When I graduated from Ilwaco High School in a class of 69 students, the resounding message was “Do well in school. Do everything you can to get into college. Get out of this town. Be successful, and you’ll never come back.”
In fact, teachers and other members of my community in southwest Washington state had pounded the same message into me since kindergarten.
Madeline Moore at her first Ilwaco Farmers Market
I did the first three things, and then the fourth, too. But I did come back, at the ripe age of 22, to start a small bakery. I remember my mom telling me once, shortly after starting the bakery, that people kept saying, “We heard Madeline moved back to town. Is everything OK?” Something had to be wrong for me to want to move back to the town that had raised me.
This is a familiar story for many millennials who make the choice to move back to, or stay in the rural, often downtrodden, small communities they grew up in. Success equals getting out and staying out for good. But many millennials are changing that narrative. We see the potential a small community offers to build a lifestyle that urban areas cannot: a slower pace of life, an appreciation for dirt over concrete, the chance to wear many hats, and the ability to directly see the change you can make, to name a few.
Six years after diving head-first back into rural life, buying a home in Chinook, a community of 450, and running a successful small business, I realized I wanted to connect with others my age who cared about rural livelihoods as much as I do. Serendipitously, I connected with two women from Port Townsend, Washington, a city of about 10,000 in the northeast corner of the Olympic Peninsula. These women wanted to do the same thing I did, and from there, Rethinking Rural was born. Together, we’re building a national network of millennials who want to create stronger, more resilient rural communities.
In March 2018, we invited 50 millennials who were active in rural communities across nine states for two days of conversation in Port Townsend. We focused on why our communities matter and how we can work together to make them better. By the end, many tears were shed. These were people like me, who wanted to fight hard for their town but, more often than not, felt as if they were banging their heads against a brick wall. But maybe if we started working together as like-minded young’uns, we could get more done and affect more than just our individual communities.
Rethinking Rural Symposium 2018
From those conversations, we created a three-year plan, which includes three more of these place-based celebrations and conversations about rural, all led and hosted by participants from our first event in their own towns. 2020: Nauvoo, Alabama. 2021: Indian Country, Pacific Northwest. 2022: TBD based on preceding symposiums.
To do all of that, we’ve partnered with a national nonprofit that has led the way on rural community development issues, the Rural Assembly. This partnership will broaden our reach and allow us to work under a larger umbrella. We’re also building many smaller, regional partnerships across the country to help guide our work.
Quincy Moore
I now have a 1½-year-old named Quincy and she is being raised in the same community where both of her parents grew up. We recently pulled her in a wagon with all of her stuffed animals in the Loyalty Day Kids Parade – a parade I walked in every single year as a child. I now have similar hopes for her as many in my community had for me. I hope she moves away and goes to college. I hope she is successful and finds something she loves to devote her life to. But I also hope that one day, she decides to move back and invest in the place that raised her. Rethinking Rural is about making sure there is something for this generation and the next, and the next, to move back to. And that rural America is a thriving, culturally diverse, healthy place for people to set roots.
A short video on the first Rethinking Rural Symposium (3:15):
Provided by the Daily Yonder, a multi-media platform that is a source of news, research, commentary, and features about life in rural America.
All images courtesy of Madeline Moore.
