A summit for ‘doers and movers’: Two-day event looks to inspire rural renaissance | Local News

The event, hosted jointly by the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship and The Sentinel Sept. 27 and 28, aims to equip residents of rural areas with strategies for transforming their small cities and towns into vibrant hubs of economic and cultural activity. Attendees will choose from among 15, two-hour workshops in five program tracks focused on entrepreneurship, business growth, agriculture, community news and the arts. (See related story on times and locations, A7.)

The summit in Keene’s downtown will host 500 people, organizers say.

Credentialed speakers will introduce each workshop’s topic, followed by an audience discussion with panel members who will share their experiences and field questions.

In addition to The Sentinel’s role in helping orchestrate the summit, President and Chief Operating Officer Terrence Williams is also shaping the community news track. His experts will discuss the role of journalism in fostering connectivity within small cities and towns.

“It’s about journalism as a hub,” he said, adding that trusted information is at the core of that hub.

On the first day of the event, two sessions will explore public perspectives about local news, especially in the wake of political events related to President Donald Trump’s presidency, which have precipitated a nationwide debate about “fake news.”

For the “Fake News: Keeping News Real in Rural America” workshop, Williams has invited guest speakers Katherine Aydellot and Kathy Kiely to talk about building trust in hometown journalism through increased accuracy, transparency and outreach.

Aydellot is an information literacy and instruction librarian as well as assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, while Kiely is the Lee Hills Chair in Free Press Studies at the Missouri University of Journalism. Both are experts in identifying fake news and how it is disseminated.

“The purpose of their program is to have people leave with a better understanding of the importance of community journalism, and the very important role it plays at the local level in keeping people informed … and connected,” Williams said.

A second workshop, “Energizing and Growing Rural Journalism,” will feature Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues in Kentucky, along with Kevin Slimp, director of the University of Tennessee Newspaper Institute. Cross and Slimp will discuss the growing financial challenges threatening small news organizations across the country and offer solutions based on their experience.

Looking to engage audiences directly in these discussion topics, Williams has an interactive program planned for the second day of the summit, called “Building Today’s Newspaper — You Be the Editor!” Given access to the same topics The Sentinel’s staff will be covering that day, participants will role play as newspaper editors to make decisions about the content they would assign and the angle from which they would approach each news item. The workshop will end with a tour of The Sentinel building during a press run, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how a newspaper is assembled.

“It’s an opportunity for a little additional transparency into how things work here,” Williams said. “Those who attend should come away feeling a little bit more informed as to the process and the decisions behind publishing a newspaper.”

Like Williams, Hannah Grimes founder and Executive Director Mary Ann Kristiansen will run a program track, in addition to organizing the broader logistics of the summit.

Her entrepreneurship track will include two workshops, along with a special event, The PitchFork Challenge.

For the past two years, Hannah Grimes has offered a quarterly financing program called PitchFork to connect entrepreneurs with local investors interested in backing the launch of small businesses. Traditionally, participants have pitched their business plans at an informal networking event with a cocktail party atmosphere. This quarter’s PitchFork program will run as a contest, allowing entrants to compete for two prizes valued at $10,000 and $1,000. Finalists will present at an afternoon live event Sept. 27 in front of Radically Rural attendees. The winner will be announced that evening at CONNECT, the centerpiece networking event of Radically Rural.

The entrepreneurship track’s Thursday workshop, called “Crazy Good,” will focus on three types of business models that work best to energize rural economies. Rich Grogan, executive director of the Community Capital of Vermont, will lead this session.

On Friday, a workshop called “Rural Renaissance and Digital Parity” will consider some ways small towns can leverage technology to increase connectivity without needing to mirror the dense infrastructural development of urban environments. The session will open with remarks from Robert Gallardo, assistant director of the Purdue Center for Regional Development in West Lafayette, Ind.

Shannon Hundley, operations director at the Hannah Grimes Center, is organizing the Main Street track, along with Emily Lavigne, who works at Prime Roast.

To head the track’s Thursday morning workshop, “Tactical Innovation for Small and Rural Towns,” they have invited Deb Brown, a pioneer in radical community development.

Brown co-founded Save Your Town, a nonprofit organization focused on energizing rural communities struggling with challenges such as low populations, small workforces or lack of infrastructure.

“She is going to specifically be talking about filling empty buildings, and how small towns can use connections to fill and improve Main Streets,” Hundley said.

A Thursday afternoon workshop, “Community-Driven Main Street Events with Lasting Economic Results,” will build on the idea of increasing foot traffic through town centers as a way to drive steady regional change.

Jay Robert Allen, owner and president of ShawCraft Sign Co., will provide examples of festivals and events that can establish small communities as tourist destinations and focal points of cultural activity. Allen is heavily involved in the Walldogs movement, which organizes troupes of artists to visit a town or city and paint a series of public outdoor murals. Next summer, a group of Walldogs will arrive in Keene to create a walking tour of murals depicting major themes of the city’s history. Allen hopes to prove to Radically Rural audiences that any small town can host events with similar energy and scope.

During the next few weeks, Hundley and Lavigne will shape the content for a third and final workshop within the Main Street track.

Aiming to the celebrate the agricultural foundation of a rural area like the Monadnock Region, Amanda Littleton and Ryan Owens are organizing the working lands program track. Littleton is the district manager of the Cheshire County Conservation District, and Owens is the executive director of the Monadnock Conservancy. Both will draw on robust backgrounds in agricultural practice and environmental policy to coordinate the track’s three workshops.

The first among them will feature Rob Riley, president of the Northern Forest Center. Riley has earned regional acclaim for successfully navigating the Concord-based organization through the 2008 economic downturn and advancing its mission to conserve working forestland.

Richard Berkfield, executive director of the Brattleboro nonprofit Food Connects, will lead the second session in the track, called “Changes on Tap: Challenges and Opportunities to Growing Rural Food Businesses.” Backed by a panel of farm, food and beverage entrepreneurs, Berkfield will offer techniques for agricultural workers to broaden their consumer base, highlighting the importance of building relationships with both regional and remote buyers.

Littleton emphasizes that many New Hampshire farms are capturing only a small portion of local markets.

“The current estimate is that, out of the food consumed in our state, only about 6 percent is produced locally. I think there is a huge opportunity for growth,” she said.

Expanding on this idea, a third workshop, “The New England Food Vision,” will present a holistic image of the role working lands can play in strengthening rural communities from economic, environmental and health perspectives.

Opening speaker Molly Anderson, a professor of food studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, will introduce her audience to the tenets of a collaborative report released by Food Solutions New England, listing action items that agricultural workers can complete to help achieve 50 percent local food production across New England by 2060.

A final set of three workshops belongs to the arts and culture track, run by Jessica Gelter, executive director of Arts Alive!. Gelter has first prepared a session called “Work in Creative Placemaking,” centered on the idea that populating rural spaces with arts initiatives can increase the value of the surrounding region.

“Creative placemaking is the development of a place, public or private, through the use of creative practice. So, using mural festivals to invigorate downtown Keene. Or engaging the students of a school to help build and design a gardening space in an abandoned used lot,” Gelter explained.

Designed to tackle the unique challenges of running an arts-based business, the second workshop in the series is “Evolving Business Models for Artists.” Gelter has invited a popular Etsy artist to speak about leveraging online markets to capture wider audiences. Additionally, a representative from the Peterborough Players will join the session to share recent adaptations to the company’s business model, such as increased reliance on solar power to trim energy costs. Gelter hopes audience members will leave the workshop better equipped to balance profitability with the production of high-quality art.

A third workshop, with panelists to be determined, will examine the role of the arts in promoting social change.

Covering such a range of topics, the five Radically Rural tracks cater to a broad slice of rural society. The tracks aim to give farmers, artists, journalists and small business owners concrete solutions to the challenges they face on a daily basis.

As Hundley explains, “We want people to be encouraged and inspired, but also actually have something they can do. This is not another meeting where you get to come and sit around a table and talk about things and then nothing happens.

“This is for doers and movers.”