Timing is everything – whether you’re baking a cake, trying to hop on a moving merry go-round (do those still exist?), or figuring out how to replace a crumbling but heavily used bridge.
Some might look at the changes happening since January 20 and wonder how our NW Rural Investment Strategy team will be able to successfully complete our pilot community projects with the uncertainty surrounding federal funding programs. Or the decrease in staff to effectively manage those programs.
As we meet with the mayors of these pilot communities (which we anticipate announcing before the end of the month as the last few councils approve their MOUs), this new federal landscape does cause concern, as does the state’s current budget deficit.
However, none of the political, economic or financial turmoil changes the fact that rural communities are struggling under the weight of their infrastructure, public safety and community challenges. Federal changes are going to acutely impact rural communities and residents, and so far, it appears, not in a positive way. The potential loss of infrastructure funding, layoffs, decreased funding for food banks, rural hospitals and now rural banks – everything will be affected in some way. And rural communities will feel these losses and their ripple effects more severely.
But with systemic upheaval comes the forced opportunity to do things differently, to see problems, and especially solutions, from a different vantage point. One of the great strengths of the NW Rural Investment Strategy is the deliberate involvement of private and philanthropic capital entities. As anyone working in rural communities already knows, federal funding is seldom the only resource needed to complete a project, and those funds trigger an avalanche of paperwork and requirements.
So as we begin working in these pilot communities, we will reach out to potential private and philanthropic partners often to seek their input and ideas to craft new solutions that work with each town’s unique situation. We must be creative. We will need to do things differently to be effective, because, frankly, the needs cannot be frozen and dealt with later when circumstances are better.
Yes, working on behalf of rural communities is getting a whole lot harder. But our rural communities need us, all of us, more than ever.
Timing is everything.
Take care,
Jody
