What makes country folk different?

“One of the wonderful things about living in the country
and the people IN the country
is they have more of the old-fashioned attitude of
‘We’ll make this work.’ They create community.”

- Joyce Marlow, “Country Ways”

This tendency to create community is one fact that makes organizing in rural areas far different from organizing in cities. You need the same organizing skills but you’ll need a whole different style of  interacting–which is based on a whole different view of life.

This site is dedicated to describing that Weltanschaung for the benefit of those who see the crucial need to organize in rural areas.

When I first came here
I heard that I might be considered a local
after about 20 years.
Lots of people come and go,
so folks get choosy about who
they are going to invest their time with.
It takes time to build that amount of trust,
over the last few years I have been
making deeper friendships,
but this is a slow process.
- A Canadian study of rural organizing.

Luckily, you don’t have to be considered a local in order to be successful at rural organizing.

One of my most successful organizing efforts
began with a meeting in Owsley county, Kentucky.
I arrived to find a group discussing a recent death
in the community. The coroner had ruled
that the deceased had committed suicide
by shooting himself twice in the chest
with the sheriff’s shotgun. Taken aback, I absently asked:
“A double-barrelled shotgun?”
One Owsley resident responded:
“No, single barrel. He had to reload.
But it doesn’t matter, he was a foreigner.
He was from Ohio.” I’d just arrived from Missouri,
but I never had any problem organizing in Kentucky.