Radically Rural Offers Six Exciting Program Tracks!

Radically Rural is built around six engaging program tracks that are highly relevant for rural communities and small towns:

Arts and Culture

Rural communities are excellent places to thrive as an artist. There is affordable living, space to focus, natural beauty, and connected networks of neighbors and passionate community organizers. Here, artists can have time and space to make, but also to become advocates and catalysts in their communities. Explore the power of creative work in rural communities and learn how to bring the unique values of rural arts to the attention of funders and investors.

Local Organizer: Monadnock Arts Alive!

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship has a powerful impact on creating regional prosperity through job creation and building local companies, which care deeply about their communities. But we see growing disparity between rural and urban entrepreneurial activity and a corresponding socio-economic and political gap between the two. Distinct solutions are needed for there to be a rural advantage. Innovative small town ecosystems are bubbling up across the nation. Join us to learn about the creativity and change that is driving local economies AND building small communities, which thrive.

Local Organizer: The Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship

Community Journalism

Small town journalism is at risk. Consolidation of media companies, the closing of newspapers and reduction in journalism jobs have conspired in some cases to create news deserts. What happens to small communities when the news they have relied upon for decades erodes or disappears? What can be done to preserve local journalism and news coverage? Did you know it’s more expensive to live in communities without journalism watchdogs? We have solutions.

Local Organizer: The Keene Sentinel

Main Street

It’s an idea as much as a location. Throughout rural America, nothing represents small businesses, friendly neighbors and unmatched customer service better than Main Street. Equal parts contemporary life and nostalgia, Main Street is a feeling of timelessness and of community. Main Streets are survivors – of malls, of flight to cities and now online commerce. Can they continue to thrive? Yes. Think radically.

Local Organizer: Prime Roast Coffee Company | Monadnock Economic Development Corporation

Land and Community

Land. It is the asset of rural life. It is what defines much of small town life and what so many of us seek to use, conserve or preserve. It is through which water flows, in which food grows and upon which we in rural communities uniquely rely. So what is being done to sustain it; to keep it robust and producing; to enrich it and keep it? If so much of our rural character is because of the land, what should we expect ahead?

Local Organizer: The Cheshire County Conservation District | Monadnock Conservancy

Clean Energy

Certain to be more and more a part of the sustainable lifestyle many seek, renewable energy offers economic and household opportunities to small towns everywhere. Tax credits, net zero construction and solar power are all part of a new business and personal landscape taking hold in rural settings. What makes regions like yours most likely to adapt to and adopt this approach to energy use?

Local Organizer: Monadnock Sustainability Network

Jump the Tracks! Registered attendees are free to attend programs from any of the tracks.

Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship Key Partners