The Brookings Institution Reimagine Rural podcast “A recipe for a rural policy renaissance”

Getting to know the Black Belt, for example, in the South and some of the layers of injustice and discrimination that exist there that compound the challenges that we face today. [...] And I think that if we all were to sit around the table in America and say, we care, we actually believe that American rural communities are our place where we want to invest, and we understand that it’s a great place to live, to work, to invest our dollars and our and our time in, then we need to change ... [...] I want to mention that the purpose of this coalition and the 45 million is to say to my peers over in Crow Reservation, to say to her, It doesn’t need to take you 23 years to get to the level that I’m at. [...] A community’s heritage is important to its identity, so these leaders take the time and effort to affirm the town’s history while also opening up a path to a new future, one that may shift its identity and connect to a different sort of work. [...] Several of the towns I profiled in the podcast are still in the early stages of their journeys, with plenty of blight and poverty to address and 19 improvements to make.