Country Code

The Community Strategies Group spotlights the challenges minority-owned rural businesses face.

Give NowThe Covid-19 pandemic hit rural places hard—and nowhere harder than in rural Native nations and Black, Latinx, and immigrant communities. As job losses threatened business and as health disparities began coming to light in 2020, a new collaboration anchored by the Community Strategies Group doubled down on CSG’s long commitment to highlighting the plight of diverse and economically challenged rural communities—and the creative work that intrepid innovators are doing to address it. Rural Opportunity and Development Sessions are an unprecedented collaboration of national organizations: a partnership of CSG with the Housing Assistance Council, Rural Community Assistance Partnership, Rural LISC, and the US Federal Reserve Board. The first two ROAD sessions were wholly focused on communities of color: one on helping minority-owned rural small businesses during the pandemic, the other focused on addressing Covid-related challenges facing immigrants in rural economies and regions. In 2020, ROADS hosted 22 speakers across four events, including 16 people of color, who shared stories and experiences from rural places across the nation. Nearly 1,000 policymakers, development practitioners, investors, and funders registered for each session.

Even for the speakers and moderators, these events were eye-opening and action-inducing. Dell Gines, the senior community development advisor for the Omaha Branch-Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, moderated a session on working with minority-owned firms during the pandemic. “Collaboration is necessary,” he said afterward. “So is empathy. It can’t be a top-down approach. You have to listen to the lived insights of the folks who are there and design solutions that really, truly impact them, instead of thinking you know best. My personal pledge is to deepen my consideration of Native, Latinx, and African American businesses in rural communities in my work at the Kansas City Federal Reserve. You can lean on me.”