Presenting at the Community Development Society

I will be presenting along with my colleague, Milan Wall at pre-conference workshop at the 41st CDS Annual International Conference in Memphis, Tennessee on July 26th, 2009. The full details about this workshop follows.Workshop Title: Attracting People to Rural Places: What We Know and What WorksIn an effort to increase leadership capacity related to a critical issue facing many rural communities, this workshop will address both research and best practices relating to responding pro-actively to rural population decline through “people attraction.” The session will begin with a description of the problem, specifically the long-term and continuous outmigration of, especially, younger people from rural to urban/suburban places. Workshop participants will be asked to share their own stories of outmigration from rural places and its impact on community vitality.The workshop will continue with a review of recent research indicating what is known about people who are moving to a very rural region of the Northern Great Plains (the Panhandle of Nebraska), what attracts them to this region and what would keep them there. This session of the workshop will be introduced through an interactive design that invites workshop participants to share their personal experiences or information they have gleaned about what brings people to their rural areas and what might motivate them to stay.The final session in this workshop will share information about best practices, that is, what communities are doing to attract and retain new residents, how alumni lists are being used and what website strategies are being utilized to promote area assets and to target specific audiences of people who are most likely to re-locate to a rural area.This workshop is proposed as a half-day, interactive experience for workshop presenters, who will take home valuable information they can use to examine their opportunities for attracting new residents to rural areas and for implementing affordable strategies in their communities or regions. It will be designed to increase leadership capacity by strengthening both skills and confidence in the area of people attraction. It will help community development professionals develop the capacity to guide communities in their design and implementation of workable plans to address the problem of rural outmigration.For more information about the Community Development Society and the rest of the conference, visit their website at comm-dev.org