By Annie Contractor
In rural communities across the nation, residents and civic leaders are thrust into debates about the future of their towns: will they become home to a data center? Would it bring needed jobs? Would it be a health and environmental risk? How does a small community work with a large corporation? How do residents make their desires known to their local governments?
Earlier this year, more than 200 people gathered online to discuss these issues. Following that webinar, the team at Rural Assembly considered what we learned and what topics we should focus upon for the rest of the year. A theme emerged for what these four sessions should focus on: given the inherent power imbalances, how do small and rural communities navigate big outside pressures?
A second workshop, which focuses on community benefit agreements (CBAs) will be held June 3. (Sign up to join us here!). As we approach the session, we wanted to share how we’re approaching this webinar series — with a framework that holds this to be true: communities already possess the knowledge needed to understand, plan, and act on their own situations.
The framework for our 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. We will use this method to help draw out the commonalities within experiences across diverse rural communities and diverse outside pressures, such as closing hospitals, consolidation in the agriculture markets, or declining birth rates causing declining school enrollments (and, consequently, decreasing school budgets.)
The PRA and PLA approaches speak directly to the experience of many rural American 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, a British academic primarily at the University of Sussex and international development practitioner, 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 Mysore Resettlement and Development Agency (MYRADA), a non-governmental organization in South India that has been involved in rural development since 1968, 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 United States: communities already possess the expertise and ownership needed to plan and enact their desired futures. 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 seeing how this framework can shape our time together this year as so many of you face outside pressures in your communities.
Next workshop
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.
Our guest for the webinar will be Jackson Rose, faculty in the Department of Earth Sciences at Montana State University and Manager of the Geospatial Core Facility. Before joining MSU, he served as Executive Director of a grassroots group in Central Montana, where he led efforts to negotiate a Community Benefits Agreement tied to the Black Butte Copper Project. He has since worked with communities across the West on similar efforts. Drawing on both his scholarly research and that hands-on experience, Jackson was an invited expert panelist for the National Academies’ May 2024 workshop, Leveraging Community Benefit Frameworks: Empowering Communities to Benefit from Federally Funded Energy Projects.
