In the months leading up to the 2024 election, the Integrated Rural Strategies Group set out to create a resource that would - regardless of the election’s outcomes - serve as a guide and framework for action for philanthropy. We knew that rural communities — if they were lucky — were poised in 2024 to withstand the boom and bust of philanthropy’s election cycle-driven infusion of resources, and then be left to hold their communities after the dust had settled and the grant cycles expired.
Toward an alternative paradigm, we created this resource to orient funders around the who, what, where, and how rural communities build power to affect real and durable change.
By profiling the work of nine organizations building power, protecting human safety and dignity, and advancing progressive policy in rural communities around the country, this report showcases rural organizing’s importance in this moment.
We invite funders to use this report to the following ends:
- Understand the humanity of rural communities and their worthiness in being resourced outside of their relationship to elections or other strategic paradigms;
- Come to learn what building power in rural communities looks like, and be able to seek out, identify, and perhaps even be a part of seeding rural power building where you fund; and
- Shift your grantmaking’s relationship to “winning” several layers deeper than a successful policy campaign or single-issue advance, to a sense of “winning” that begins at the roots.
We are incredibly grateful for the nine profiled organizations for sharing their work with us, to Rural Democracy Initiative for their partnership in creating and sharing this resource, and to Karla Flemming for her beautiful design work.
In community,
Biz Ghormley, Lead Author
Lindsay Ryder, Director, IRSG
Stephan Oak, Sr. Program Coordinator, IRSG
Posted 03/06/2025 in
Share