Register Today!
NFG’s Integrated Rural Strategies Group (IRSG) is excited to invite you to join us for our fifth annual flagship event – the 2025 Rural Equity Summit!
Set to take place over two afternoon, March 4th-5th 2025, IRSG is holding a virtual convening of funders from across the nation for the 2025 Rural Equity Summit. Amid political and economic shifts, rural communities are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of disinvestment, and remain at the frontlines of protecting local wins and human safety and dignity in this current moment.
**Please note that you must register separately for each day on the tabs above**
Why should you attend?
Rural communities are under siege. Federal funding that has kept rural communities afloat for generations is vanishing overnight, amplifying the impacts of historic underinvestment by philanthropy, leaving entire regions to fend for themselves. The combination of these consequences are already playing out:
- Indigenous Sovereignty and Self-determination are under attack as extractive industries and aggressive rollbacks of tribal protections expand.
- The prison-industrial complex is tightening its grip, with new federal prison construction projects pitched as "rural economic development" despite their devastating long-term consequences for communities (while in the short-term bolstering authoritarian mass deportation)
- Dismantled and defunded local rural news ecosystems have weakened trust in democratic structures and prevented communities from accessing information to understand how issues and policies affect them.
The IRSG Summit will tackle these challenges head-on, highlighting the ways in which rural communities are both blocking and building in this moment for short-term defense and long-term progress.
This funders-only summit is not just a learning opportunity—it is a strategy session to respond, ensuring that rural communities have what they need to thrive.
- Rural communities are the frontlines of these attacks—but they are also the frontlines of resistance.
- Funders must act now to move resources, protect vulnerable communities, and build the long-term infrastructure needed to sustain rural power.
- The insights, relationships, and strategies developed in this space will feed into broader, long-term rural equity work, including an in-person pre-Convening IRSG Summit on the afternoon of July 14th at the NFG Convening July 15th -17th.
There is no neutral position in this moment. Philanthropy must organize to resource rural community capacity critical to a multiracial democracy.
What to Expect
📅 Day 1: Tuesday, March 4
1:00 - 3:00 PM ET
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Welcome, Grounding, Network Weaving with Small Group Connections
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Concurrent Program Blocks
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Rural Prisons & Criminal Legal Reform: The false premise of prisons as economic drivers in rural areas – How rural communities are fighting back against the false economic promises of federal prisons and advancing people-centered rural economic visions.
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Building Rural Power to Activate Local Governance – Moving beyond election boom-and-bust funding, how do we fund local rural power to push back against authoritarian control, support progressive rural electeds, and advance hyperlocal campaigns?
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Youth & Intergenerational Organizing – Investing in youth movements to build multigenerational power, create a sustainable rural organizing ecosystem, and counteract Project 2025’s rural agenda.
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- New York Rural Organizing: An Overlooked Critical Line of Defense - We’ll explore why overlooking a “blue state” like New York in a responsive national grantmaking strategy is a grave miscalculation. We’ll learn about what’s possible when rural community capacity is resourced - and what’s at risk when it’s not, and how this all adds up to statewide change.
Day 2: Wednesday, March 5
1:00 - 3:00 PM ET
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Rural Immigrant Safety, Defense & Justice – How are rural communities responding to escalating ICE raids and deportations targeting farmworkers and immigrant families - what funders need to to support now and in the long-term.
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Concurrent Program Blocks
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Indigenous Sovereignty and Self-determination – The federal government’s latest attacks on tribal sovereignty, land rights, and economic self-determination and what's at stake if we miss this moment.
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Local News Ecosystems & Rural Narrative Power – The collapse of local journalism and the rise of disinformation—how philanthropy must fund narrative power.
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The Summit will offer opportunities to connect with peer funders, as well as key IRSG stakeholders including:
We look forward to you joining all of us at the Summit!
IRSG Staff
- Lindsay Ryder (she/her) Director, Integrated Rural Strategies Group
- Stephan Oak (he/him) Senior Program Coordinator, Integrated Rural Strategies Group
IRSG Coordinating Committee
- Hester Dillon (she/Her) The Schmidt Family Foundation/11th Hour Project
- Olivia Trabysh (she/her)
- Vickie Walsh (she/her) Mertz Gilmore Foundation
- Sade Dumas (she/her) Borealis Philanthropy
Funder Partners
- Kyle Erickson (he/him) Blandin Foundation
- Jed Oppenheim (he/him) Public Welfare Foundation
- Kate Vickery (she/her) Headwaters Foundation for Justice
- José Morales, Jr. (he/him) Democracy Fund
- Emma Bouton (she/her) Heartland Fund/Resource Rural
Event Details
When
Mar 4, 2025 - Mar 5, 2025
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm ET
Where
Virtual
Posted 11/19/2024 in