Introduction to Rural Resurrection

Rural Resurrection is a blog about the never-ending hunt for ways to help rural communities to not just survive, but thrive. Specifically, we are talking about the small towns in the Midwest. The quaint towns have dotted the countryside that truly define the term “small town feeling” that is so horribly misused today. These great communities are hurting, not only from the “brain drain” of their youth moving to urban areas, but the changing economy of the post-industrial era. Slowly, gracefully, many of these communities are dying.

This blog was created to provide information and resources to community leaders. Leaders who’s hearts ache for ways to make their community better. Through this blog we’ll discuss several subjects that affect small towns. We’ll also conduct interviews with people that know what works and how. But we’ll also celebrate “Star Communities”, the towns that have succeeded, and how they’ve turned things around. We will also look at “Outside the Box” solutions that are new ideas or just something that hasn’t really been tried in the Midwest.

Make no mistake, this blog isn’t intended to help make your community double in size or become a burgeoning economic center. It’s intended to help make communities more stable, more viable in the long term, while enhancing the look, the feel of the community.

Initially, posts will be weekly, with occasional bursts of activity, so make sure you like Rural Resurrection on Twitter as new blog post notifications will show up on our Twitter account. You can also follow the posts through our RSS feed. We will be looking for other ways to integrate social media, so stay tuned!

If you have a recommendation for a story, feel free to submit the idea through the Contact page.

About The Editor

Chris Solberg is a City Planner for a suburb of Omaha, Nebraska. He’s a member of the American Planning Association and a certified planner through the American Planning Association (AICP). Chris is also currently the President of the Nebraska Planning and Zoning Association (NPZA) and a member of the APA Nebraska Board. But it should be noted that the views expressed by Chris in this blog are not the views of his employer of NPZA.

Though Chris works in a suburb of a metropolitan area, his roots are in Red Oak, Iowa, a community of 5,500 persons southeast of Omaha. He has spent a significant amount of his career helping small towns. Whether through writing grants for sewer improvements or writing housing studies aimed at improving the existing housing stock of a community, Chris has helped numerous small towns throughout Iowa and Nebraska.