Lunching with the Rotary Club

 What would it take to change the world? Rotary's 1.2 million members believe it starts with a commitment to Service Above Self. 

 http://www.rotary.org

The quote above is how the Rotary Club's "About Us" information tab begins its organizational narrative. There is something refreshing in the direct and simple commandment. The question is daunting. It is the kind of question that makes people throw up their hands and go about their business. One hour of broadcast news can fell a person, knock them flat down. Rivers burning, oceans turning into plastic dumps, bees up and disappearing, despots ruling and running for office, people dying in small and heartbreakingly tragic number and at numbers so great we could not count them in a day--there is a story to break you in half on the half hour.

What would it take to change the world? The world is such a big place, how could the question possibly be answered? I study and write about place, because I think that place is where we begin our world experience. From home to hometown, from feeling at home and in place to being lost and feeling out of place, we put ourselves into action in location. Even if it is a mental action, and the place is far away or imagined, place is where we come into the world, the boundary between our skin and our society. There is something both old fashioned and deeply spiritual about claiming the world can be saved through a "commitment to Service Above Self."

The history of the Rotary Club, as per the Rotary Club International resonates with my small town place study:

           The world's first service club, the Rotary Club of Chicago, was formed on 23 February 1905 by Paul P. Harris, an attorney who wished to capture in a professional club the same friendly spirit he had felt in the small towns of his youth. The Rotary name derived from the early practice of rotating meetings among members' offices.

           Rotary's popularity spread, and within a decade, clubs were chartered from San Francisco to New York to Winnipeg, Canada. By 1921, Rotary clubs had been formed on six continents. The organization adopted the Rotary International name a year later.

           As Rotary grew, its mission expanded beyond serving club members’ professional and social interests. Rotarians began pooling their resources and contributing their talents to help serve communities in need. The organization's dedication to this ideal is best expressed in its motto: Service Above Self.

           By July 1925, Rotary had grown to more than 2,000 clubs and an estimated 108,000 members. The organization's distinguished reputation attracted presidents, prime ministers, and a host of other luminaries to its ranks — among them author Thomas Mann, diplomat Carlos P. Romulo, humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, and composer Jean Sibelius.

           The Four-Way Test

           In 1932, Rotarian Herbert J. Taylor created The Four-Way Test, a code of ethics adopted by Rotary 11 years later. The test, which has been translated into more than 100 languages, asks the following questions:

           Of the things we think, say or do

                     Is it the TRUTH?

                     Is it FAIR to all concerned?

                     Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?

                     Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

           Rotary and World War II

           During World War II, many clubs were forced to disband, while others stepped up their service efforts to provide emergency relief to victims of the war. In 1942, looking ahead to the postwar era, Rotarians called for a conference to promote international educational and cultural exchanges. This event inspired the founding of UNESCO.

           In 1945, 49 Rotary club members served in 29 delegations to the UN Charter Conference. Rotary still actively participates in UN conferences by sending observers to major meetings and covering the United Nations in its publications.

           "Few there are who do not recognize the good work which is done by Rotary clubs throughout the free world," former Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain once declared.

           Dawn of a new century

           As it approached the 21st century, Rotary worked to meet society’s changing needs, expanding its service efforts to address such pressing issues as environmental degradation, illiteracy, world hunger, and children at risk.

           In 1989, the organization voted to admit women into clubs worldwide. Today, women are an integral part of Rotary's membership.

           After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Rotary clubs were formed or re-established throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The first Russian Rotary club was chartered in 1990, and the organization underwent a growth spurt for the next several years.

           More than a century after Paul Harris and his colleagues chartered the club that eventually led to Rotary International, Rotarians continue to take pride in their history. In honor of that first club, Rotarians have preserved its original meeting place, Room 711 in Chicago’s Unity Building, by re-creating the office as it existed in 1905. For several years, the Paul Harris 711 Club maintained the room as a shrine for visiting Rotarians. In 1989, when the building was scheduled to be demolished, the club carefully dismantled the office and salvaged the interior, including doors and radiators. In 1993, the RI Board of Directors set aside a permanent home for the restored Room 711 on the 16th floor of RI World Headquarters in nearby Evanston.

           Today, 1.2 million Rotarians belong to over 32,000 Rotary clubs in more than 200 countries and geographical areas.  

This history hints at some of the problems with Rotary Club, a charge that can be leveled at about any institution in American society. The quiet mention that women were allowed in right before the 1990s speaks to a history of exclusion in American. Gender, race, class and sexual orientation have kept a lot of people out of private "members only" clubs. And public organizations. And away from all kinds of social and civic rewards. America's history, which is also a global history, is one of segregation and exclusion, violent or benign. It is a history of how we use categories to define others. This is a big part of why the world is in such desperate need of saving in my opinion.  

When I mentioned to a friend yesterday that I had been to lunch with the Rotary Club of Truth or Consequences, as a guest, there was a subtle derision in the laughter. It had nothing to do with the nations or the worlds history of malfeasance, or any particular knowledge of this particular Rotary Club, it was a little closer to the small town "club," which honestly rankled me. As though going to Rotary Club lunch was so old fashioned and small town that it was funny. He certainly thought it was funny. But this guy is a bit of a cynic. When I got off of the phone I kept thinking on it though. I am now writing madly so I can get some of this posted before tonight's town planning meeting on the old youth center site. More on that in my next post.   

I will say this, it was rather old fashioned. In a Christmas Caroling door-to-door old fashioned. Old fashioned in the help your neighbor kind of way. A presentation was given on a new foundation established to serve individuals in the community with prescription pill addictions. It was a moving and harrowing presentation. I will talk about New Mexico's drug epidemic soon, because in a state that ranks at the top for addition and overdoses, Sierra County ranks at the top in the state. But there was a good willed can-do spirit in the room that took the edge off of these statistics. Attendance dollars were gathered for missed meetings. I loved being there. I was gifted a happy dollar, or perhaps an announcement dollar, in order to introduce my work and me self. I was not taking notes because I was so busy eating the K-Bobs salad bar I had heaped in front of me. Lunch, as an invited guest, was also gifted. Everyone was so nice. I honestly felt a little out of time. 

The next day I interviewed the club's restaurant server. She was generous and willing to give me some time. She is gorgeous and friendly and sharp. Her girl is one, and we met at Ralph Edwards park so my girl could run around while we talked. She wants to move away, and I wanted to know why. She said it was because she is tired of New Mexico's rankings. The lists that we top are the bad ones. We are a poor state, and we have a lot of problems. She wanted to move closer to her family, she said, because home is more about family than about place. I am still thinking that one through. When I asked her the worst thing about the town, she laughed and said it was the trash talking. Trash is not the word she used. Everyone is in your business. Everyone knows your business. But this is also what she described at the best part of the town. You know everyone, and when you need help, people are there. They may talk about you, but they care about you too. And they will put their money and time where their mouths are. 

This is what I was thinking of when I called my friend, excited about my field work and my growing body of interviews and my Rotary Club luncheon. Because what she said helped me figure out why I liked being at the "club" so much. You got the feeling that these people were good for their word, and that their words and deeds would be pretty well aligned. Having been in Truth or Consequences for over a month now, I can guarantee someone will read this post and set me straight, because word will get around that I am a Rotary Club cheerleader now. What can I say? I served in AmeriCorps, one of my favorite quotes is Mahatma Gandhi's "Be the change that you wish to see in the world," and I believe in Service Above Self. Our reach can only extend so far, but join hands you know.   I think that thinking around ourselves and seeing beyond ourselves might be the only way we can save the world. I also loved the international flags on the banners. A "friendly spirit of small towns" does not have to be provincial, it can be global. Small towns are everywhere the world over. 

An Open Letter, or, Please May I Interview You?

The following is a letter being handed out around the town to all souls who will take one. I intend in the months ahead to record as many reflections, listen to as many stories and discover as many place histories as possible. Personal narratives of place are open windows to how people think about, remember, and navigate through the places they inhabit. Referrals are wanted and most welcome.   

Welcome to Truth or Consequences:

Place and Place Making in Modern New Mexico

A dissertation project by Tita Berger

Department of American Studies &

UNM School of Architecture Historic Preservation & Regionalism Program

University of New Mexico

Hello! I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and my dissertation topic before I ask to talk to you about Truth or Consequences. My name is Tita Berger. My various academic commitments are listed in the title above, and all of my contact information is listed below. My dissertation explores ideas about 'place,' largely through a place study of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Ideas about place can include theory, history, settlement, attachment, cultural expressions, exploration, land surveys, architecture, newspaper stories, literature, political rhetoric, government policy, geography, economic development, road building, booterism, land use, and a lot of other things. I focus specifically on place narratives, what people say about places, and place making, what people do to make places. 'Modern' New Mexico refers to two periods, both theoretically and historically. The first period covers colonization, which established the earliest 'modern' place narratives and place making practices in the region. This began with Spanish entradas in 1598 and was briefly taken up by Mexico until American colonization, which became official in 1848. It also refers to ideas of what 'modern' meant at the turn of the 19th century, including new and old ideas about places and place making.

The city of Truth or Consequences is a central component of my dissertation. National and regional place narratives and place making practices, historically and right now, are more interesting when explored through an actual place. Truth or Consequences is a fantastic place study, or case study, which is the more common term. I am looking closely at a single place in order to think about the bigger picture. From reclamation, WPA and CCC projects, to popular culture and space travel, from historic preservation and Walmart, to revitalization and economic frustration, T or C is an excellent place to study. I went to school here in the 5th and 8th grades, coming in from Monticello, so I have know the town for 30 years. I care about the town and its development generally, and want to contribute something to its historical record, to the ways that we think about what makes place, and by extension, what we do as a community that create or curtail sustainable place making economically, culturally, environmentally, socially and otherwise.

This is a preview of my 200 or so eventual dissertation pages. My forth chapter, which I am working on now, is a 'place ethnography.' I will be in T or C doing fieldwork until August 2013. I have started a blog that explains these methods. A 'place ethnography' is field-based research that includes interviews, observation, documentation, mapping, etc. I share some of these experiences on my blog (see below). I am writing to request an interview or visit. Tuesdays and Wednesday are best, because I have childcare, but I am flexible. I want to talk about the town and your experiences, on or off the record. I will be in touch again, and I expect you might see me around town. Please contact me anytime. Thanks!

Tita Berger

PO Box 1025

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico 87901

tberger@unm.edu

505.917.9111

http://titaberger.blogspot.com

The Death and Life of Ordinary American Towns: Part I

Farmers Market at Ralph Edwards Park.
http://www.torcnm.org/images.html 

Jan Jacobs begins the Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) succinctly. "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." She says she "shall mainly be writing about common, ordinary things: for instance, what kinds of city streets are safe and what kinds are not; why some city parks are marvelous and others are vice traps and death traps..." The attack Jacobs leveled was against 20th century urban planning practices starting from the 1940s, but especially evident after WWII. A major target was the rise of "single-use" zoning over "mutli-use" zoning. For those not in the planning field, single-use zoning this means that we carve up places and give them one solitary and single purpose, usually through legally-binding zoning laws. Jacobs believed that places where living, working, playing, enjoying cultural activities, and that included light industry or manufacturing and all kinds of other activities (hence 'multi-use') were vibrant places. The pattern of single-use zoning remains strong however, most notably in America suburbs. This is part of an urban planning legacy that sought rational, well-ordered, separate, distinct places for our modern compartmentalized lives. Jacobs pretty much condemned these practices as soul crushing, community destroying and deadening. This type of planning favored automobiles and new ideas on economic development, such as shopping malls. Hand in hand with single-use zoning was the practice of urban renewal. The legacy of urban renewal, or 'urban removal' as it is commonly known, was an overwhelmingly bleak one in America. Traditional and vibrant neighborhoods, landmarks and buildings were razed to 'make way' for the clean, well-ordered and rational modern city, most of which were utter failures. These were not just urban policies however. These ideas were everywhere.

New Mexico has two examples of how these city planning policies impacted our own city and town landscapes. There is Las Cruces to the south. In the 70s, a handful of gorgeously important historic buildings were razed. They were torn down to make way for a downtown strip mall which was to be the central component in a "downtown revitalization" plan. It was the death of downtown Las Cruces, which has been a vivid and beautiful place. The buildings included the St. Genevieve Parish, the Loretto Academy and the Rio Grande Hotel. Then there is Albuquerque to the north, and the similar destruction of the grand Alvarado Hotel. According to an editorial that ran a few days after its destruction, the hotel, which was in decline, was meant to be a a central component of downtown preservation and revitalization, but the city lacked the funds and will to save it. And so it became a parking lot. Across America built history was lost to memory.

The Loretto Academy building in Las Cruces.
http://archives.nmsu.edu/exhibits/loretto/index.html

Photo from the story Tearing out the Heart of Las Cruces by Denis Chavez
http://www.pasodelsur.com/news/chavez.html

Alvarado Hotel. Razed for parking, now the site of a vaguely creepy 'replica' that serves as a transportation center.
Photo from Duke City Fix.
http://www.dukecityfix.com/profiles/blogs/the-alvarado-has-come-back-for

Historic postcard photo of the Alvarado in the 1940s? Ebay auction site (sold).

So what does this have to do with the town of Truth or Consequences? A few very important things. The most important to this project, this place study on Truth or Consequences, is reflection. Jacobs sought to understand the "death and life of great American cities," through grounded case studies on place and a great deal of place reflection. In my own small way I too want to understand the death and life of "ordinary American towns" to some degree. I am spending a stretch of time in a place I am both immensely fond of and believe to be a fantastically illustrative case study on revitalization, preservation, economic growth and stagnation, opportunity, cohesion and conflict. In short, a lot of the things that small towns are struggling with across America. Jacobs book is a classic in urban planning. There are some great books on rural planning, but the focus on urban centers remains strong. The movement of urban dwellers to small towns, who join both the rooted, the recent transplants and those returning home, has refocused some attention on small towns. "Main Street," after all, was the foil against the lying, cheating, stealing and other evil excesses of "Wall Street." The "character" of a lot of small towns draws people. This is not the moral character generally, although it is often the characters. A great deal of the appeals, however, is the character of the built environment: the buildings, streets, landscapes and physical structures of a town. A lot of small towns escaped the 'rational' madness of planners and elected officials. They still have a core of historic buildings, traditionally built neighborhoods and business blocks. 

Some small towns were spared the destruction of urban renewal/removal by the virtue of their size. This worked in two ways. The first was the growth of cities. This was largely the result of wage labor overtaking agriculture labor and subsistence agricultural livelihoods, essentially stealing an entire generation from rural America who went in search of work and opportunity in urban centers. This was especially prevalent after WWII. The second thing that saved a lot of small towns from losing their 'hearts,' their landmarks, historic buildings and downtown business blocks, was the economic decline that accompanied the loss of the work force and traditional rural industries. The decline in small agriculture, base economic industries, such as mining and ranching, mom and pop stores shutting their doors, and the increase in urbanization, suburbanization, mechanization, big box retail and similar economic models impacted every landscape across America. But in small towns, and some lucky urban cities, there was no money to tear down vacant but lovely 19th and early 20th century buildings and put up those disco-hot models from the 1970s or make way for parking lots. Do note that buildings, like fashion, go out of style, but, if well-made, can come back as hip vintage. A good city or town fabric should be multi-era as well as multi-use. What looks dated now might be the cool boutique or bistro location in 20 years. The well-made part always applies but is not always evident. Place making is about what we do, like farmer's markets and walking trails, but it is also about what we don't do, like not tearing down a good building or not coming together to make things and places happen.  

Photo from chuckmancollectionvolume12.blogspot.com. 

There are a lot of things going on right now in rural America. Some of those vacant building are getting new life. People are rediscovering historic downtowns and the vibrancy of muli-use places. People are starting to realize that suburbs and other landscapes built for automobiles at the expense of being built for people, who do happen to own and love cars, are not sustainable or pleasant models. Handmade and local crafts and foods are experiencing a renaissance. Don't get me wrong here. These is not a blog about shiny-bright cumbaya moments where small town folk are showing that can-do rural spirit of sufficiency, calling out each other by name out on Main Street and trading baskets of peaches for legal advice. But it is a blog about some of those good things, so it may reflect a little of that singing around the campfire feeling. There is a lot of hard-work going on in Truth or Consequences. This means a lot of good-tasting, fun-loving, cultural shaping, community and collaborative place making happening. What may look like a bunch of seemingly random posts in my chapter 4 dissertation blog may in fact be a bunch of random posts. This is how it seems to me at the moment. I am sure there is some agreement among my handful of readers. The hope is at the end, and maybe even towards the middle, that patterns will emerge, a few worthy observations will be made, skills in interviewing and reflection will get better, and this will ultimately result in tidy and not-so-random record of a year in this town. 

Much of my critique of both the town and of larger place narratives, what we say about places, and place making practices, what we do in places, will happen in my dissertation. Critical assessment and critical theory, in the old-fashioned academic sense of looking carefully at ideas of power, influence, historical repression, violence, race, class and other ways that the power of place is realized and enacted, will not be entirely absent from these writing here. But at present I just don't know enough. And I don't think this is the right place for too much academic speak. But even as a glass half-full and plenty-enough-to-share kind of person, the questions about the state of the well and aquifer need to be followed up and investigated. But until then, bottoms up. 

Returning to the original focus of planning, a few buildings have come crashing down in Truth or Consequences in the last few weeks. The first was the downtown Buckhorn Salon, long-abandoned but still charming enough to warrent a lot of small town abandoned biulding 'character' shots on-line. According to the Sentinal, there was concern that the building could collapse on its own during Fiestas. As another story by Frances Luna in the Sentinal tells a more complete story:  

If the City of Truth or Consequences had a skyline comprised of its downtown buildings, it has forever been changed. The once hopping Buckhorn Bar on Main Street was demolished into a pile of rubble, hauled offand now sits as two vacant lots Once the thriving downtown pub for locals, miners, ranchers and visitors alike, the Buckhorn Bar had set motionless for nearly 30 years, being used only by vagrants, graffiti artists and the owners as a storage. Earlier this year the City of Truth or Consequences pushed on with the condemnation proceedings, after notices had been sent to either bring the building into a safe condition or have it demolished, failed. Once on the historical register, the Buckhorn’s owners, Jim and Bettie Brannon fought the city’s demolition movement to no avail. The Brannon’s cited attempting to get grants to return the building to a useable state. However, it appeared as though the years of abandonment had ruined the historical bar beyond a saving grace. The destruction order was given for the week of July 2. But the traditional trait of the owners carried on, and at the eleventh hour the Brannon’s asked the city to give them one more week in order that they could retrieve the contents from the building, including the bar, which were said to be sold. Their request was granted...

Photo from gpkmedia.com

Photo from the Luna Sential story (see above)

Photo by author 8/7/2012

The other building that came down was the 'disco-hot' addition to the lovely historic downtown building by the City Hall. I remember going to dances there in the 8th grade, and felt a little nostalgic about seeing it come down. All of that lovely lava-rock and the feeling of a school portable ultimately had to go though. There will be a charrette, I hear, on August 24th and 25th to start the conversation about what to do with this prime center-town location. A "charrette," is a french word for 'little cart,' and comes from the design practice of professors sending a little cart around for student drawings, and the mad rush to complete them before deadlines that had students flinging themselves onto said carts. What is the appeal to design professionals, architects, planners and the like, to use this obscure word to bring the public together? Because the Historic Preservation and Regionalism graduate and professional certificate program is housed in the UNM School of Architecture and Planning, I am generally the only non-design professional in the room. Like the RC & D Councils of the last post, there is inevitably a shared and secret language in any discipline. Perhaps the word is used because in the process of telling people what it is, you can also stress how important creative and collaborative planning to creating great places. Half full? 

Photo by author 8/8/2012 

A charrette, according to The Town Paper (http://www.tndtownpaper.com)  is "an intensive planning session where citizens, designers and others collaborate on a vision for development. It provides a forum for ideas and offers the unique advantage of giving immediate feedback to the designers. More importantly, it allows everyone who participates to be a mutual author of the plan." According to Wikipedia, a "charrettes take place in many disciplines, including land use planning, or urban planning.  In planning, the charrette has become a technique for consulting with all stakeholders. This type of charrette (sometimes called an enquiry by design) typically involves intense and possibly multi-day meetings, involving municipal officials, developers, and residents. A successful charrette promotes joint ownership of solutions and attempts to defuse typical confrontational attitudes between residents and developers." So basically, it is a public meeting where ideas and solutions to "what to do" with places are put forth. A good friend recently told me that the quickest way to ruin a public space is to give it to the public. 

Photo by author 8/8/2012

Collaboration is  more than just the public though, is meant to bring all parties to the table--public, private, professional, blue-collar, business, creative, young, old, rich, struggling, optimist, nay-sayer--the whole lot. Sort of like Fiesta crowds. But most people who I have talked to repeat the idea that the the same handful of folks show up all over the place. But this is the heart of the heart of Truth or Consequences, and the consequences of this decision are far-reaching. It would be nice to see the glass overflowing in this instance. 

Fiesta 2012
http://www.torcnm.org/images.html 

City panoramic looking south.
http://www.torcnm.org/images.html 

     

RC & D Councils: Local People Making Local Places

The Jornada RC&D Council, Inc. teamed up with the USDA. Bureau of

Reclamation (BOR), and a private landowner to address a

critically eroding area of abandoned cropland in Sierra County.

Lucy Lippard, in The Lure of the Local, begins her second chapter "Being in Place" with a quote from Marlene Creates. "The land is important to me. But even more important is the idea that it becomes a 'place' because someone has been there."… Lippard weaves history, reflection, philosophy, personal narrative and examples into her work on place to create a book that is highly informative, deeply enjoyable and useful book. This last quality is important. The book is useful because it shows how places come into being prosper, fade, revive or disappear. It is useful because it teaches its audience something about place and how place is talked about by academics without being academic. It is useful because it shows how important people are in shaping the landscape where we live….

Philosopher Bertrand Russel argues that "if all men were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society." Though we may never get to this point of well-to-do, it is a good sentiment. There are a lot of people who work tirelessly to do useful things, in order to make good places. People may differ in what makes a good place, but most can agree that the sum of places, the identity, feel, look and sense of a place comes from what people do, say and believe. This is place making. This is the hard work of being useful that is easily overlooked, often unrewarded and generally unrecognized. This is the sort of work that Resource Conservation and Development Councils do. If there always "remains much to be done to produce a valuable society," RC & D Councils are out doing it… 

Resource Conservation and Development Councils have not, historically, been showy organizations. Made up of ranchers and  private landowners, volunteers of all sorts, and agency partners, RC & D Councils did their hard work without the fanfare that accompanies similar work in communities where stakeholders are, for example, elected officials. This is evident in the length of the project description.

Jornada RC&D Council, Inc.
2101 S. Broadway
Truth Or Consequences, NM 87901

Palomas Creek Abandoned Cropland Protection Project

The Jornada RC&D Council, Inc. teamed up with the USDI Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), and a private landowner to address a critically eroding area of abandoned cropland in Sierra County. The council received a generous donation from a nearby landowner and native grass seed from the BOR to set this project in motion. The local Soil and Water Conservation District (Sierra SWCD) provided manpower and native plant transplants for an herbaceous wind barrier. Total project cost was $4000.00 of which $3500 was in-kind from BOR and Sierra SWCD to treat 22 acres.

Area after seeding 22 acres and installing a 1320’ herbaceous wind barrier

                         Results of seeding and herbaceous wind barrier after 1 growing season: Wind erosion reduced from an estimated 15 tons annually to less than 5.

HISTORY OF RESOURCE CONSERVATION & DEVELOPMENT COUNCILS

The following history was borrowed from the Western RC & D website, which also featured the "success story" featured above. All of the stories are worth reading at http://www.westernrcd.org/about.htm. RC & D Councils across the nation are struggling to maintain their community presence. There is more on that below…

Resource Conservation and Development is a program of the United States Department of Agriculture.  It was created by a provision of the Food and Agriculture Act of 1962.  The Secretary of Agriculture gave Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS - formerly Soil Conservation Service) responsibility for administering the program.  RC&D is based on the assumption that local citizens, with help provided through the USDA, can develop and carry out an action oriented plan for the social, economic and environmental enrichment of their communities…

The purpose of RC&D is to promote conservation, development and utilization of natural resources; to improve the general level of economic activity; and to enhance the environmental and standard of living in all communities.  The aim is to provide a system of rural development, encourage the wise use of natural resources, and improve the quality of life in America…

Not many people have heard of Resource Conservation and Development Councils. Neither had I before I sat in on a meeting last Thursday of the Jornada RC & D Council at the Sierra County County Soil and Water Conservation District building in Truth or Consequences. (Sierra SWCD). Academics get a lot of grief for jargon, which they should, but to get really lost, try sitting in on a meeting full of people who have worked for a couple of decades doing things in rural America, especially through the multitude of agencies, organizations, bureaus and the like. The acronyms are so thick you want subtitles. It is a foreign world for a minute, until you realize every local place you have ever been is connected to these initials. From the BOR, or Bureau of Reclamation's Elephant Butte Dam and the Hatch chile that get irrigated from their water to the NPS, or National Park Service, where our watersheds are protected, from the BLM, or Bureau of Land Management, who manages the vast federal lands in the West, public lands that fund out schools, the sheer number of organizations is staggering.

From the website http://www.westernrcd.org/about.htm.:

Local people know what is best for their communities. That is the core premise of the Resource Conservation and Development (RC&D) Program and the key to its success. The RC&D Program provides a development process that is unique in that it is driven by a passion to mobilize local, state and national resources to address economic, social, and environmental and quality of life issues on the ground where those issues occur. Often that ground is rural America and the partnerships formed are rooted in the communities being served.

The hallmark of the program is its diversity and scope. There is no one RC&D model. There are 375 local RC&D Councils across the United States and several of its territories. Each council is made up of local leaders of all types who know their communities well. These volunteers are driven by a passion to serve their home places. They identify the challenges their communities are facing, forge partnerships to take on those challenges…

The focus on local direction and control has made the RC&D Program one of the Federal government’s most successful rural development programs, with RC&D Councils able to leverage approximately $7 for every Federal dollar invested in the program. Today, More than 32,000 volunteers are serving on and with RC&D councils.  The 375 RC&D Councils are located in all 50 states, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Basin and serve a combined 85% of all US counties and 77% of the total US population.

Comments from the Gallery:

RC & D are currently struggling to re-envision their organizations. They are organized as 501c3 not-for-profit organizations but until recently had federally-funded coordinators. While these coordinators were never meant to stay on indefinitely, the loss of the one paid employee has left most councils in a bind. While some are thriving, many have been lost or are in danger of being lost in our rural communities. The people who get together to work tirelessly to make our places safe, economically viable, sustainable, beautiful, productive, bountiful, and enjoyable, can only do so much in their spare time as volunteers. The Jornada RC & D is where I have begun the cataloging of the many organizations that work in our local communities, and there are a lot. A little because it is struggling to re-tool itself, but also because it is so obscure. This is obviously one of the challenges that it faces. But mostly because it builds on the argument I began in the last post (Where Everybody Knows Your Name). This is the idea that volunteers are being asked to do more and more. And one of the ways they are supposed to do it is with grant money, if you can find a volunteer to find and write a grant. 

This is a trend that seems to be everywhere. It is the shifting of money from hard money, line item budget money, to soft money, cyclically awarded grant money, in public works. More to come on this idea of a "trend" (if it is one, and a lot of community people I know attest to this fact) as research develops. To what extent it is happening, and where it is happening is important for a lot of reasons. It potentially shifts the money of community funding for services to a whole new model….. You have to ask people to do for free what used to be funded. Additionally, in order to get the soft money, the grant money, to provide the services that used to be funded, you need to get people together. Although it is a model, like volunteering, where a few people do a LOT of work, soft money still usually demands a higher level of community and civic collaboration than hard money and paid positions. This may be a good thing in some, but only if you have a town that has a committed and collaborative spirit. Thus far, a month into my research on Truth or Consequences, there are a lot of promising signs…