 Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota. Produced by Lakeland PBS with host Ray Gildow. Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport for information available at BemidjiAirport.org. Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Niswa Tax Service, tax preparation for businesses and individuals online at NiswaTax.com. Hello again everyone and welcome to Lakeland Currents where tonight my guests are dressed identically in green because they work on so many projects together, but I'm very happy to have back Ben Wenchester who has been, he said this is the fifth time he's been on our show over the past 11 years, always has really interesting information. Ben is with the University of Minnesota, he's a senior research fellow and not only does he work in Minnesota now but he's been telling me he's been actually giving speeches around the country and to his immediate right is Chet Bodine who is a labor market analyst for the Northwest region, is that right? That's right, yes. With the Department of Economic, or Employment and Economic Development also known by the Ackerman deed, so if you ever hear that word deed that's what it stands for. Welcome to the show. Thanks Ben, it's good to have you back. I feel like you're almost a co-host. It's certainly my pleasure. I should be bringing my own chair. And I know you have been speaking a lot of places and you said you speak what two to three times a week now? That's right, yep. And that's over the whole state? Across the state, across the country at times too. So when we first met you, you were doing research on the brain gain in rural Minnesota and now you're revisiting the brain gain because a lot of exciting things have happened since your early research. So just give us an overview of what we're talking about. Sure, thanks, yeah. So I'm with the Extension Center for Community Vitality and part of the work we do is apply research. We want to do research that helps small towns across the state really reinvigorate their social and economic sectors. And what we had found early on was there was this dominant narrative about rural, about doom and gloom, right? We lost our hardware store, we had to close our grocery store, our schools consolidated but in the midst of all this negative narrative we actually found these trends that were quite positive. And this talked a lot about a migration of people aged 30, 40s and 50s that were moving to almost every rural county across the country, not just Minnesota. And this tended to counter the narrative again that you know people were just flocking away and flooding to the cities and the only people that were left were the folks who couldn't afford to move in a sense. But what we found was a story quite the opposite. In fact we had many people move into rural areas. They're bringing with them their education, their experience, their job skills, their careers in many cases and that this was actually helping to reinvigorate our small towns. And not only when we had done the initial research did we find that this happened a lot in the 90s. It continued in the 2000s but this stretched all the way back to the 70s and it just wasn't well documented. And so we started to do this research and outreach across Minnesota and let groups know, hey, by the way, you do have these newcomers. And once we state the trend people like, oh yeah, I did meet a couple new people here, here and there, right? But it's harder to know people that are new in your small towns today because I mean we're in Minnesota where it's dark when you get up and dark when you get home at night. I mean you wouldn't know it if somebody moved in across the street. So ultimately we tried to highlight these trends and that we had these newcomers moving in and many times these newcomers, they're very active socially but they're just active in different ways and we had talked about this in one of your previous programs too is that these newcomers are moving in and while they're not necessarily on the Kiwanis or the Lions Club, they're in the snowmobile group or the archery club or whatever it is. It's very much interspace, it's regional and people live in what I call the middle of everywhere that we don't just live and work and shop and play in one town. You may live in one town, you work in another and you recreate and shop and play in this two hour radius around your home. I've really noticed that in the health field. We sit here in Brainerd, Crosby to the east, Staples to the west, Wadena to the farther to the west, Little Falls south of us and so many of these people work in maybe they work for Ascension here in Brainerd but they live in Wadena or they might be working in Wadena and they live in Crosby. It's really changed. When I started my career in Staples, I was a teacher, it was expected that you would live in the town you worked in and that's not true anywhere anymore. There's another dynamic too is that 50 years ago we might have had a couple grocery stores in our small towns or hardware stores and those jobs have really been shifted to the regional centers. So we live much more in what I would call the new rural urbanism that we've got regional centers plus these outlying communities that again can go up to an hour out where people commute from. So while people may not want to live in Wilmer for example, they want to live in some of the smaller towns that surround Wilmer. So it's really this interesting dynamic of change that we've seen that lead to people wanting to live in a small town or a rural place and then working in those regional centers. Now, Chet, before we get into more of the detail of what he's doing, what's the connection to what you're doing with some of the things that Ben's doing? Well, I think there's a professional connection and then also a personal connection because I'm a resident of the Brainerd Lakes area. Professionally, I saw a lot of Ben's early work and it really informed a lot of my work when I started it up here in 2014. One of the things I found that really stuck out in the data first was the labor market shortage that was quickly approaching because of the silver tsunami as people have coined it. So, but I was really turned on and intrigued by what Ben had shown that we were actually bringing in more people in their 30s and 40s and we lost. And I didn't think that was something that was discussed very much in our communities. And he really made a great point that said, if we only reached out more, if we only encouraged this, how much further could it go? So, in your job with the Department of Employment Economic Development, what is it that you do primarily? Primarily, I research labor market data, trends, and also other economic and community development data. And so, most of the time I'm looking at statistics, kind of similar to what Ben does. So, do you find that your statistics are matching up to his statistics in terms of the trends? Are you seeing the same thing when you look at this through a different lens? I am, yeah. So, I've done a couple research pieces and used American Community Survey data, but used the same model that Ben's used in his research. It's a simple cohort method we use to look at how the in and out migration of different age groups into the region. And I use his model, and I use it specifically on our region, Northwest Minnesota, to see what was specifically happening here. And yeah, I saw a lot of the same results. One of the things that I sort of observed just by the jobs that I do in the summer is that Brainerd area has a lot of resorts. And I think in the past, we've gotten a lot of our summer help from European nations. A lot of kids, students would come in from other places. And with the change of administration and a change in the immigration laws, a lot of those students were not able to come here, which created some real shortages in some of the resorts. I don't know if that ended up getting straightened out towards the end of summer. But I know early in the season, that was a real big issue. And I know America, I think, typically, has not had the birth rate to produce all of our own workforce anymore. So we've really relied on the workforce coming from other places. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, that's right. I think what you look forward to, Chet mentioned, we're going to enter the tightest labor market we've almost ever experienced in this country. And rural areas are like canaries in the coal mine here. It's happening here first. And especially as we've got a greater proportion of our population that has retired already, if not beginning retiring in rural areas specifically, these dynamics are hitting us first. And we're starting to see now, so when we combine the tight labor market with some of these population projections, you'll see that the state offices will tell you too, like who's going to fill these jobs? Ultimately, we don't have the birth rate needed to help fill in the people basically for those jobs. So we do have to look to immigrant populations in many ways. You can look at domestic migration too, but domestic migration is not going to make up for the fact that we need millions of people to be brought into this cycle of workforce. So we are at the preface of some of these major structural shifts and which is really rewarding for me because we get to see this happen in rural areas first. We get to try things out in rural areas first on a scale that might not be like don't be afraid to fail. And if you fail in a smaller community, the impacts may not be as big as if you were to fail in a much larger community, for example. So even on this kind of brain-gain trend about trying to bring in residents, how do we recruit residents in? It's called a resident recruitment model. And many times, rather than an industrial recruitment model, which would be the business first and brings people, it's a well-worn argument in economic development about chicken or egg. Is it a chicken or egg? Do you need jobs to bring in people or can people bring in jobs? And 100 years ago would be jobs drew people, but this isn't 100 years ago. And so today people can bring with them jobs. And we had seen this in the research we had done early on is that we had people telecommuting. We had people that were 1099 workers for U.S. Bank. We had people book editors and publishers, electrical engineers. They were working from home. They were working remotely. And I think part of the story that one of the regional development commissions out of Appleton, they were an early partner in this research where we did interviews and focus groups. What they picked up on was many folks across the state, especially in urban areas, don't believe you can be a book editor in rural Minnesota. And really what we're trying to share with folks is that you can be a blank in rural Minnesota. Really, every occupational category is reflected there. Every industry is reflected. So just making, again, kind of back to that narrative, making it real for people that you can lead a vibrant life with a high quality of life in a rural community. The wage levels may not be the same, but the cost of living is not the same either. But we measure commute times in miles and minutes at the same rather than just minutes. So ultimately, we've got all these groups that have sprouted up across the state. I call them the organic efforts. So initially, we shared with communities what this research was. And the Regional Development Commission out of Appleton was the very first one eight years ago that capitalized on this. They helped us with the surveys, the focus groups, the interviews. Fairmont, Minnesota too, presented one time. And after that, the city council approved $5,000 to help work on resident recruitment efforts. And so we now have a program down there called Fairmont Area Life. And so we've had kind of all these organic efforts sprout up across the state to try something. Like, we don't have a well-worn path here, but we can try something at this point. And this is where the work that Chet's done over the past three years here has really helped inform our group as well. When we were talking off air, I thought it was really funny that you did all this research in the beginning. And you got it, came up with all this interesting information. And then when people started hearing about it, they came to you and say, well, now what do we do? And you said, we don't have anything. Go ahead and try some things out. Because that wasn't part of your original research. Yeah. And really for us, it's about the best voice for promoting your community or your existing residents. So if the narrative in your community is negative, like, you know, there's nothing here for you have your kids, for example, talk to some newcomers. Because new people are moving to all of our rural communities, and they're not moving there for pity. They're not moving there because, hey, I heard you lost your hardware store 25 years ago. I kind of feel bad for you. Like, nobody ever says that. People are moving to our small towns for what they represent to them today and what they will be in the future. Nobody looks back. So we've got all these kind of groups that are energized. They're informed. They're using research. And that led to the development of kind of these organic groups across the state. And Chet really took the lead on a group called Greater Minnesota Rising. I live in Staples. And the Staples community, I'm not positive who did the survey. But last fall or early winter, they did a survey to see what are the ages of people that live in the Greater Staples area. And Staples is a community of about 3,000 people. It was a shock to just about everyone to find that it's a young community. That's right. There's a lot of young families with young children that are in the area. I think everybody thought it was an old rundown railroad town with not a lot of younger people. And so I think that made the City Council and other leaders in the area ask themselves, what are we doing for these people? Just exactly what you've been saying. And there's a group now from your research in Staples too. I forgot what it's called. Do you remember what it's called? You said that started now in Staples like you did in Fairmont. So this actually leads right to Chet's work. His research in doing interviews and focus groups with newcomers in the central part of the state and the northwest part of the state led to the development of two efforts taken on by the Regional Development Commission in Region 5, as well as the Initiative Foundation out of Fairmont Falls. And what is that group called on Staples now? Do you remember? Well, I kind of want you want to back pedal a little bit. But I think what you're talking about is it's not a group. It's a regional kind of marketing strategy. It's called The Good Life. Okay, that's it. Yep. So what is it that they're trying to do? Well, we did some research prior to that to think like what's the substance behind this effort? What are we trying to do in the community that will create the conditions for newcomers to engage with the existing population to stay, to find things they enjoy and stay in the region, really. And that was the Greater Minnesota Rising research we did. And that project gave us some recommendations like what should we do regionally? What should we do locally? How do we get employers involved? So this kind of vacuum that was created by all this data that said, hey, we actually attract people in their 30s and 40s and people are like, well, what do we do about it? You know, that's what we tried to take on a little bit with the Greater Minnesota Rising research. That was in 2015. We came out the recommendations. From those recommendations, a few programs were developed, one of them being The Good Life. It is absolutely amazing to me. My wife and I have been down to Florida the couple, we go down for just a few weeks in the wintertime. All the help wanted signs. And it doesn't matter what the community size is. If you go to a restaurant, if you go into, if you need your tire worked on, your car worked on or whatever, there are help wanted signs just almost everywhere. And some of the larger businesses in the area, I know without getting into the names of the organizations, but some of them are 20 to 25 in place short in operating at full strength. So what can we do about this sort of thing? This is a huge issue. Is this your area chat? Are you going to give us an answer? You know, I try to help businesses who are planning for this know what's going on statistically more. But as a member of the community, I was also really interested to learn about how do we become a more welcoming environment for people who are moving here. And even for people in there, what you call them the millennials or people merging leader types who already live here and how do we help them convince them to stay more? So both recruiting and retaining workforce, I think is really important. But it depends on how your community looks like in terms of are they welcoming? Is there opportunities for them to engage with each other with existing residents? And so yeah, I think that's a big part of maintaining your workforce. Ben, you made a comment and I really believe this is true, even though I think a lot of people don't think about this. There are people who don't want their communities to get bigger. That's right. And they don't want them to change while there are ramifications for that philosophy. Why don't you share that? Yeah. So I think this general idea is that we don't want our communities to change and especially look at the suburban growth. Some of those suburbs were distinctly rural places 40 years ago and they have changed themselves into these more urban environments. So I think a lot of people look to that and be like, well, we don't want that. But I'd just like to remind the folks who aren't as welcoming that their parents may not have been welcoming either. But what would have happened if nobody moved to your town 50 years ago? We would have dried up by now. But ultimately, right now, we're just at the beginning here of the forefront of all of the baby boomers starting to retire. And then as you progress through your continuum of post-retirement life and before you get to the continuum of care, people are going to sell their home. And I would ask communities that say, if you're not welcoming, if you don't want new people into town, who's going to buy your house? 75% of our rural homes across the state are going to be on the market over the next 25 years. Who's going to buy these properties? If you're not welcoming, are you ready to take a hit in your equity of your home because you don't want new people there? But ultimately, what we hear a resounding message from these newcomers voices is that they would say, this is my town now too. And they want a voice in this community. Just as much the baby boomers today transform the communities that they moved into 40 years ago. So it's this continual transformation of our communities. This isn't new. This isn't the first time our communities have turned over. This is the fifth time they've turned over. So really talking about how have we managed change in the past? What can we do better? How can we celebrate the fact that people actually want to move here? They like your town for what you are. So how can we kind of capitalize on some of those trends, especially given the fact that we might not have, again, all these opportunities for social engagement, or you don't even know where these newcomers are? So for example, the Otter Tail County hired a rural rebound coordinator, a position dedicated to help welcome newcomers and have them connect with the existing people across the county. So they've got ambassadors from every town. Like the welcome wagon. It is. I believe you can't have a welcome wagon anymore because the post office surely cannot just hand you a list of everybody and their phone number and their address of who moved in. So they've got this grab a bite program in Otter Tail County, which is literally ambassadors taking newcomers out to lunch. And it's not, and it's not getting them to sit on your board. It's not asking them for a commitment. It's just getting to know who the newcomers are. And at the same time, we see we've had this happen in a number of places, but Meeker County more recently, I had a newcomer supper. And one of the biggest outcomes out of these newcomer suppers, which is directed more at just connecting newcomers to each other. It's not always connecting newcomers to the existing residents. But once newcomers see how many other newcomers there are, the number one outcome is these newcomers saying, I can't believe how many other new people there are here, because you generally don't see each other. And if you're pumping gas, you're a newcomer to a small town, you can be pumping gas next to somebody who lives down the street who just moved there too, but you wouldn't know it. So being concrete and discreet about providing opportunities for newcomers to make a personal connection to the region, we believe is vital. Now you talked about, and one of your other shows that we were doing together, the shortage of leadership in rural areas. Are these groups addressing that at all? Yeah. So part of this is really trying to connect the existing infrastructure to these newcomer groups, because we've got a group in Northeastern Minnesota, Regen, which again is about getting recent folks to the iron range to connect with one another. So it really is, and we call it bridging capital from a social capital perspective, it's how do you connect the existing groups to the new groups, because these newcomers are moving in and they're creating nonprofit groups, they're creating their own social opportunities. They're not necessarily just jumping on board with the existing infrastructure, they want to do their own thing, and they actually do things very differently. So generally the younger people in our communities don't want to sit through a board meeting where you have five different committees update what they did of their 12 points and then talk about the budget for a half hour. It's very much about task forces, like I want to get something done. So maybe kind of this new dynamic is when you see these younger groups kind of doing things in town, they don't really go out and like get community consensus, like we as community developers would say, you want to do a project, get consensus, and then get some action playing like this whole process, they just go out and do it. They're like, well, this is something we're putting energy toward, we're just going to get this done. So there's all these very fascinating dynamics about how just the social dynamics of communities have changed as well. Now you said in your research, rural is rural and it doesn't matter if it's Minnesota or North Carolina and you have been asked to come to some of these other states. That's right. So are you seeing there's just absolute similarities to wherever you go? That's right. I mean there are more similarities than differences. Every time I get asked like, you're not going to find that here, I find it there. Really? It's growth in nonprofit sectors in these very diverse new groups that they've got. That's where the newcomers are spending their time. They are choosing the communities for quality of life, safety and security, low cost of housing. All of these dynamics generally are the same. It may shuffle a little bit, but they're always at the top. So people are choosing to move to rural. They're not being forced to. They want to live there. They want to raise their families there because they're beautiful places to live. For a community that's never been involved with either one of you, how should they start if they're interested in doing something like this? Would they contact you, Banner, or you, Chet, or how would they go about doing that? In our region, Region 5, which is Crow Wing, Cass, Morrison, Todd, Rodina County, we have started that framework and that's the good life that you referred to where we talked about it a little bit. And so that's kind of a hybrid program. It's got the regional website, connects a lot of the activities going on in the region together. But then it also highlights and publicizes some of the local programming that's meant to connect newcomers and millennials and emerging leaders within the region and to each other. And so we're working on that. I think any community who has a newcomer program or a millennial group could publicize through the good life. And the idea is you can reach a broader audience outside the region by working together on a program like that. Are there parallel studies being done in urban areas? Not necessarily. Not necessarily. This is still pretty much a rural initiative. That's right. So we just found out this past spring that we were awarded a three-year grant from USDA because we do have these dynamics we talked about. There is a brain gain, 30 to 50-year-olds moving in. There's this labor shortage upcoming. We're in a very sweet spot here. So we were awarded a three-year grant. Chet is on the advisory committee and helping us with that work as well as a number of these different initiatives across the state. And we've got three years. And this first year is we brought together these initiatives across the state that have been around really for two years or more. We've got about 10 of them. And we're starting to bring them together. They're going to help us do more focus groups, more interviews, not just with the newcomers, but also the existing residents. So as we've got these groups that are doing the work across state, we want to help them do their work better. Again, we're the experts at doing applied research. We've got very solid methods. We want to make sure that we're capturing the right information. But at the same time, we need to provide something that's valuable to people on the ground. So in the regional centers, we're interviewing immigrant populations too. We're interviewing business owners because really in some ways business owners in some communities are the only recruiter that you've got in that community. And how are they doing that work? So we're doing three years on this as well as a look at tourism. Because there is this examination right now. It's called the Halo Effect. The Minnesota Department of Tourism did a study that explained how visitors to your rural communities, when they have a positive experience, they can see this as a place they can move to. They see this as a place that they can start a business in or raise a family in. And that's if your narrative is positive. But if you go into the grocery store, the gas station, you ask people like, what's there to do around here? You're frontline folks for visitors and they say there's nothing to do here. You aren't going to be producing. Yeah, it is the kiss of death. You're not going to be contributing to any type of Halo Effect for your community. So training all these employees is really critical. That's right. I think just recognizing how many different fronts we've we've got to fight this battle on in terms of helping people to realize that you can be a blank in rural Minnesota. Well, we're down to about our last minute guys. So maybe we could just share with people how to contact your organizations. Sure. I'm easily available via email. Ben Winchester with the University of Minnesota Extension. You can Google Ben Winchester Brain Gain and you'll see our landing page. Not Brain Drain. We're trying to get away from that language. My email is benw at umn.edu. Okay, Jett. With the Department of Employment and Economic Development, you can reach me at my office location. I work here in Brannard at the Workforce Center in the Crow Wing Community Services Building. The Good Life is administered by Region Five Economic Development Commission. And so more information about that. You can certainly contact me at Sheryl Hills. You can certainly contact me and I'll put you in touch with them if you don't know Sheryl. But yeah, Sheryl or Don Espie over there are the leads of that. Well, it's really interesting, Ben, since you first started on the show, how this has grown, really, really grown. Hasn't it what you've been doing? We've come a long way. You hit some really critical pieces of information for rural areas. And I think it's amazing to me how many people have picked up on this and are starting to do something about it. So, well, thanks to you. Well, job. So, job well done, both of you. Thank you very much for being on the show, guys. We appreciate it very much. My pleasure. Thanks. You've been watching Lakeland Currents, where we're talking about what you're talking about. I'm Ray Gildow. So long until next time.