Whitney Kimball Coe:

Welcome back to Everywhere Radio. I’m your host, Whitney Kimball Coe. Teresa Kittridge is the founder of 100 Rural Women, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that focuses on creating connections and inspiring women in rural Minnesota and elsewhere to greater leadership. Through workshops and gatherings, support groups, coffee hours, book clubs, and a leadership exchange program, 100 Rural Women cultivates relationships among women and provides them with more tools to connect and lead.

Teresa lives in Marcel Township in northern Minnesota and has spent much of her life serving rural people across the country, with a career that includes executive level leadership in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, as well as serving in elected office. The first 20 years of her career were spent serving as an officer of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

Following her time in the legislature, she built the Washington DC office of RPRI, the Rural Policy Research Institute, and served as its director of national programs. She has over a decade of experience in leading and building national and international businesses, as a publishing executive for Minnesota-based Coughlin companies, and then as founder and president of Minnesota Renewable Energy Marketplace, a nonprofit organization.

Teresa returned to RPRI in 2014 as Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. She’s also an active civic and community volunteer. She’s an elected trustee and secretary of the board for the Big Fork Valley Hospital, Northern Itasca Hospital District. She serves on Marcel Township Business Loan Committee and on committees of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Rural Innovation. She also served as board chair and as a director on the Waconia School board.

She holds an MA in organizational leadership and a BA business administration, and I’m just so glad she’s here with us today on Everywhere Radio. I mean, what a resume and what a life you’re leading, Teresa.

Teresa Kittridge :

Well it’s been, I feel really blessed and honored to be able to do the things that I’ve done and that I get to do now, and I’m just really excited to be here with you today.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

I was thinking about how I’ve known you since the beginning of my career and as a rural advocate really. I mean, I think I started at Rural Strategies and the summer of 2008 and my first, the immersive experience that I had was coming to Washington DC for our first rural assembly that we did in conjunction with Standup for Rural America. And I know RPRI was a steering committee member of the Rural Assembly for a very long time. And I’m pretty sure that’s where we first met was in 2008, which is like 15 years ago.

Teresa Kittridge:

Yes. Yeah.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

And so I was thinking about during that time of rural policy advocacy, how different the environment was and also how similar it was to now. But I wonder if you would just reflect with me for a minute about what was the rural policy landscape then? And what was the role that you felt like you were playing? And what were the conversations that were happening back in 2008, 2010 area?

Teresa Kittridge:

Yeah. And I’m even going to take you back a little further because when I started working for RPRI and really building more of a DC presence because we’re a heartland-based institute, always have been, but we needed that DC presence. And so that takes me back to late nineties, early two thousands, and it was a very different time in Washington DC. And one of the amazing pieces of work that I got to be involved in was rebuilding the rural caucus in the house side.

So I worked with a couple incredible congresswoman, representative Eva Clayton from Carolina, and Joanne Emerson from Missouri, so Republican and Democrat working together to figure out how do we lift up the rural differential and how do we rebuild the caucus and get outside the politics, but really talk about what’s important and how can we best serve rural people?

The beauty of that work was, well, number one, getting to work with these two women who were superstars, and were such advocates for their people and for rural America. And beyond that, I got to work with some of the bigger NGOs in DC, national government organizations like NATO and NACO, and build a national rural network, which was a network of rural stakeholders that usually were always fighting over the same little piece of pie for rural. But it was bringing people together from the Farmers Union, Farm Bureau, Bankers Association, you name it, rural stakeholders that are in DC working for rural people. And to bring folks together to really think about what are a couple issues we can agree on that we can support the rural caucus on, that we can bring more membership into the rural caucus. So that was one of the most incredible experiences for me.

And it was great for me to come into that crew in DC because it really helped me have more depth and better understanding of all the issues that face rural America and figure out how could I be a better advocate for rural people. And with RPRI, nonpartisan, really our issues were rural and it was really a great opportunity for us to build this network and to be able to work with policymakers. And was it still political? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Congress has always been political.

But everybody interacted. That’s what’s missing. And that’s what I saw and rode as we headed into the two thousands and got to 2008, got to today, that whole personal relationship piece where people get to know each other as people first. And that’s always been my premise. Those are the pieces that I think have really changed when I think about rural policy, rural conversations, even the way we handle data or the lack of the way we handle data about rural people, how data is collected at a federal level and how funding formulas work for rural. I think that’s another thing that has changed quite a bit.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So probably once a week, Teresa, I’m asked by someone via email or in a meeting that I’m in to give the definition of rural America. What is rural is the question oftentimes and often it’s followed up by, and why does it matter? And I wonder if you also contend with that question fairly regularly, and if you have a good response, a solid response.

Teresa Kittridge :

Yeah. I just had this experience a couple weeks ago with an organization I’m partnering with to do some civic engagement and just some leadership training. And one of the graphics that they put together was that we had zero women from rural serving in our state senate. And I’m like, not true. No, we have women in Duluth, we have women in Rochester. So some of our regional hubs, our regional cities. And they are defined urban and those counties are because of the data and federal definitions.

And I’m like, oh, well, you better believe those women are representing me as a rural woman, and maybe they have the city, but they have townships also. You have to be broader. So I get that question a lot, and I have a very broad definition of rural, because as I said, population’s one measure, but it’s geography. And people ask me like, “Oh, what’s different between rural and urban women?”

There aren’t any differences. We have differences as far as access to resources. Geographically we’re different, but as far as our issues, they’re the same. I mean, it’s just that we have different levels, different barriers that we have to come across with geography. And so yeah, I get the question a lot. I’m very broad. We did a hundred meetings across the state of Minnesota when we started this organization to really learn about what what are the challenges and barriers women face, what are strategies to overcome them?

And we had meetings in every county. We have 87 counties. Only one county in our state I would say does not have a rural geographic area, and that’s where our state capital is in Ramsey County. But a lot of people that live and work in Ramsey County are working on rural issues. So we did meetings in every county, and I tell you, I came across challenges where people are like, “Well, yeah, but I’m not rural. Why would I come?” It’s like, but you are. You live in a rural geography.

So it is a tough one to explain. But with this organization I was working with the last couple weeks, we had a really good discussion about what is rural and are you just defining by population? That’s a bad way to define rural. So I had just talked a couple people over the last couple weeks about we need to put some kind of definition on our website to talk about rural and what is that rural definition as far as we see it. I just think it’s very broad. And I’ll just throw in, I know I’ve said it a couple times, but geography tells a lot of the story.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So geography, when you say geography, are you also thinking along the lines of culture too, what it means to live in a place without access to those resources, but maybe access to other kinds of resources like social capital or community or natural resources or those sorts of things. Is there kind of a cultural element to the geography that you’re talking about?

Teresa Kittridge:

There absolutely is. And from the work I did at RPRI and that I’ve always believed in my whole life, it’s a place-based policy, place-based decision making. But so much of that is getting defined by federal and state funding formulas. Rural has just become sort of a, people don’t like to define themselves as rural. I was just doing a little research on some civic engagement work due this weekend and I was looking at a township in an area, and they call themselves an urban township, and there are 1600 people. And I was like, I’m very curious to talk to, and I do want to talk with them about why would you define yourself as a urban township?

So I’m always really intrigued in how people define themselves and how they define their place. But so much of that gets defined for us by the resources that we have access to also. And culture’s a big piece of it. How we build our culture and how we build a positive culture for the people that we live with and we interact with and that we raise there and that we take care of there. I think we should be very proud of being rural.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Well, and of course I’m with you on that. Rural Assembly is with you on that and you mentioned rural women earlier and how rural and urban women are, they’re the same in a lot of ways facing a lot of the same issues. But you and this organization, a hundred rural women have decided to uplift and focus on the rural aspect of women’s lives. And I wonder, tell me a little bit about 100 Rural Women. Who are these hundred? Are there truly a finite number that you’re working with or are there more?

Teresa Kittridge:

Yeah, that’s a good question. So it isn’t just a hundred. It can be a hundred gathering one place, it can be a thousand, it can be ten thousand, it could be a hundred thousand, it could be a million, is what I would love to see. 100 Rural Women was, when we pulled the name together, it was just, what a great organizing principle to just think about building in hundreds.

And so when we did our market research, it’s like, you know what? We’re going to do a hundred meetings. We’re going to do a hundred meetings across the state. We’re going to have a hundred ideas. When I started a 100 Rural Women, and I always say not to get political, but to get political, that 2016 election was really defining for me because I was just looking on a national stage of how women were being discussed, dismissed, all those pieces and how rural America was being painted with this broad brush.

And not that some of that painting is inaccurate, definitely as in a lot of our geographies, but I was like, that’s not the rural America I know. And my solution to deal with the divisiveness and all of these things that are negatively impacting our rural communities is to have more representative government, more representative communities of people that live in the community. And we’re at 51% of the population. We are not there as far as representation.

Men are just traditionally more hierarchical. And that’s because that’s the system that was built. Women are more collaborative. Not all women and not all men fit into those boxes. But women have a more collaborative approach to leadership and decision making. I think in order for rural America to prosper, we need to be more collaborative. But women lead every day in these communities, but they aren’t necessarily making the decisions as far as investments, policy, all those pieces. I just think that we need change. We need systemic change, and we need to make sure that it’s women, it’s women of color, it’s people that live in our communities from socioeconomic to, you name it, so we have a better, more diverse representation in what guides us.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So all of those meetings or gatherings you engaged in at the very beginning across all those counties, what were some of the surprising things that maybe you heard that informed how you wanted to shape this initiative? And what were some of the other barriers or places of excitement that were touched upon?

Teresa Kittridge:

Yeah, and it’s interesting because people would say, oh my God, why are you doing a hundred meetings? And it’s like, well, number one, because we’re 100 Rural Women. But number two, we have 87 counties and we’re piloting, we’re starting this in Minnesota, and I want to make sure that we hear all the voices.

But I think that one of the things that was surprising to me in a way, but not that surprising, is confidence, that women need leadership confidence. They need places where they can practice leadership. They need areas where they can have safe spaces. And you know this. The research shows it takes seven or nine times just on the public side to get a woman to even consider running for office. Where when you talk to most men, it’s sort of like, oh yeah, I could do that.

So women really feel that they need to know all the issues and have everything prepared and have all this experience before they’ll even put their toe in the water. We need to figure out how do we build confidence, and what we heard from women is they need public acknowledgement, they need encouragement, we need to support each other. I mean, that’s what this organization is about. How can we better support each other as rural women?

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So Teresa, you’ve done all of these meetings, you’ve started all of these programs within 100 Rural Women. How are you conceiving of success? What is success looking like? I don’t want to ask about measurements or anything like that, but just tangibly, what looks like success?

Teresa Kittridge:

Yeah, I think for us for success with those hundred meetings, I mean that we had 2000 ideas that came out of that. It’s really helped us shape our programming. We now have a weekly newsletter that goes out and we have 6,500 people who are on that with MailChimp. So I see that as success.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

I’m on it.

Teresa Kittridge:

Yay. I think success is, one of the measurements of success is we really built this organization with young women. We launched our official, we are just building and got a board up and we’re ready to roll. And then of course, as all of this, Covid hit, and we were really fortunate that we had a couple professors that I knew who called who had interns losing their internships because of Covid, and asked if we could take a couple interns. So that first summer we had five interns and we had seven interns.

We at least have that many. We also tapped into graduate students. These young women really have a lot of influence and perspective that helps drive our organization because what we want to do is create a world that they want to be part of. And we just did get recognized by the college compact, when I think about students as a president’s award for being a community partner. And to me that was such an amazing award because it is about young people and it is about how do we make a better place for young people in rural and make space for them in rural and give them opportunities not to just have a voice, but to lead, to lead.

And that’s what we’re all about at a 100 Rural Women is how can we best practice leadership, give other people and anybody that wants to be involved, opportunities to lead. We’re just launching into a mentorship program and we want to go across sectors. We want to do civic, private, nonprofit. We’re starting on the civic side. Every one of those 20 women that we interviewed who are super busy elected officials and former elected officials all said, “I’ll be a mentor. I’ll be a mentor.”

So the other measure I give for success is, oh my gosh, success and not success. Success is I meet the most incredible women every week. Oh my gosh. It’s absolutely amazing. I love doing webinars because it’s so many new people that come in, because depending on the topic. Probably the downside of that is we don’t have the human capacity, resources, financial capacity to make all the connections we want.

We do these at 8:30 in the morning, just open networking for 30 minutes a week, and we have different people every week. People make the best connections and figure out, oh, you do that. Well, I could help with that. And it’s just an amazing. There’s no topic. It’s not scripted. People just want to get together and talk.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So I wonder what’s next for you and for 100 Rural Women, and actually you’re still doing a million other things. I was looking through your bio and you’re serving on boards and doing all kinds of things locally. So what’s sort of on your horizon?

Teresa Kittridge:

Well, for my horizon right now, we’re really focused on mentorship and how do we build that across sector. I think that’s really key to our work. And when you think about the six themes that came out of our research, that was the one thread through all of it.

And not just mentorship like you and I meet once a month and I’m old, you’re young, I give you advice. No, no, no. It’s circular mentorship. And how do we each learn from each other? And maybe you want to make a career switch. Maybe you’re interested in renewable energy. Well, who do we know who’s a woman in renewable energy that could spend 30 minutes with you to talk a little bit about the industry and connect you?

So that’s really, with 100 Rural Women, we’re really focused on how do we start building those? And we’re building all of our pilots in Minnesota. And the goal is to me, I’m like a hundred meetings in Minnesota, a hundred meetings across the nation, a hundred meetings globally. So that’s sort of our trajectory, but we want to make sure we have the resources that we can follow through. I want to figure out what I can do not as an individual, but as an organizational leader, to figure out who takes this forward and how can I support that person or those people to take this forward and serve women?

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Those are all incredibly important things. And I hear the energy for all of it in your voice. So that is very exciting.

Teresa Kittridge :

That’s what keeps me going though. I mean, there are days, believe me, where I’m like, what the heck am I doing?

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Oh, good. I’m not the only person who feels that way sometimes.

Teresa Kittridge:

It’s like, oh, you’re doing such great work. It’s like, great, could you give me some resources to support that work? But then what happens is I get to have a conversation like this, or I get to meet someone that’s doing incredible work that we need to share. I mean, I’m all about why create the, why recreate the wheel? If there’s women out there doing really cool work, organizations doing cool work, we don’t want to replicate that. We want to build that. We want to share that. So how do we make those connections?

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So one more question. Thinking about long-term vision, if women were there in government and from the local to the national level, if it was the right ratio, what would be different? I mean, what sort of change would that make for all of us?

Teresa Kittridge:

I think women have a more collaborative style of leadership, which I think is really important, especially in some of the divisiveness that we’re living in right now to figure out how we can be more collaborative and not as hierarchical.

But I also think that by not having women right now at the decision making table, our experiences and our views, our perspectives aren’t being represented. So what I see happening is if we can get more women into leadership, just our experiences will be better reflected. And you’re seeing microcosms of that around the country in different legislatures and different governors and some of the local governments where we have more women. And it is different policies, it’s different focus.

And so we’re seeing that happen around the country. In Minnesota, we’re passing legislation that is very different than has in the past because we have women leading in both of our chambers, and it’s a different policy focus. So I just see it would be more representative policy.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So Teresa, I’m excited to ask you the question that I ask all my guests towards the end of the show. And that is, what are you reading, watching, or listening to right now that is bringing you joy or is challenging you in all the right ways and you’d want to share with our audience?

Teresa Kittridge:

I think a series that I’ve watched recently is called The Extraordinary Attorney Woo. And it’s this amazing series about a young woman who’s autistic in Korea, and she goes into practice law, and it’s just one of the most incredible series about this courageous young woman and just how she navigates. So I think that’s probably, when I think about watching, that’s been a really amazing, amazing series that I would recommend to people.

And I was just thinking of books too. Oh my gosh. So we have a book group at 100 Rural Women and it’s been wonderful for me because I’m reading books I would never read and authors I would never read. And our one qualifier is that it has to be about rural or by somebody. So that’s been a really incredible experience. And I’m thinking probably Isabelle Wilkerson is probably, when I think about some of the books that we’ve read, I think her books on race have been, and culture have just been probably some of the most interesting books that I have read. I’m just getting started on Caste now.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Yeah, that’s wonderful. And I’m on your list serve, so I get those updates about what it is you’re reading, and oftentimes I’m inspired to pick it up myself. And I agree Isabelle Wilkerson and Caste and the Warmth of other Suns is just so profound and important.

Teresa Kittridge:

It’s incredible. And I think the other piece that I really like about these book groups is I could never commit to a book group in the past because I traveled a lot for work and I couldn’t commit to being in the same place, same time each month and having my homework done.

And so the beauty of doing it virtually is people can join from wherever. And we have a big rule that you don’t have to have the book read, just come join us for the discussion. And it’s a real mix of people who like to read, people who like audiobooks, people who travel a lot. So that’s been a really neat thing. And then we have people from all over in different ages and different perspectives, and so that’s just been a great experience.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Wonderful. Well, Teresa, thank you so much for being on Everywhere Radio. It’s always wonderful to talk to you and see you, and I hope we get to keep talking in the future.

Teresa Kittridge:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to thank you for this opportunity too, and it’s so good to connect with you. And I just think we have a lot of positive potential and a lot of amazing things going on in rural, so I think the more we can all work together, the better. So yeah, I love it. Thank you.