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Monday Mailing

Year 24 • Issue 25 26 March 2018 1.

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Sorry I Didn’t Read Your “Rural Is Dying” Article Reedsport Residents Begin Planning Centennial DAX The Robot Comes to Philomath Guide: Building Stronger, Safer Communities Citizens' Institute on Rural Design Food Scholarships Could Help More Students Finish College Cultural Trust Now Accepting applications for Cultural Development Grants The Next Green Revolution Kick the Tires on Your Local Zoning Code British Columbia Goes All in on Rapid Transit, Funds High-Speed Rail Study America's Loneliest Roads, Mapped

1. Sorry I Didn’t Read Your “Rural Is Dying” Article …but I was busy serving the people who are innovating in rural places today.

That’s not actually true. I did read your article. And I shook my head through the whole thing. And I set aside being busy long enough to write down a few thoughts in response.

Quote of the Week: "There are no shortcuts to any place worth going." ~Beverly Sills

Oregon Fast Fact: The western Oregon climate is very similar to that of the Burgundy region in France where the Pinot grape is from.

Western Oregon has several wineries which produce Pinot Noir wine.

You went with the “this town is dying, all of rural is dying” theme. (The only other ones that I see used very much are “small towns are the idyllic past” and “rural people are a bunch of nuts.”) I’d rather talk about the #SmallTownNow than your same old stories.

I disagree with your fundamental premise. Rural has a future. Small towns have long-standing relevance in growing food, raising livestock, processing foods, producing natural resources and protecting the environment. That relevance is never going to go away as long as we need food, utilize natural resources and care about our environment.

Professor Ivan Emke goes so far as to point out that rural will save civilization. Small towns have new relevance in a work-from-anywhere, anywhen world. I think you wrote about ruralsourcing once, years ago.

Thanks!

To access the full story, click here.

2. Reedsport Residents Begin Planning Centennial It's a town hit hard by floods in earlier decades. It's a town that boasts the chainsaw festival. It's a town that claims timber and fishing as parts of its history.

This coming year marks the centennial of Reedsport's incorporation.

With this in mind, city leaders and volunteers are getting the engines ready for a big bash or series of parties to celebrate the lady that's Reedsport.

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Main Street Coordinator Emerson Hoagland discussed how best to commemorate the birthday with a group of roughly 20 residents March 7 at city hall.

"It looks like we've got a good turnout tonight," said Hoagland.

To access the full story, click here.

3. DAX The Robot Comes to Philomath Rural Oregon spawns a delivery robot.

The welcome sign at the entrance to Philomath, Ore. reads, “Home of the Philomath frolic & rodeo.”

The tiny Willamette Valley town, population 4,676, is also the birthplace of DAX, an R2D2-esque, semi-autonomous delivery robot.

On a cloudy Tuesday in March, DAX rolls into La Rockita, the local Mexican joint. Owner Elsa Parmelee drops a burrito into Dax’s heated belly compartment. The simple action marks the first delivery for the 21-year-old family-owned restaurant — and its first robotic delivery. As DAX departs, Parmalee and her family wave and snap pictures from behind the counter, as if they were seeing off a family member at the airport.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Guide: Building Stronger, Safer Communities Building Stronger, Safer Communities: A Guide for Law Enforcement and Community Partners to Prevent and Respond to Hate Crimes offers leadership strategies and actionable tactics to help law enforcement agencies work with community partners.

Real-life examples, documented by the Not In Our Town movement against hate and intolerance, illustrate how agencies can work with community stakeholders to create an atmosphere where hate is not tolerated and take positive steps in the aftermath of a hate crime. This guide also explains the history of the Not In Our Town movement and provides multiples lists of resources to promote action, engagement, and empowerment for the community and law enforcement.

You can get the guide in two ways: Download the digital guide here as a PDF, or Request a free hard copy from the U.S. Department of Justice COPS Office (free shipping included).

Multiple copies can be requested for trainings, community task forces, and other events.

For more information, click here.

5. Citizens' Institute on Rural Design Residents in America’s small towns and rural communities care deeply about the future of their towns and value their uniqueness, strong sense of community, and special places. However, they increasingly face urgent challenges: How can they add jobs and support local businesses? How do they create a positive future for their kids? How can they honor and protect local character and history? How do they use limited financial, human, and natural resources wisely?

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Developing locally-driven solutions to these challenges is critical to the long-term vitality of these communities, and the arts and design can play a powerful role in this process. Across the country, community leaders and residents are coming together to tackle these challenges and to find creative strategies that address: • • • •

How to build strong economies and grow jobs; Where to locate new growth or redevelop older areas; How to design efficient transportation systems; How to protect the community’s historic and culturally significant resources.

Rural design is an important tool for rural communities to build upon existing assets and improve the way a community looks, its quality of life, and its economic viability. However, few rural communities have access to design assistance or the expertise to tackle these challenges on their own.

The Citizens' Institute on Rural Design™ (CIRD) provides communities access to the resources they need to convert their own good ideas into reality. CIRD works with communities with populations of 50,000 or less, and offers annual competitive funding to as many as four small towns or rural communities to host a two-and-a-half day community design workshop. With support from a wide range of design, planning and creative placemaking professionals, the workshops bring together local leaders from non-profits, community organizations, and government to develop actionable solutions to the community's pressing design challenges. The community receives additional support through webinars, conference calls, and web-based resources.

To access the CIRD Website, click here.

6. Food Scholarships Could Help More Students Finish College It’s hard, if not impossible, to succeed in college if you’re hungry. Seems like such an easy concept that it’s not worth mentioning.

But behind that simple concept are some staggering statistics. According to the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, more than 50 percent of community college students nationwide do not have access to healthy and affordable foods.

As a researcher who focuses on poverty, I believe campus hunger is a significant factor behind inequality in college completion rates. And “food scholarships” may be a solution.

Some elected officials have begun to take notice. Last summer, Gov. Jerry Brown of California included US$7.5 million in his budget to develop “hunger-free” college campuses. In December, advocates convened a federal briefing about campus food insecurity on Capitol Hill, where legislators are advancing bills to make it easier for undergraduates to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as SNAP. To access the full story, click here.

7. Cultural Trust Now Accepting applications for Cultural Development Grants The online application will open March 1, 2018 with an application deadline of April 13, 2018. The FY19 Cultural Development grant cycle are for projects taking place August 1, 2018 – July 31, 2019.

Grant seekers interested in applying for Cultural Trust grants are encouraged to attend the 2018 Conversation with Funders & Partners workshops.

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Grants are awarded in four categories and are intended to fund arts, heritage, history, preservation and humanities programs.

Cultural Development grants are for project activities that: • protect and stabilize Oregon's cultural resources; • expand public awareness of, access to, and participation in quality cultural experiences in Oregon; • ensure that Oregon cultural resources are strong and dynamic contributors to Oregon's communities and quality of life; • build an understanding of the value and impact of culture to Oregonians.

Cultural Development Grants recognize and support significant cultural programs and projects through four grant categories: • Access: Make culture broadly available to Oregonians • Preservation: Invest in Oregon's cultural heritage by recovering, preserving, and sharing historic assets and achievements • Creativity: Create and/or present cultural or scholarly work; Support the development of artists, cultural experts, or scholars who promote culture as a core part of vibrant communities • Capacity: Strengthen cultural organizations to increase stability, improve sustainability, or measure/share cultural impacts In considering funding requests, the Cultural Trust seeks proposals that will expand the public benefit of Oregon’s culture through: • positive impact on, or improvement of, cultural resources and activities and the expansion of public and private support for culture; • preservation of the past or investing in the future, by commissioning new work that continues Oregon’s strong artistic, literary and humanistic presence; • enhancing cultural opportunity and understanding by creating or sustaining model programs that can be replicated elsewhere; and • by creating opportunity for every community to invest further in its culture, stimulating new ventures that could not be tried without Trust help.

The Trust’s two non-competitive grant programs fund the Trust’s five statewide Cultural Partners and 45 County and Tribal Cultural Coalitions.

Have questions? Contact Aili Schreiner at aili.schreiner@oregon.gov or 503.986.0089. You may schedule a 30 minute grant application conversation before April 13, and may submit draft applications for feedback by March 31.

For more information, click here.

8. The Next Green Revolution Something is killing Ramadhani Juma’s cassava crop. “Maybe it’s too much water,” he says, fingering clusters of withered yellow leaves on a six-foot-high plant. “Or too much sun.” Juma works a small plot, barely more than an acre, near the town of Bagamoyo, on the Indian Ocean about 40 miles north of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. On a rainy March morning, trailed by two of his four young sons, he’s talking with a technician from the big city, 28-year-old Deogratius Mark of the Mikocheni Agricultural Research Institute. Mark tells Juma his problem is neither sun nor rain. The real cassava killers, far too small to see, are viruses.

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Mark breaks off some wet leaves; a few whiteflies dart away. The pinhead-size flies, he explains, transmit two viruses. One ravages cassava leaves, and a second, called brown streak virus, destroys the starchy, edible root—a catastrophe that usually isn’t discovered until harvest time. Juma is typical of the farmers Mark meets—most have never heard of the viral diseases. “Can you imagine how he’ll feel if I tell him he has to uproot all these plants?” Mark says quietly.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Kick the Tires on Your Local Zoning Code One of the great mysteries of my adult life has been trying to understand why nobody builds lovely places anymore. How hard can it be? Our ancestors built amazing cities with little more than horses, hand tools, and human muscle.

But with all our modern knowledge and technology, we’ve built a lot of depressing stuff.

Gargantuan shopping centers. Massive “garden” apartments. Multi-car garages that people live behind and call homes.

It wasn’t until recently that I started to understand how these developments were regulated into existence. Everything from federal housing policies and loan industry underwriting rules to local zoning codes have played a part.

It’s a shame that the era of mass-produced real estate corresponded with the era of auto-oriented regulation and design. Unfortunately, when these two Wonder Twin powers activated, they formed the shape of a lot of lousy places.

To access the full story, click here.

10. British Columbia Goes All in on Rapid Transit, Funds High-Speed Rail Study On Friday, the British Columbian governments declared support for studying high-speed rail from Vancouver to Portland and building out key transit and transportation projects throughout Vancouver’s Lower Mainland. Governor Jay Inslee (D-Washington) traveled up to Vancouver to join his fellow West Coast governors at the annual Pacific Coast Collaborative conference. The theme of the conference was climate change, environmental protection, and trade–topics that set the stage for big announcements later in the day.

Premier John Horgan (BC NDP-British Columbia), the progressive leader of the province, stood side-by-side with Governor Inslee to announce $300,000 Canadian in provincial funding for the regional high-speed rail business case study.

“The convenience of a one-hour trip between Vancouver and Seattle would create countless opportunities for people in both B.C. and Washington, from sports or concert getaways for families, to untold economic growth potential for businesses,” Premier Horgan said. “Exploring the possibility of creating a clean, efficient high-speed corridor is particularly important as the Pacific Northwest grows in economic importance, and we look to reduce barriers to expansion across our borders.”

To access the full story, click here.

11. America's Loneliest Roads, Mapped Among road-trip enthusiasts, the Alaska Highway is a favorite. It runs more than 1,300 miles, dazzling travelers with tundras and sightings of eagles, caribou, and the like.

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But if you want to take the road less traveled, a study by the GPS-company Geotab suggests you should go north to the James W. Dalton Highway, Alaska’s hidden gem. It runs 414 miles from Fairbanks to Deadhorse, and sees mostly ice road truckers, with few service stations and small towns in between. You would, however, be greeted by majestic snow-covered mountains and glimpses of the Yukon River.

In fact, it’s the quietest route in all of the United States. That’s according to the study, which crunches 2015 annual average traffic data from the Highway Performance Monitoring System to find the least traveled roads in each state, and in all of America. The results are highlighted in an interactive map. Click on a state, and you can get a virtual preview of each route via Google Street View. The site also offers the top 10 most scenic paths (starred on the map) from those listed, as ranked by the conservationist and photographer James Q. Martin, who collaborated with Geotab on the study.

To access the full story, click here.

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