March 2022 Episode of Solidarity Is This

Deepa Iyer:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the March episode of Solidarity Is This. I'm your host, Deepa Iyer. On the Solidarity Is This podcast, we explore the incentives of solidarity, as well as the sticky spots, through conversations and resources. This podcast is part of a bigger effort on solidarity that's housed at the Building Movement Project. Learn more at our brand new website, www.solidarityis.org. And if you haven't yet, please check out our podcast playlist for Black History Month, with episodes that explore black liberation available on our website.

Deepa Iyer:

As I tape this podcast, there is a lot happening around the world. The news headlines are about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and the lifting of mask regulations here at home. It's a time that undoubtedly brings up confusion, sorrow and uncertainty for all of us, on different levels. I hope that you're able to both find solace as well as ways to engage in social change work in your own communities.

Deepa Iyer:

This month, our podcast takes a look at what it means to cultivate solidarity with rural communities. I'm in conversation with Heidi Khokhar, the executive director of the Rural Development Initiative, or RDI. RDI is an organization that works in rural Idaho, Washington State, and Oregon, running programs that build rural leadership and civic engagement and revitalize rural economies. Heidi and I met through a collaborative that is exploring alternative forms of social change leadership. Through that work, Heidi and her team have been uplifting the importance of rural-centered leadership in advancing economic vitality and justice.

Deepa Iyer:

As Heidi and I got to know each other better, I realized how little I knew about rural America, from the demographics to the needs. So before we get to the conversation, here is a short quiz to assess your knowledge of rural communities. First, true or false, 32% of rural counties in the United States do not have a local bank? If you said, "True," you would be correct. Here is the second one. True or false, agriculture employs 25% of the rural workforce? Now, that is false. Agriculture actually employs less than 5% of the rural workforce. Service industries, manufacturing, and the energy sectors are the current economic drivers in rural America. Last question, true or false, people of color comprised 83% of the rural population growth between 2000 and 2010? That is true. In fact, immigrants seeking jobs drove nearly 40% of rural population growth between 2010 and 2016. These data points come from RDI and the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group.

Deepa Iyer:

So perhaps you got some of those right, perhaps you didn't, but either way, I think that you will find a lot of rich information in my conversation with Heidi Khokhar, coming up next. We talk about what solidarity between rural and urban communities looks like and what frames and narratives resonate with rural America and which don't. Here is our conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Heidi.

Heidi Khokhar:

Thank you, Deepa. It's so lovely to be here with you.

Deepa Iyer:

I'm really excited to be in conversation with you, Heidi, because we are starting to get to know each other, and I am really impressed by the work that you do in Oregon, so I want to start by just learning a little bit more about your point of entry into this work. What inspired you to get involved with social justice work, and in particular, with rural communities?

Heidi Khokhar:

So RDI, Rural Development Initiative, is an organization that I work for. It's over here covering Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. We're a nonprofit, and our work aims for community and economic vitality in rural communities.

Heidi Khokhar:

But how I came to it is that RDI was a place where I got a job at this nonprofit organization and I just got a little entry job. One of my jobs was to read strategic plans of communities, and one of the communities that I was reading the strategic plan for, it was for Charleston, Oregon, which is a small fishing community on the coast of Oregon. And they were struggling with the development of their community, the loss of their industry, and these community members had come together and had created this plan for vitality. And while reading it, what I recognized for the first time in my whole life, at the age of almost 30, was, I'm a rural kid, right? I'm from a rural place and I never identify. And these are my people and how lovely it is to help people, that are my people, work together to get things done for their selves and in their communities. And that became, then, both my identity, as a rural person, but also my career now. I have been here for 23 years.

Deepa Iyer:

Thank you for sharing that, Heidi. A lot of people who are listening probably don't have baseline information about rural communities, so I was wondering if we could start off with some data points that you might be able to share with us about the demographics of rural communities.

Heidi Khokhar:

Well, first of all, the definition of rural is something that we could, and many people do, by the way, spend all of our time talking about because it gets defined multiple different ways for multiple different agencies, and even within government, across agencies, it's not uniform. But one of my least favorite definitions is not urban. It's that space that's not urban. And I don't think rural places think of themselves that way. I think that there's this intrinsic value that we're missing with these definitions and that we're missing when we think of it as not urban because there is intrinsic value in the people, in the places, in the economies, in the natural resources that these people steward. Rural makes up the majority of our land mass in our country. 97% of all places of our country are rural. Nearly 80% of the high-poverty counties in our nation are in rural. Here's the number that I fight against a lot, rural receives 6% of all of the philanthropic investment. That's one in $16 for one in five people.

Deepa Iyer:

Wow, Heidi, those are really stark numbers. They're also numbers that I think a lot of us don't know. And you started talking a little bit about some of the needs in rural communities, and obviously, this is not all of a sudden, right? These are generational issues, so as a result of these generational systemic problems, what would you say are the top needs that are facing rural communities?

Heidi Khokhar:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). I'm going to answer this question from my own perspective, right? Rural communities would each answer them differently. I'm going to come in at economy first, right? This economic development piece, I'm going to come in at it first because it's the mission that I'm on, so rebuilding and creating rural sectors, bringing from the assets that are in community, developing small business and entrepreneurship in rural communities, so the idea of increasing local economy and locally-controlled economy, and that matching the needs, like local foods, childcare, community needs, with the assets and the business opportunities there are.

Heidi Khokhar:

So I know that's what's happening. I hope that we're done waiting for the silver bullet answer to come into communities, but we can rebuild sectors. We can rebuild sectors. I'm in Oregon and I'm from a timbered community. I was there, live, when the timber industry was leaving our community and that opportunity leaving, but it was one industry. And I think we kept waiting for that one other industry to come in and replace it, and I don't think our economies are going to look like that. They're going to be much more diversified. But what they cannot be is in service of urban. What they cannot be is service industry economies. That does not create the wealth needed to sustain these places.

Deepa Iyer:

Thank you. That was really super clear. What other needs do you think are pressing and how is RDI working on those?

Heidi Khokhar:

It is capacity building. It's the idea of building the capacity of local people to work together, to get things done, and to bring in the resources and the information and the other things that they need in order to get done what they want to get done. I'm a stark believer in local people should be driving local change, and so there's just not enough resources going into community and people who are doing this work, so the idea of building local capacity is huge. There is an enormous amount of poverty in Appalachia in the deep south, and not only that, but that is concentrated with people of color in those places.

Deepa Iyer:

As you look back over the last 20, 30 years where you are in Oregon, what are some of the root causes that come up?

Heidi Khokhar:

What I would say here is that we do not have an economic system in place that ever was designed to solve this problem, so how we're choosing to participate in it doesn't work for most of us, but it certainly is never designed to create success for rural places, and I'm not sure it ever was, right? This was always the working class. This was always the farmers and ag. It was always meant in service of something, and so I guess I feel like that extracted base economy is never going to work. It's not going to work for our trees and our birds and our deer, and it's not going to work for our rural people. And if you add rural people of color onto that, it's only exacerbated.

Deepa Iyer:

The silos are so real and there are silos everywhere, right? But you mentioned several times throughout our conversation, communities of color, so I want to dive into that a little bit more. How would you characterize issues of race in the rural communities you work in? So again, I think a lot of folks don't know that people of color also live in rural communities, right? So tell us a little bit about how issues of race show up and how communities of color living in rural areas are experiencing perhaps the double, triple impacts of what you've been sharing.

Heidi Khokhar:

If you saw me in my face, you would look at the whitest woman you've ever seen, but here I am. So there's part of this question that I feel incredibly uncomfortable answering, is, what do people of color feel like? I don't know the answer to that-

Deepa Iyer:

I appreciate you saying that.

Heidi Khokhar:

... but here's what I am going to say. I love it, and that's sarcasm, in the sarcasm font, that we have now put rural synonymous with the word white, and those are not. That is the first thing. And the problem is that that's not just from the outside. That is how all of us all have defined rural, and that isn't... Yeah, first of all, it's not true. I'm from Oregon. Oregon is 75% white. 11 of the 36 counties have a higher Hispanic population than the state average. Every one of those 11 counties are rural. There's eight counties where there's a higher population of native or native Alaskan population. We're getting more and more colorful. We're getting more and more diverse, and-

Deepa Iyer:

So tell us-

Heidi Khokhar:

... also, these are the poorest of the rural poor, right? We have nine federally-recognized tribes, many more that are not. These are the poorest of the rural poor, our American Indians and our indigenous population.

Deepa Iyer:

What are you hearing from the communities of color that you work with in rural communities? If they're part of rural lead or other programs that you're doing, entrepreneur programs, what are their demands? What are their hopes and dreams?

Heidi Khokhar:

They want their own tables, which is an interesting thing that came out of the rural lead, is, we don't want to just be involved in your tables. We want our own tables to build our own strength and our own power. We want to have the ability to explore our own issues from our own lenses, and not your gaze, and not your lens, and we want to be included. So diversity, equity, inclusion, the words necessarily aren't prevalent in the community, let alone the practices, and so I feel like that is true for BIPOC communities, as well as the white population.

Deepa Iyer:

Thank you for sharing that and making it so clear too, Heidi, because when you were speaking about that, it really reminded me of some of the work we do on solidarity, which we'll pivot to next. But before we move on to the solidarity piece, I do want to give you a little bit more time to talk about RDI's work in the rural equity space.

Heidi Khokhar:

How do you center equity and what does it mean to do that? Right now, we are skilling up. So to me, we, as facilitators, are working on the frame, and getting the frame of equity right, and how that works in rural places, because the frame is different from a culture of rural, which can be conservative in nature, certainly more tight-knit than urban, certainly more collective and community-based, so in some ways, there's opportunity. But the words really do matter when you're talking about equity work, or what you would call solidarity work, in rural places.

Deepa Iyer:

So it depends on where you are, in terms of the language you use and the frame you use. But one of the things that I learned, that I'm going to try to incorporate in the work that we do, is what you said around language matters. And so, we need to understand how some of our language could be off-putting, or might not resonate, or might just be like, what are you talking about, right, and really centering the values that people hold, and using their language to describe.

Heidi Khokhar:

Well, thank you. That's lovely. That's [crosstalk]-

Deepa Iyer:

No, and there's so much more, so much more. So let me close by asking you about any calls to action that you have, for our audience. How can we support, amplify, and work more closely with rural communities?

Heidi Khokhar:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). We are far from equity in our country, and where that shows up the clearest for me is in rural places, and where I can see the clearest path forward in ways that don't divide us upon racial lines is in the rural-urban diversity and that rural-urban inequity, because it's there. So I encourage you to become rural curious, and I encourage your audience to become rural curious, and ultimately, maybe rural active, but certainly rural curious. What is going on up there? What is opportunity for us in this work?

Heidi Khokhar:

I think that the other call of action is, really, this personal thing that I have of... is that considering that inclusion might mean including people and places that you don't agree with fiercely. But it really is my experience, that when we stop focusing on our positions and start focusing on our interests, on our issues, and the things that we are trying to solve together, we might just get to those solutions.

Deepa Iyer:

You're right. We get so focused on our positions and we don't talk about what our common interests are. Heidi, this has been an amazing conversation. I'm actually really glad that we're getting to know each other personally and, hopefully, get to work together more. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Heidi Khokhar:

Oh, Deepa, it has been a pleasure, and I have loved to spend this time with you. Thank you.

Deepa Iyer:

Thank you so much for listening. For more information about RDI, please visit www.rdiinc.org, and check out the episode notes where we provide links to additional resources, as well as a transcript of the podcast, which is available on www.solidarityis.org. I hope you'll subscribe to this podcast on your favorite platform so you don't miss an episode and that you'll let a few of your friends and colleagues know about it too. We'll look forward to connecting on the next episode of Solidarity Is This. Till then, take care of yourself and take care of your community.