ARTICLE

Community Leadership and Making the Most of Changing Times

July 1, 2018 – Christopher Visentin

The more things change, the more they stay the same­—a familiar saying, but it is hard not to feel that small communities today are facing new threats that will fundamentally change their futures due to global economic change. A unique symptom of that change is the movement of industries, jobs, and people away from small communities to larger, established economic centers.

Nevertheless, even as globalization continues to transform the world and to influence challenges, the key to small communities meeting economic challenges in many ways has stayed the same. Now, as before, community leadership is critical—and technology can be a helpful tool in bringing a community together to address eventual change.

Small towns in the United States have faced similar problems before. Finding solutions often lies in understanding how similar challenges were best addressed in the past.

Milan Wall reviews and examines the plights of many small, midwestern communities in the ‘80s and early-to-mid ‘90s in his 1999 academic paper “Factors in Rural Community Survival: Review of Insights from Thriving Small Towns”.

In the 1980s, Midwestern farm communities faced very real threats to their economic existence. Heavily dependent on agriculture, the farm crisis of the mid-1980s devastated the family farm and forced the relocation of families away from their traditional homes in search of employment in larger cities. The population of small towns shrunk and destabilized economic viability, a plight that seems all too familiar today.

Wall notes that experts at the time suggested that some small communities were just too small, too isolated, or too distant from larger population centers to be sustainable; the concept being that the farther away a small community is from a large economic center, the greater was the threat to economic sustainability and the more significant the population dislocation. These issues, they thought, materially undermined the fundamentals of the then prevailing status quo.

To a certain extent, this is assuredly correct. But Wall notes that while the reason for the threat of economic distress—that is, the community’s location—is beyond control, the approaches communities take to address these threats are not. There are communities that fare better than others when confronted with economic dislocation.

Government and university researchers have studied why some rural communities more ably cope with change and restructure while others surrender in a crisis situation. The answer they identified has relevance not only to the communities in question, but also to other small towns as they respond to future threats to their economic viability.

Researchers focused on towns that represented a broad range of sizes and locations, and considered distance from nearby population centers and main transportation routes. This study resulted in “20 Clues to Rural Community Survival”:

1. Community pride
2. Emphasis on quality in business and community life
3. Willingness to invest in the future
4. Participatory approach to community decision making
5. Cooperative community spirit
6. Realistic appraisal of future opportunities
7. Awareness of competitive positioning
8. Knowledge of the physical environment
9. Active economic development program
10. Deliberate transition of power to a younger generation of leaders
11. Acceptance of women in leadership roles
12. Strong belief in and support for education
13. Problem-solving approach to providing health care
14. Strong multi-generational family orientation
15. Strong presence of traditional institutions that are integral to community life
16. Attention to sound and well maintained infrastructure
17. Careful use of fiscal resources
18. Sophisticated use of information resources
19. Willingness to seek help
20. Conviction that, in the long run, you have to do it yourself

Importantly, despite specific differences among communities and the influence these characteristics exert on success and survival in difficult times—location, access to or availability of resources, population size—Wall writes that leadership constitutes a highly critical factor in community success and how effectively a community responds to and weathers change.

He posits that leadership and community initiative can overcome many natural disadvantages that communities face. Though some things are beyond a community’s control, communities might still be able to determine their own future, so long as their leaders are capable of galvanizing the community’s view of self and identifying opportunities for economic development.

Ultimately, it is up to community leadership—elected officials, business leaders, and motivated community members generally—to inspire and nurture those traits that contribute not only to survival, but success. But even after identifying these traits, there remains the task of encouraging community members to assume responsibilities and adapt in order to bring about change.

The Center for Rural Affairs based in Lyons, Nebraska—incidentally one of those communities held out in Wall’s paper as an example of a thriving small town—has published its own small guide, “Leadership for Rural Communities” by Kathie Starkweather, which aims to help communities identify, develop, and encourage strong leadership in small communities.

Starkweather cites what she calls “collaborative leadership” as the best approach for small communities. This collaborative spirit involves working with fellow small communities and their leaders, rather than competing or working in silos.

Successful leaders come from all walks of life, Starkweather notes, but collaborative leaders have a defining characteristic: they have acknowledged that their own community can be most effectively strengthened by strengthening their sister communities as well. This kind of collaborative leadership, she writes, “models leadership for the 21^st century”.

Where Starkweather’s “sister communities” might once have been a term applied to nearby towns in the region, modern communication and the resources of the information age make that larger ‘community’ of small, sister communities greater, the concept of that community more expansive, and its power much increased as a result. The world may be shrinking, but that also means that such communities-of-communities are expanding.

Technology continues to transform the world, but it also positively influences the ability of small communities to address the challenge of change. Now, as before, a small community’s success and survival depends on innovative individuals who are willing to take action, reach out, and collaborate. If anything has indeed changed, it is that those leaders now have a greater capability to do just that.

Forum communities such as underthemarkets.com are the ultimate collaborative leadership model, and a new tool with which to develop ideas, share strategies, and inspire new leaders in their respective communities.