraid of risk, calculated at times, of course, because it's not my money. It's theirs, more often than not. But that's how I see it playing out in the work that I do.

MEGAN WEILER GREEN: I would say, generally, as entrepreneurs, we're not risk averse. I mean, you wouldn't be starting the business and leaving a sure thing if you didn't have some appetite for risk, so it's being really intentional about the risks that you take. And also, we talk a lot about we still consider ourselves a small business, but we're getting to be a big business.
 
And compared to the people who are buying our equipment, they maybe are a single man paving crew, or they have eight employees, or a big crew is 20 employees. The equipment that they buy from us is the most expensive piece of equipment that they will ever own. So that's a big responsibility on us to make sure that when they take a risk on Weiler-- it is Weiler, but we get called Weiler all the time-- and when they take a piece or a risk on buying a piece of equipment, that risk is going to pay off for them.

We talk a lot about if a paver is down in the field, the cost of that towards that individual. And I would guess that you could walk up to anybody on any of our assembly lines in the factory and say, if a paver is down, how much money does that cost? They will know it is $10,000 an hour.

That's how much asphalt is wasted if a paver is down. So that's a big responsibility, but it also is motivating. I think if you're a person who likes to see risk, and mitigate that risk appropriately, and then dive head in.
 
NORA FOOTE WESTBROOK: Yeah, I'll just add briefly to this. So when we started this work in 2017, less than 1% of all venture capital investment was going to companies in rural zip codes. Over 88% of venture capital in 2017 was going to three metropolitan areas in this country.

I'm very happy to say that seven years later, that number of venture capital being invested in rural is inching up closer to 3%, which is super exciting. But one of the things that we found in-- yeah, totally. It's awesome. There's hope.

So one of the things that we've found in working with folks who are-- just to be clear, the folks that we work with are the ones doing the real work, including the amazing folks at 20Fathoms in Traverse City. That's one of our founding Rural Innovation Network members, as are our good friends up in Marquette, Michigan. Go UP.

One of the things that we've found is that access to capital in rural places is really, really difficult, especially for tech entrepreneurs. So investing in technology companies is inherently riskier than investing in a lot of other types of small businesses because there's no physical collateral to be able to provide. There is an idea. It's conceptual.

How do you even think about managing this risk? And we also know that there are a lot of capital networks across rural America that can be tapped. But in order to stand those up into something more sustainable and substantial in a place based way, you need deal flow and you need existing ecosystems.

And so what we did in place of that, because this tech based economic development work is fairly nascent in a rural context, in terms of the last two decades, we stood up our own fund, which is currently raising its third round of funding. Last year, we won a bill to scale capital challenge along with all of the SSBCI funding for the state of Vermont. That will be specifically directed to companies that are coming out of accelerators in our five rural innovation network communities in the state of Vermont.

But the first and third rounds of funds are specifically investing in entrepreneurs from all across rural America, not exclusively in our Rural Innovation Network. I think if you talk to Jay Bockhaus, the managing partner of our fund, he would tell you that the one thing you need to know to be a good investor in rural is that patient capital is powerful capital. And the reality of the matter is that in nascent ecosystems, failed startups are also success stories.
 
What we want to see is that sort of critical mass of early activity. We need to start doing the work. And we need to set up support systems of people, of human beings around every-- I loved that idea of the shift in the fourth wave from jobs to people. And I think that's really the core of how we mitigate risk.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: Excellent. So you've done a great job of teeing up our next question, which is talking a little bit about mitigating risk. And so in that case, obviously, money can help a lot, talk about the SSBCI program, especially making sure that transactions and deals get done, the nuts and bolts.

So this question has two parts. One of my-- I guess one of my toxic traits is to add lots of questions together. So I'm going to ask one part of the question.
Then, I'll come back to the other part. And I just hope that, again, sort of making this concrete is if you can give some examples of resources, tools, financial resources that have helped to offset some of that risk. What are some of these programs that are out there that you have found particularly effective?

And they can either be current or maybe there are things in the past that you're like, I wish they would bring that back. But let's talk about the nitty gritty of just where can the dollars help people get over that-- get to a point that's more comfortable.
 
MEGAN WEILER GREEN: Yeah, I can talk about some of the programs that we've done. I had the mic at the ready. So we have done a number of projects with Iowa Economic Development Authority in their high-quality jobs programs.

So that provides funding typically in a interest free loan, and a forgivable loan, and tax credits is kind of how that program works. And in order to get that funding, we commit to a certain dollar spend to usually either buy new equipment or enhance our current facility.

You saw the slide show. That's a toxic trait of ours, is we can't stop adding on. And we also commit to hiring a certain number of people and to those jobs being at a certain wage rate. So that has been really beneficial for us and maybe pushed kind of over the edge something that might not make sense and make more sense.
I will say, too, we know that it is difficult for a contractor when the housing market is booming in Des Moines to bring their crews down to Knoxville and build homes, build condos, duplexes, apartment buildings, all of that. And so we have done some private deals as well to make some of those projects make more sense. Again, welding is welding is welding.

No matter where you weld, it's about the same. So you're not going to commute 60 miles to Weiler to weld at Weiler if you're going to pass eight other welding jobs along the way. So we have to do two things.

First of all, make our welding job more attractive than any other welding job you can get. We do that by increasing pay, doing benefits, some of the other programs that we can talk about later. But one of the things that we started January of 2023 was a Knoxville residency incentive.

So if you live anywhere outside of Knoxville and you move to anywhere inside of Knoxville, we'll pay a $1,000 today and $1,000 a year from now, assuming that you still work for Weiler. We will not hunt you down to get it to you. But we thought, it's the right thing to do.
 
We can maybe get a couple of people. And if they could set down roots in Knoxville, wouldn't that be great and start to become more permanent members of our community? But we've paid out 27 of those. And I mean, that is money well spent from our perspective.

If you set down roots, and your kids go to school, and your volunteering to coach, and blah blah, blah, you're not leaving Knoxville. I mean, I think the city speaks for itself once you're there, but not necessarily. Sometimes, people just need that little extra push.

We've even had people who are rooming together, and they're both employees. And they're both getting $4,000. I mean, that money talks.

So the other thing that I would say, just real briefly, in terms of incentivizing people to move is we realized bringing in customers and dealers that are not familiar with Knoxville that are thoroughfares going into town and leaving town, which the roads that you have to drive to get to Weiler, they're not the best representation of our city. And there are nice homes, but they're not on that road. And there are nice buildings, but they're not on that road either.

And so we've done a lot of work with the city to both bring our employees out to clean up some of these areas, like landscaping, trash, the things that you consider low-hanging fruit. But if you were just coming to Knoxville to work at Weiler, you might not say, oh, there's definitely a nice house here for me to rent or buy, so just all different things that we're doing.

None of those are a silver bullet, but it's all just ways to chip away. And to your question about funding, some of those have been funded by Weiler as well.

DAN CULHANE: I need Weiler to move to Ames. That's terrific. I think about resources that we deploy with the communities we work in. Most of you are probably somewhat familiar with them.

The USDA has a number of programs. The one that we use the most-- we can't use it in Ames because Ames is too large-- but we use the REDLG program, which is the Rural Economic Development Loan Program. And we've used in a lot of places across our region for infrastructure deployment, for a company to buy a piece of equipment.

And it has to be sponsored, the conduit for that. But that program has to be a rural electric cooperative or a rural telephone cooperative. And so we've got a number of examples where we've done that.

At the same time, depending upon census tract data, the federal program, EDA, Economic Development Administration, we've gotten at least four of those grants for, again, projects to expand the Iowa State University Research Park. There's over 100 companies there. And so consequently, as they've been trying to build out their infrastructure as an organization, the City of Ames applied for that.

We broker the money. They fill out the paperwork. But we've had that for a company in Nevada called Burke, which is owned by Hormel. And so we've done a number of those things.

And someone was talking about all the grants that are out there. We're unafraid as an organization to take on the challenge of writing a grant. Because if it'll help one of our communities or one of our companies, we're going to take that risk.
 
NORA FOOTE WESTBROOK: And I don't have too much to add other than the fact that I think it's really, in a rural context, it always comes down to trying to attack the question from multiple angles. You can never-- we've heard that as a theme today. We feel very strongly that in order to stand up thriving tech economy ecosystems, for example, you've really got to have a physical place where people can come together.

That's sometimes a hard pitch in a rural place. And so you've got to start where there are centers of gravity, where there are existing institutions that have credibility, that have decision-making power, that have access to resources, who can help as you are pursuing these innovative and high-risk strategies. That, as we like to say, it's hard to tell the story when you don't know the ending.

But finding the folks who are showing up every day and continuing to do the work, who can be your friends along the way, that tends to really be the thing that sets the folks who are able to push through and start to take off apart.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: So it's not all about money?
 
NORA FOOTE WESTBROOK: It's sure not all about money.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: But sometimes, it's about the data. And this is a Fed conference. And so it wouldn't be a Fed conference if we didn't talk a little bit about data.
And so I would love to hear what data you collect, what data informs your decisions, what helps you think, quantify that risk. And Nora--
 
NORA FOOTE WESTBROOK: Sure, I can take the first stab. Yeah, yeah. I wish that my mapping and data analytics team colleagues were here because they can speak much more fluently to all of this. But we have a pretty awesome data infrastructure view of rural community development.

And we use data in lots of ways. The truth is that data only tells you so much in rural. We know that. So when we come into a community, the first thing we do is an assessment.

The program that I lead actually started through a two-year cooperative agreement with the Economic Development Administration. We had supported our friends in Springfield, Vermont, to apply for the I6 program, which is now built to scale. And EDA's Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship came to us and said, wait. We didn't think rural places could win this grant.

How did you do that? And do you think there are other places that could do it? And so that's-- the first two years of this were going out and asking these questions.
And when you follow the data, there are a lot of places in rural that can do this well. But I think it really comes down to using data to help you be intentional in your strategies and to help identify the questions that are going to require further investigation before you start spending money and, especially, if you're about to start spending other people's money. It's really, really important to have that data informed view of where you're going and what you're working with.
 
And often, we are starting to get to a place where there is a small critical mass of rural communities that we can draw this data from, that it's starting to work and take off. And so how can we look at those stories and pull out the key themes to help drive growth and/or sustainable prosperity, if you prefer to knock the growth word, which is totally fine, too.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: Are there particular indicators that you look for? I don't know if that gets you out over your skis a little bit. But as far as--
 
NORA FOOTE WESTBROOK: No, no. Absolutely. It's much of what I spend my time doing, is working with our data team to figure out what are the indicators. So right now the, current iteration of our model is really focused on presence of higher education institutions. And don't forget, this is in the context of tech based economic development, which we do not see as the be all, end all for rural places, but we see as an essential part as of any comprehensive economic development strategy for rural places that want to survive in the wake of ongoing automation.

So we look at presence of higher ed, broadband infrastructure. We look at the percentage of the workforce that is employed in computer and math jobs, which is sort of our proxy for technology jobs. We talk about tech jobs in broad terms. But ultimately, we're talking about the creation and maintenance of automation technology as the jobs that will continue to be resilient.

And on the computer and math jobs indicator, our research, to quote Amanda Weinstein, for any of you who know Amanda, has found that a 1% increase in computer and math jobs in a rural place will lead to, on average, an increase of $6,500 for the region's GDP, so that's 1% increase. That's in a town of a population of 10,000 to 80,000, you will see, on average, an increase of $6,500.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: Other thoughts?
 
DAN CULHANE: We use data to sell. We use it to sell to a local government as to why they should invest in a project, whether it's a housing project or a job creator. And on the flip side, we're always using data to put in front of people that say, prove to us that what you say is true.

30 years ago, I could talk to a company and say, they said, hey, we're going to hire 50 people. I can say no problem. And they'd say, great. And they'd come to the community.

Well, today, it's totally different. We have to substantiate, and justify, and articulate, and illustrate that those 50 people are really going to be there in the region if they build their facility or expand their operation in one of our communities. And so honestly, the data we have, we use a lot of it, but it's usually to advocate for either a business or for a private developer or another sort of program that will help augment one of our communities.

MEGAN WEILER GREEN: I hope my response does not lead to someone escorting me out of the room. But we don't use data much from our perspective. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. And I mean, a lot of this is luck that has gotten us to where we are.

But when we look at a town of 6,500 people, and we went from 2 employees to 725 employees, and the town is smaller than it was when we started, it is hard for the data to look great on that. And even when we're making these applications to IEDA and saying, our latest application that was approved, we said we're going to hire 124 people. And we're sitting there going, we have 124 jobs.
 
Do we have-- can we find 124 people? And so, I mean, it is really-- we're just having to be strategic in how we hire those people and how we do those jobs. We have also, historically, said we believe in good people over good paper. That is kind of our little internal thing that we say.

We don't need anybody with a degree. There is no position other than mine as general counsel, because that's the law, that requires a degree at Weiler. So you don't have to have even your high school diploma. If we have a person who is motivated and who will show up every day, we can teach them to do the job.

We have seen a shift in that in the last 12 to 18 months because the people that we need now are people who we need to do things that we don't know how to do. So it's things like run our new welding robots. Well, we just bought it too, so we don't-- do you know how it works? We don't know how it works.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: Yeah, read the manual.
 
MEGAN WEILER GREEN: Yeah So here's the manual. Best of luck. Here's YouTube. And so there is some stuff that we are now out over our skis on.

And so that doesn't necessarily mean that we need somebody with an advanced degree to come in and do this. We need the same person who is willing to learn and motivated to get the job done. But we are now beyond saying any job here, we can train you how to do because there's-- we've just moved on from that, but yeah.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: One final question before I open it up for Q&A and other stories. And that is, looking forward, what are the risks that you see looming out there? Maybe this is what keeps you up at night conversation. And what should we be doing now to start to think about and mitigate some of these upcoming challenges? So Nora, you're the one--
 
NORA FOOTE WESTBROOK: Yeah, I'll take a crack. Unfortunately, I spend way too much time in the middle of the night thinking about all of these things. I spent the weekend, this past weekend in New York City with my gaggle of cousins that I grew up with scattered across the East Coast.

And I was struck, having now spent most of my travels since COVID began really just jetting across rural America. Lucky me, took five years for me to get COVID. I heard a lot of conversation this weekend around the old tropes about rural, these just core assumptions that we make about who is living in rural America and how much they are worth that I worry sort of poisons our ability to think about these questions and these problems in a really inclusive and clear-eyed way.

And at the same time, just like any other bias, it's so deeply ingrained and comes from a number of circumstances in anyone's life. And also, stereotypes are based in some kind of reality. And so I think we have a really big challenge in front of us to continue to change the narrative about what is possible in rural America and to shift.

I heard a lot of folks talk about the paradigm that folks in your communities exist within, about what's possible here, right? Well, it turns out there are tech jobs here. But what we've heard from our good friends in Aberdeen, South Dakota, who are doing all of the work, at the very beginning, when we sat down with them five years ago, they said to us, we will not do this well if we don't sit the grandparents in our community down and ask them what this will mean to them.
 
We can't use the word tech. We need to talk about this as a community initiative. And I think-- I'll keep coming back to this. That the thing that keeps me up at night are the stories that we tell and figuring out a way to cut through the noise to get to what really matters here, to just start doing the work of connecting people with opportunities to have aspirational jobs, and to be able to move back home, and do that close to their families so that their parents can take care of their kids.
Yeah, and I think we're on the right track. It still keeps me up at night, but I'm but I'm looking up.

MEGAN WEILER GREEN: Yeah, I would say I talked a little bit about the community that we are in and how that community is not growing numbers wise. There is only so much that we can do, as the largest employer in town, to fix community issues. We've committed a lot of time, and a lot of funding, and a lot of, honestly, sitting around the table like brainstorming time to try and figure out what issues can be solved and which ones can be solved quickly.

And I think there is a bit of woe is me from some in the community that are like, we're not a big city. And we just don't have the resources. And we don't have this. And we don't have that.

And we, up until 2018 maybe '19, we made a lot of donations in the community, but we were very explicit that they had to be anonymous. We did not want our name on anything. The feedback that we got from our employees starting in 2018 and 2019 was, gee, it'd be nice if my employer did some stuff around this town.

[LAUGHTER]

OK. So now, we put our name on the hospital now. And that is a very major shift in how we have addressed things as a family. However, that is incredibly important to our employees, to know that where they work and the people who are paying their paycheck care about the same little league teams that they do.

They care about health care in the community. They care about investing in housing and in daycare. And we really underestimated how much that would mean to people individually.

And so it was a bit of humility that we had to get over in that. But if you have large employers in town, encourage them to be vocal about the things that they are doing and the ways that they are keeping the money in those communities, especially if you have an employer who has multiple locations. A reminder that, hey, a lot of the money stays right here and it's not just paychecks that we're providing to the community.
 
DAN CULHANE: So I'll go back to livable communities. I think, you've got to give people a reason to live rural. I'll give you a quick example. I hear people lament all time, oh, if the 31,000 students at Iowa State would just come to downtown Ames. Downtown's about 2 and 1/2 to 3 miles from campus. If the students would just come downtown, downtown would be so much better.

Well, I was at a place called Sweet Caroline's-- it's a bar and grill in downtown Ames-- a week ago Monday. And it was packed to the gills on a Monday night at 7:15 with college students having dinner, hanging out, no big deal. And I talked to a couple people the next day.

And I said, they do come downtown if there's something they want. But there's a lot of things downtown they don't want or they don't need. And so consequently, I liken that to a livable community.
 
That's why the work that we do in the communities, we serve, no matter how small those communities are. If they want to tear a house down, we're saying, wait a minute. Can we save that house? Or that downtown commercial building that was built in 1922, that's decaying because there hasn't been a business in there for 30 years. Can we save that building?

And I think it's incumbent upon organizations like mine across this country and other organizations like yours, maybe, to go in and do a real strong inventory of, how do we make these communities more livable? Because in Ames, not everybody can live there. It's an expensive market.

Not everybody can live in West Des Moines here in the Des Moines metro. Let's find places across our country where you can go into small town America, and you can have a really great quality of life, and a really well-run operated school district, and a small downtown with some of those amenities. And then, it's people like me, it's my job to paint the picture that if you live in Boone, where, I think, your grandfather lived?
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: My dad.
 
DAN CULHANE: Your dad. OK, Boone's like a neighborhood to Ames now for us. We paint it that way because Boone will not have everything. Ames does not have everything. Des Moines just down the road.

And we're starting to paint the picture about how we can't have everything in one community like we did maybe 50 years ago. So we got to think differently. We can have a lot of livable communities around rural Iowa. And they can still have access to really cool amenities.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: Great. So with that, I want to open it up for questions. I already see hands going up, which is great. Questions and stories as well. Share your experiences. So Marie, go ahead.
 
AUDIENCE: I have two questions. The first is kind of asking you guys to put like your predicting the future hat on. And I'm curious what inherent place-based risk mitigation you think there is in the Midwest as we watch hurricane Helene and hurricane Milton ravage huge parts of this country.

I feel like we're talking a lot or I've heard more talk about the insulation that the Midwest has from some of that risk. And how do you think that will impact your industries, your communities, et cetera, as we look down the road? And how do we make sure that we're taking advantage of that risk mitigation in a way that lifts everyone in the community up rather than seeing like a Boone that is inequitable, if that makes sense?
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: Recognizing that Iowa has had some pretty significant events recently as well, weather events.
 
DAN CULHANE: I'll take a stab at this. So I've been old-- I'm old enough that I was working, I was in this industry on 9/11. And I was convinced-- I was 31 years old-- and I was convinced that the masses would rush to the Midwest where it's safe. And I'm still waiting.

And I see what's going on in Florida right now. And I just can't imagine the horror of getting in an airplane or getting in your car and leaving and not knowing where you're going-- when you can come back and what you're going to come back to. So I'll go back to what I've been saying.
 
I think if we make this a really great place, wherever you live, if you make it a really great place, we've got a shot. We've got a shot because there are places-- Dustin, don't take offense to this. My daughter lives in Chicago. I'm worried about her all the time.

And I go to Chicago a lot. I love Chicago, but I can't, I really can't imagine living there because it feels unsafe to me, from what I hear more than anything. I haven't had a bad experience there. But I think that's our value proposition.

In Knoxville, Iowa, if you leave your garage door open overnight, there's a really, really good chance your stuff's going to be there in the morning.

MEGAN WEILER GREEN: And three neighbors will call you to let you know--

DAN CULHANE: And they will.

[LAUGHTER]

I text my neighbor across the street every night-- she's 85-- and say, Joyce, your garage door is up. Oh, bless you. And she goes and puts it down. But the point is that I'm not sure there is a magic potion to make the masses come to where it's safer from crime, and natural disasters, and things of that nature.

But it would be great if a few more of them came our way. Because if all of you are representing rural parts of this country, we've all got room for more people, right?
MEGAN WEILER I would just say when I moved back here-- so I grew up here and went to school in Iowa, and then went to Illinois.
 
And that was a town of 250,000 people, so it was big city for me. And coming back here, I was like, oh, my gosh. I kind of feel like I'm going backwards.
There's not going to be a Target anymore. What are we going to do? And it's so much easier, even than it was in 2017, to live in the middle of nowhere because of all of the amenities that are probably ruining other parts of our country.

But Amazon will get whatever I need next day. And I don't even have to go to Target anymore. And so some of those things that you may think this is the end of the world to live in a place like a lot of us live, it's not really so bad. It's just people have to give that a chance and understand that you may be trading off some things, but the benefits outweigh the risk.
 
NORA FOOTE WESTBROOK: It's a great question. And I don't-- I'm going to be just super honest. I have no idea what the answer to this one is. I grew up in rural Vermont, where I've been told for the last 10 years we were really going to be a climate refuge in the coming decades and century.

And we've had 300-year floods since that sort of narrative began perpetuating itself around. And the story now in the face of our ongoing really terrible housing crisis that I know impacts so many places across this country is, oh, yeah. And make sure whatever you're doing, you want to buy a 200-year-old house, well, don't buy it along a waterway in Vermont.
 
20 inches of rain comes down and wrecks anything. We are working right now, we're in the middle of about a two-year sprint, with the very good folks of Rutherford County, North Carolina, which is about halfway between Charlotte and Nashville. I don't know if any of you saw the devastating images from Rutherford County last week. But we have put all of our work there on pause.

And my impression is that pause is going to be a lot longer than anyone of us would have hoped. But the truth is that what these folks need to do right now is focus on what's in front of them. We are happy as individuals and friends to show up and help think through how we put one foot in front of the other.

But it's really hard. And I think you're right to be asking how we start to tell the stories of the places that we can use data to predict might be safer. But yeah, I don't know the answer to this one. It's a tough nut.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: Thank you. See some questions. Yes, right up front.
 
AUDIENCE: I have a question about the alliance. And as we're talking about risk and calculated risk, it sounds like you guys brought multiple organizations together and have a variety of organizations that work as partners or with you. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that decision.

Because I think we see a lot of that in rural communities, in terms of having maybe lots of organizations that are doing similar things or lane blurring and how all that works when there is limited talent resources and financial resources. And I'm just wondering if you could tell a little bit of that story.

DAN CULHANE: Sure. So 30 years ago, I ran a one-person countywide economic development organization in Northern Iowa. And you could do it then. Today, that same county really struggles because there are so many demands put on that local economic development person, that local chamber, whatever you want to call that organization that's supporting economic and community development.

There's so many other things that person needs to do. It's no different in Central Iowa here in the communities we're working in now that have joined our alliance, they've realized that the bench strength we have as an organization is really what they need. And what I'm really proud of is that there's a little town east of Ames called Nevada. It looks like Nevada. We call it Nevada there, great people.

But they said, hey, we're going to join the alliance-- this was 10 years ago-- but we still want to keep our name. And I said, fine. And so the person that runs the Nevada Economic Development Organization, she's a senior vice president inside for the alliance. That's on one side of her business card. You flip it over, she's the executive director of the Nevada Economic Development Group.

And at the end of the day, if they feel better about that because they've got some identity, then I don't care because--

AUDIENCE: Do they have their own board?

DAN CULHANE: --they've got their own board. They've got their own budget. And frankly, we're standing up a new organization right now in Hamilton County that hasn't had anything because they wanted local input. And I said, that's a great idea.
 
At first, I wanted to just talk to the county supervisors and the mayor of Webster City once a quarter, but now, they're meeting, the board's going to meet monthly. But what's cool about that is, now, we've got probably 30 ambassadors that are on that board every month. And they're not apologists.

So they're going out and they're telling the rest of that county about the good stuff that my person that's working up there is working on. And then, they're telling about how that one person that works for me has the bench strength of the rest of the team in Ames. And the best part about that is they came to us.

If we go knocking on their door, it's like big brother knocking on little brother's door. But they came to us. And we said, yeah, we can make this work. The one thing I would tell you is that they pay for it.

And we've got a pretty healthy contract with Hamilton County. And as a result, we give them as good a service as we would the City of Ames or Iowa State University or anybody else that calls us. And so that's why it works, because we let them be who they want to be. And we're in the back office supporting them however we can.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: Close to time. But Nora, do you have anything to add to that, about consolidation of services, municipalities with the County, those kinds of things? That's a touchy subject for a lot of places.
 
NORA FOOTE WESTBROOK: Yeah, I mean, honestly, when I heard about your organization's story, I was so excited. It sounds-- it's a familiar story, but I think especially in the last 10 years or so. I'll tell a very brief story of our network partners in Rutland, Vermont, which is just on the other side of the mountains from me.
When I grew up, we all called it Rut Vegas. But the truth about Rutland is that it's this amazing, it was this amazing population center in Western Vermont, just very close to the border with Upstate New York, about halfway from Burlington down to Bennington, and just a short jaunt to all of the ski mountains. So it's got a really amazing draw, but was really, really was the sort of epicenter of the opioid epidemic and has also suffered a lot of automation related economic decline in the last 50 years.

It was actually the-- Rutland High School was Hartford High School's biggest rival growing up. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about Rutland and my perspective about this. This place has changed a lot in the last five years.

And they did the same thing. They took the chamber and the economic development, the regional development corporation, and they combined the two entities five years ago in order to put together a more competitive federal grant application because one of those entities had access to dollars that another wouldn't. And I think it was something that had been underway for a long time.

But the other thing that it did is it offered an opportunity to rethink the way the community was approaching development. The Chamber of Commerce is devoted to supporting small businesses, which are, in my view, entrepreneurs, and small and medium businesses are the lifeblood of these places, having a place that you can work where the people care about where your kids are going to school, and who you're running into at church, and in the restaurants.

And all of a sudden, thinking about small businesses was also thinking about the future. And it's not that was of major radical shift that happened overnight, but it represented a shift. And as this organization that's leading the charge, they've now stood up this-- they went on to win a Build to Scale grant.
 
They have stood up an absolutely beautiful innovation center on Commerce Row in downtown Rutland. We were funded by USDA, actually, through our Placemaking Fellowship to do a placemaking plan for the City of Rutland that was unanimously adopted three weeks ago by the Board of Aldermen. So they've begun construction to make the streets outside the hub more walkable.

And I think that-- I say that to say that I think when Lyle Jepson, as visionary leader of the Rutland Regional Development Corporation, thought to himself, there's been this weird dynamic between the chamber and the development corporation. And there's a new leader at the chamber. And I wonder what we could do if we banded together.

And six years later, it is one of the most, I mean, for me, it's one of the most personally moving transformations that is really just this, all of a sudden, concrete image of what so many folks across the region have been working to do, but realized if they came together, they could probably do it faster.
 
SUSAN LONGWORTH: Wonderful. So I think that's a great note. It was a concerned when I agreed to moderate this panel that it would be a very glass half full, glass half empty kind of conversation. And I think we're ending on a glass half full note. So we've removed a barrier between you and the reception, So? That was a success. And we had a successful panel as well, so please join me in thanking them.

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