Registration is now open for our upcoming webinar: How Community Benefit Agreements Can Support Rural Communities, June 3, 12 p.m. ET.
Community Benefit Agreements (CBA) are a tool that rural communities can utilize to help secure a future for their community in a way that works for the community. You’ll hear from rural community members who have utilized CBAs. Through their experiences, reflection, and time to connect with others on the webinar, you’ll leave understanding how you might use CBAs in your area. Whether you are navigating data center development or another type of development, join us to learn more about Community Benefit Agreements.
This is second of four educational deep dives presented by the Rural Assembly this year. In March, In March, Rural Assembly gathered with folks from across the country to learn more about the rapid expansion of data centers and the impact of that development in rural areas. (The data center webinar replay is available on Youtube.)
As we closed that webinar, the call to learn more about tools communities can use to support their planning and agency was loud. From that session emerged a theme for the year: Given the inherent power imbalances, how do small and rural communities navigate big outside pressures? Together with Radically Rural and presenter Annie Contractor, we are preparing three webinars that will answer this call for more tools and address the question of how rural communities can navigate outside pressures.
Given the inherent power imbalances, how do small and rural communities navigate big outside pressures?
A Framework for these Sessions
The framework for the webinar series is based on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), methodologies developed through decades of grassroots practice across the Global South.
These approaches speak directly to the experience of many rural US communities because they were designed for places facing similar structural realities: economies built on extraction rather than investment, communities treated as disposable rather than permanent, and power concentrated elsewhere while the consequences land locally.
While Robert Chambers is often credited with codifying PRA in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the approach emerged from collaborative work by practitioners in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa who were dissatisfied with extractive research methods that treated rural people as data sources rather than knowledge holders. Key contributors include James Mascarenhas, Vidya Ramachandran, and colleagues at MYRADA in South India, who developed Participatory Learning Methods working in thousands of villages; Orlando Fals Borda and collaborators in Colombia who created Participatory Action Research with peasant movements facing failed land reform; Paulo Freire’s conscientization work with landless communities in Brazil; and M.L. Swantz’s participatory research in Tanzania.
These practitioners shared a core insight that translates directly to rural organizing in the US: communities already possess the knowledge needed to understand their own situations. What’s often missing isn’t information but the tools to analyze it collectively, the recognition that local knowledge counts as expertise, and the frameworks for turning analysis into action.
PRA’s tool-oriented approach makes the methods themselves mechanisms of empowerment – the act of mapping your watershed or ranking community priorities with your neighbors is what builds the capacity to act, not a separate “training” imposed from outside.
We look forward to learning with and from you this year. Want to hear about future webinars? Sign up for the Rural Assembly newsletter.
June 3 | 12 p.m. ET
Presented by Rural Assembly, Radically Rural, and Annie Contractor
