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Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “side by side” as the state “of existing beside one another” and “of being in the same place, time, or circumstance." What does it mean for rural and urban communities to live side by side? Join University of Minnesota Extension staff as we explore the interdependent relationship of rural and urban spaces and why this necessary and complex relationship matters.
Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
Savannah Barrett:We started this work not because we were trying to bridge Democrats and Republicans to have political conversations, but because we wanted Kentuckians to participate in a shared future. One of the things that I think too often happens in the bridging space is that people have a couple of conversations. Maybe they go through some really interesting facilitated activities, and then they scatter and they never come back together again because nothing changed fundamentally about their future. It cannot be built that way. People have to come together and reckon with one another over what is gained and lost in different versions of a shared future.
Savannah Barrett:And through that process, they have to build the kinds of relationships that can hold water, that can hold complexity, that can be challenged and come through stronger.
Ellen Wolter:That's Savannah Barrett, co founder of the Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange, or as it is frequently called, RUX, which began in 2014 as a way to foster collaboration across rural and urban places. The program aims to build civic capacity by bringing together people from rural and urban places to experience different communities across the state of Kentucky. The program has since grown into a distributed network of community leaders across the state. Savannah joined me for a conversation to reflect on RUX and the importance of committing wholeheartedly to place and to relationships over political conversion. She firmly believes that relationships are what drives civic renewal, and that is because she has seen the power and possibility of building relationships that make room for complexity, and as she says, that hold water in ways that ask people to sit with what is gained and what is lost.
Ellen Wolter:And this can't be done without building relationships and coalitions across rural and urban places.
Music (Jim Griswold):Side by side.
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter with the University of Minnesota Extension. Welcome to the side by side podcast. Tell me a little bit about yourself and and where you call home.
Savannah Barrett:Yeah, Ellen. Let's see. Well, I live in Louisville, Kentucky in the South End. This is my husband's hometown. It's a we live in the most linguistically diverse neighborhood in the state of Kentucky, one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods.
Savannah Barrett:I think there are 27 languages spoken at my child's elementary school, and we love this community. You know, many of our dearest people live in this city, and we're both very lucky to get to be a part of a rich community of artists and sort of world builder people. And the rural people in place that I'm from just very deeply shaped me. And I am fundamentally a product of Grayson County, Kentucky. That's where my deepest experiences of belonging and accountability come from.
Savannah Barrett:And along Grayson Springs Road where my family has lived for 12 generations and where I steward both my family land and a historic site with several friends from across Kentucky. That's the place that I feel most myself and my deepest sort of it's more than accountability. You know? I really believe in a sense of generational progress that we're all just trying to carry the ball a little further than those who came before us. And and when I think about my purpose and, you know, what I'm really called to do, all roads lead back to Grayson Springs Road.
Savannah Barrett:So while I live in the city and have lived in the city for quite a while, I've kept a really deep relationship to that place that I call home, and that relationship has essentially shaped a sort of rural urban identity. And then when you add in the work that I've been doing with art of the rural and the Kentucky rural urban exchange for the past twelve years, traveling across the state, getting to build really deep and meaningful relationships with people in every region of the state and hosting RUX in, I think, 18 Kentucky communities now has also made my sort of rural urban identity more complex and nuanced. And so it sort of feels like my lived experience crisscrosses the rural urban continuum, but I've come to understand my identity foremost as a Kentuckian. I
Ellen Wolter:really identify with what you're saying because I grew up in a really rural place and really rural states and then lived in Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon for a long time. So I also have that kind of dual rural urban identity. And I wonder if you find that there are lots of people that have that kind of dual identity.
Savannah Barrett:Absolutely. I mean, I would say that most people have a rural urban identity. Most people have, if not a a family or lived experience connection across rural and urban America, then some of the places they love cross those lines. You know, even the most, like, I was born here, small town, will never leave. This is my place.
Savannah Barrett:Folks that I know have things that they love about a city. You know, if it's a whether it's a restaurant or the state fair or
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm.
Savannah Barrett:An opportunity to go see music or art. Country people have deep experiences in the city.
Music (Jim Griswold):Mhmm.
Savannah Barrett:And I don't know any city people who don't have a deep relationship to at least a natural landscape, if not across a rural urban continuum.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. I think that's absolutely true. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about Grayson County. I'm curious about what Grayson County is.
Ellen Wolter:Like, what do you love about it? What are the the things that connect you to it so much?
Savannah Barrett:Yeah. You know? So I'll start with geography. There's a giant map of Kentucky behind me here.
Ellen Wolter:Beautiful map, listeners. It's a beautiful map.
Savannah Barrett:Thank you. It's a physiographic map of Kentucky. You can Google it. Grayson County is sort of a crossroads. It's a place where two different geographic regions meet.
Savannah Barrett:So we're kind of right at the edge of cave country in Western Kentucky. And about an hour from Louisville, about an hour from Bowling Green, so also a place where I think the South and the Midwest kind of meet in Kentucky, and it's pretty hilly. It's also I think of it as a sort of place that's beyond the foothills. It's not physically part of the Appalachian Range. But I think it's a place where the culture of Appalachia and the culture of the South really meet.
Ellen Wolter:What are some of the more urban areas of Kentucky?
Savannah Barrett:Sure. There are three counties right at the northernmost edge of Kentucky that border Cincinnati and are really part of the Cincinnati Metro. So those are are deeply urban parts of the state. Louisville, certainly, and Lexington are cities, though they are each, along with Northern Kentucky, really full of country people. And then Bowling Green and Owensboro are two other large communities in the state.
Savannah Barrett:You know, Bowling Green's only thirty to forty five minutes depending on how you drive from Nashville and is increasingly you know, I heard someone recently in Bowling Green in community and economic development refer to themselves as North Nashville. So Oh. Nashville's really growing and becoming sort of a part of Southern Kentucky. So those are, I think, the four largest that's actually five largest urban regions of the state. You know?
Savannah Barrett:Two in Central Kentucky, one in Northern, one in Southern, one in Western.
Ellen Wolter:And tell me a little bit about Kentucky's rural urban exchange.
Savannah Barrett:Sure. So back in 2014, my good friend Josh May and I met during a residency that I was doing as part of art of the rural's year of the rural arts in 2014. And I kind of went to this residency with the concept of rocks in my back pocket. But meeting Josh was like, you know, putting rocket fuel on that idea. In part because both of us, though we are generational Kentuckians, he was a tenth generation McGoughin County and I'm eleventh generation, Grayson County and had each heard just too many times as we'd shared the stories of our place.
Savannah Barrett:Well, that ain't the real Kentucky. That doesn't count. And we really bonded sort of by laughing at that idea and by asking the question, you know, like, if two generational Kentuckians whose experiences are sort of the iconic story of Kentucky don't always belong in this state. How many other people are left out of meaningful belonging here? And what what broader harm outside of the individual experience of disbelonging does that do to our state?
Savannah Barrett:So that really led us to have conversations about regionalism and the ways that Kentucky's deep sense of regional identity, which is really beautiful in some ways, you know, it, draws from Kentuckians deep sense of place and pride of place, has had also sort of held us back as a state because people were so invested in who they were regionally that they were less invested in how they could work together. And that lack of collaboration and awareness across the state had really held Kentuckians back and made it possible for traditional power structures to really thrive here while the people of the state haven't always thrived.
Ellen Wolter:Savannah, what did that mean that you're not part of the real Kentucky or you're not a real Kentuckian? What did that mean?
Savannah Barrett:You know, if you spent a week in Kentucky, I feel like it's inevitable that you would experience a little bit of what I call, like, the Kentucky bona fides, you know, which is there is something about our culture that asks people to, like, prove that they belong here and sort of demonstrate that that you're one of us. And I think that's common across rural regions. It's very common in the South. I think it's common in a lot of places, and it has its place. You know?
Savannah Barrett:I mean, that's what our governor, Andy Bashir, famously said about the vice president, JD Vance, when he wrote a book about his Kentucky experience as an Ohioan, which is like, he ain't even from here. And that's sort of our default response when we don't like something.
Ellen Wolter:Okay. Okay.
Savannah Barrett:Yeah. And it's powerful. You know? I'm not above it myself. And we had, I think, an opportunity because we were in this generational moment of economic transition, which was catalyzing a lot of first generation college students and a lot of migration across rural and urban Kentucky, we had this opportunity to translate value across regions and to build a collective and shared future.
Savannah Barrett:And so that was really the seed of RUX, this desire to really draw from the pride of place that Kentuckians have, the same instinct that calls them to say whether or not someone's really from here. How could we turn that into you really belong here and so you have a stake in this place's future, and so we're going to give you the tools to participate in that future together. That was the sort of early impetus of this work. And we thought in 2014 that it would take us five years to reach every, region of the state and that in that time, we could reach a 150 people and that we would do that through one to one cultural exchange. So we started back in 2014 as an exchange of 17 pairs of people coming from the Louisville region in Southeastern Kentucky around Apple shops and electric.
Savannah Barrett:And those were matching, you know, a city councilman in Louisville, a city councilman in Whitesburg, a native American healer in Knott County with a medicinal herbalist in Louisville, A grocery store owner in Louisville with someone who was just starting a mercantile in Whitesburg. So we were really looking at all of the interesting folks that we each knew and how their practices, their lives, their businesses could be strengthened if they knew one another. So that's how we started. We're really excited this year, twelve years later, to host a RUX homecoming at Seatime for their fortieth anniversary where the same band and residents that RUX brought twelve years ago is going to be playing. And so at its core, the Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange or RUX as I'll call it, works to bridge divides and build connections among Kentuckians by meeting people, exploring place, and cultivating partnerships through annual weekend intensives and other programs.
Savannah Barrett:That's how the work started. Twelve years in, we've really grown into a statewide leadership network that's working to uplift new narratives of culture and belonging and tell a Kentucky story that we can all participate in. We do that work alongside work to really strengthen individual Kentuckians' capacity to to participate in their community's future.
Ellen Wolter:And one of the things I noticed in your materials, Savannah, is you refer to it as a creative leadership model. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Savannah Barrett:Sure. I'll start with just describing why we use cultural strategies, and it's because they are, in my view, effectively a shortcut to help people bridge differences. We often say a phrase that I learned from my good friend Ivy Breshear, who was on the founding steering committee of RUX, which is that the shortest distance between two people is a story. That has become a core value of RUX's, and it's really strengthened in Kentucky because there's so much power in meeting people where they're from. So we learned early on that if you take Kentuckians to sensory rich experiences and beautiful places and bring the people who steward those places along to talk about why they matter, and then invite more people to talk about that place's history and to sort of make it more complex and nuanced and help people understand that two stories are true at the same time, then we can build a really rich understanding of place and really uplift the truth that every place holds value, every place is complex, every place is nuanced, every place has challenges.
Savannah Barrett:And very often, those challenges are connected to the challenges that we experience in our own communities. So we do that really place rich work alongside story rich work that helps people not just hear from others about their experiences, but also be challenged to tell their own story of place and belonging, which sounds pretty simple, but it's actually a profoundly vulnerable act. It really requires vulnerability to tell the story of who you are in place. Most of us have some pay embedded in our story of place. And when you linger in that question, it really surfaces what you may have not resolved about your experience of home.
Savannah Barrett:And when you do that alongside 50 other people who are on the same journey at the same time, and you're hearing their stories of becoming, it really, I think, creates an openness, and what we often call a sort of benevolent confusion, where folks are just overwhelmed enough while also, like, being held really well by the program to be able to think about things differently.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm.
Savannah Barrett:And it's in that really rich space that is opened by story and opened by cultural experience that folks can begin to see something from someone else's perspective and begin to care about a person regardless of whether or not they fundamentally oppose their beliefs.
Ellen Wolter:We were talking before we started recording about this connection to place and how spiritual it is. One thing that comes to mind is I I wonder like, sometimes I feel like people think, oh, you're connected to place because you live in this beautiful rural environment and you grew up in the mountains. And is there sometimes this misconception that people in cities have less of a connection to place? I wonder, have you experienced that at all in your in the program?
Savannah Barrett:Well, you know, I think that's actually, like, a a stereotype that a lot of rural people hold about people in cities. Yeah. But what I found is that place seeps into who we are. Mhmm. No matter where you live, it becomes a part of who you are if you stay there long enough.
Savannah Barrett:We start every RUX weekend with a story circle. And the first story circle of the year always draws on a reading that we ask everyone to complete before they come, which is the first chapter of bell hooks's belonging, which is called Kentucky is my fate. And in that, Bell really asserts that part of us always lives where we were in childhood. So the first prompt of the story circle in RUX is to ask everyone to tell a three minute story of the place that they loved best in childhood. And in Kentucky, over twelve years and, I don't know, 36 story circles, I have heard one story really consistently, which is that people find water, children find the water, and it can be a beautiful wide limestone creek that like the one that I was lucky enough to grow up swimming in, or it can be a culvert that's, you know, six inches wide at the end of the neighborhood.
Savannah Barrett:And either way, it's a place of imagination. There's something about running water and amphibians that just makes the idea of travel possible for a young mind. Right? The water is moving. Things can sail along.
Savannah Barrett:Where will it end up? I think there's something about, like, just the playfulness and sort of movement of water that helps our imaginations connect to a larger world.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm.
Savannah Barrett:And so when you ask people about the place they connect to in childhood, and it's so often a body of water, it's a beautiful sort of entry point into the ways that we all live downstream from one another.
Ellen Wolter:And and connects people physically too.
Savannah Barrett:I don't know if you would know this, but as a a resident of Minnesota, y'all are surrounded by water. Yeah. And so it it's always surprising when I share this with Minnesotans, but Kentucky actually has the most miles of navigable shore of any state in the Lower 40.
Ellen Wolter:Do Minnesotans argue with you about that, Savannah, do they?
Savannah Barrett:Oh, yes. Love they love to argue
Ellen Wolter:with Yeah. Yeah. But they do.
Savannah Barrett:But it's true. Yeah. And it's wild to imagine that we have more navigable coastline than California.
Ellen Wolter:Is it river?
Savannah Barrett:It's creeks and rivers primarily. Mhmm. You know, all of our borders, excepting part of our southern border, are rivers.
Ellen Wolter:They
Savannah Barrett:all empty into the Ohio and the Mississippi at various points, which, of course, connects the two of us.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm.
Savannah Barrett:But, you know, you just can't go far in Kentucky without a a large body of water. So I think it's a natural starting place for us too in this context because everyone has a favorite body of water.
Ellen Wolter:So, Savannah, what what did RUX kind of evolve into? You know, what does it look like now? You have been doing this amazing work for twelve years.
Savannah Barrett:Sure. So we spent ten years focused on what we describe as a creative leadership model or eventually came to describe as a relational leadership model. And what I mean by that is that we were bringing Kentuckians together across the state to really reshape their relationship with people in places across the state. And over the course of their two year experience, really reshape their relationship to Kentucky. We did that through a series rural urban exchange cohorts, leadership cohorts, which, like a traditional leadership program, like Leadership Minnesota, folks apply.
Savannah Barrett:They are selected by a peer reviewed panel of alumni of the program. They talk about their vision for Kentucky and their application. They talk about what they do to participate in that vision now, what they would like to do, what some of the challenges they've faced as Kentuckians have been, what they really see as the greatest assets of their place. And we are really clear that we value participation in community much more than we do standing or affiliation, and we really have worked hard to recruit folks from across a range of racial and economic and geographic experiences so that machinist and folks working in logistics at the plant are seated alongside elected officials and grant makers and institutional leaders because they really need to hear from one another and be in relationship to make appropriate decisions. We've been recruiting these folks to come together.
Savannah Barrett:Once they're accepted, we generally have a cohort of about 50 people. Pre pandemic, that was a 75 member cohort, which was just bananas. We moved from that initial exchange of 34 people that was reciprocal. We all went to Weidsburg for a weekend, and then we all came to Louisville for a weekend into writing a report about how the pilot went. And then in 2015, building out a statewide steering committee of people, about 15 folks from across the state who were really inspired by this mission and wanted to participate in building it out.
Savannah Barrett:These folks, I think all of us were 40, and we came from a range of of sectors and proximity to power. Some of us were working in formalized institutions. Some of us were grassroots organizers. Some of us were farmers. Some of us were musicians.
Savannah Barrett:It was a ragtag bunch of folks coming from different backgrounds who really brought their lived experience and the organizing strategies that they had learned from into the ethos of RUX. We spent a lot of time talking about our shared vision and what would be different if we succeeded, which is just, I think, an essential part of building this work. One of the things that I think too often happens in the bridging space is that people in proximity to power come together to solve a problem, and then they look for the people who can participate in their problem solving strategy. The people come. They have a couple of conversations.
Savannah Barrett:Maybe they go through some really interesting facilitated activities, and then they scatter. And they never come back together again because nothing changed fundamentally about their future. It cannot be built that way. People have to come together and reckon with one another over what is gained and lost in different versions of a shared future. And through that process, they have to build the kinds of relationships that can hold water, that can hold complexity, that can be challenged and come through stronger.
Savannah Barrett:And that's not like a 100% success rate. Not every person who started with us stayed with us. We've had some, like, just incredible moments of pain along the way. And for the most part, we've come out stronger. And today, we have 400 members and 200 partners across 80 counties in Kentucky who see themselves as a part of a shared future for the state.
Ellen Wolter:What have been some of your most rewarding moments of this program? And then what have been some of your biggest challenges? You're very honest and forthright, your team in your handbook about, you know, when we started, there was some harm and we had to figure that out. So what what does that look like on on both ends of the spectrum?
Savannah Barrett:The biggest win of this work is that it has grown to meaningfully include so many people. Back in 2015 when we formed that statewide steering committee, the thing that we knew we wanted to do was build this as a distributed leadership network, which meant that we made decisions collectively as a steering committee and that as members graduated from the leadership program that they had a chance to join the steering committee or join committees or lead this work themselves. We've built that distributed leadership muscle increasingly over the past twelve years, and now we're in a moment where we're not accepting a new class and are instead really investing all of our resources in supporting RUX members to share these tools in their own communities and to create these RUX experiences for one another, which is, you know, just profoundly exciting to me. So the biggest reward is hands down finding your people over and over again and getting to play a small role in hundreds of Kentuckians, finding the people that they needed to stay here and dig in. The biggest challenge is the same thing.
Savannah Barrett:It is trying to hold space with hundreds of people at the same time who not only are coming from really different lived experiences, but who increasingly in 2026 see those varied lived experiences as not just, like, diametrically opposed, but a real threat to the people and places that they love. And sometimes that's real. Right? You know, one of our participants who graduated last year is a Palestinian young man from Northern Kentucky who is one of the most gentle, thoughtful people I've ever encountered and who is also experiencing rage and trauma for what is happening in Palestine. So for him to be in relationship with people who have a real Zionist perspective on what's occurring isn't just bridging.
Savannah Barrett:I think he has the capacity to hold complexity
Music (Jim Griswold):Mhmm.
Savannah Barrett:And to try and hold two truths at the same time, which is that he cannot accept the beliefs of some of his fellow members, and he can have a great time with them at a Square Dance. We live in such a complex world where, you know, I think all of us are sort of thrust into an experience of hypervigilance by the Internet, by just the enormity and complexity of the challenges face facing us politically, globally, in terms of security, in terms of, like, just the ways that communities are functioning, that I think very few of us have a a real clarity in terms of how we are moving through community right now. I think we all feel a little jumbled. And the work of RUX and civic renewal is a callback to what we know works, which is sitting down, sharing a meal, raising your hand to do the thing that the PTA needs or the neighborhood association needs, pulling someone out of a ditch for free because they are your neighbor, checking on people. You know, we know how to do this.
Savannah Barrett:And we have got to remember that we know how to do this with joy and with delight.
Ellen Wolter:Savannah, do you feel like the work in the last ten years, the bridging work became I don't know if harder is the right word, but for all the reasons that you just mentioned that it became more challenging, you had to adapt because there was increasing political polarization.
Savannah Barrett:Sure. You know, I think there's been a real pressure since 2016 for this work to fit neatly into political bridging space, and it just doesn't. You know, one of the things I always try and say is that we started this work, before Donald Trump's rise to political power. We started this work not because we were trying to bridge Democrats and Republicans to have political conversations, but because we wanted Kentuckians to participate in a shared future.
Ellen Wolter:I wasn't surprised that you started in 2014 before the two thousand sixteen election because I think your work is so connected to place and spiritual. And I wonder, reaction, and were you surprised when the two thousand sixteen election happened? And then there were lots of folks who are real curious or who, to your point, just now wanted to bridge politically. I imagine there was a lot of looking to your work and saying, hey. You know, look at what they're doing.
Savannah Barrett:You know, I wish that that had been more of our experience. I think we did we did get a lot of interest after 2016. You know, the Wall Street Journal did a piece on our work. The Christian Science Monitor did a piece on our work. So our platforms and opportunities to tell the story of what was happening in Kentucky really expanded.
Savannah Barrett:But what we found too often in those stories and even more so in the democracy and bridging field as it emerged and in the grant making space was that people really didn't understand the value of this kind of work when it wasn't directly pointed at political bridging, which was just, you know, a real missed opportunity. I think for deep partnership and for folks to learn from a model that is invested in place in the long haul. I think instead, a lot of resource I think that moment was captured. I think it was a moment for folks to come together and build lasting civic infrastructure in the places that they are committed to. And instead, I think most of those resources went to people who had graduated from Ivy League colleges who knew the folks who were interested in supporting this work, and I think they got $5,000,000 grants to do listening tours.
Savannah Barrett:And so I think a lot of that knowledge went right back to the place that the money came from and was sort of extracted out of communities and didn't only, like, fail to build the capacity of those communities to make change in the long run, but also really undermined the local leaders who were already doing the work there. Because when someone from a national philanthropy invest in a place and sends outside help to do the work, everyone takes notice, and everyone assumes that they sent someone in because they didn't believe that we had the competency to steward our own future.
Ellen Wolter:That's such a valuable point, Savannah. Such a valuable point. And you can see that how that works, not just in philanthropy, but in academia, state government, federal government.
Savannah Barrett:Absolutely. And to come back to the sort of political dimension of it, you know, I wasn't surprised at Donald Trump's ascent to power because I knew that philanthropy and many of the institutions of this country had given up on rural America and that people had not failed to notice, though I dare say they had been patient. You know, rural America was much slower to rebound after the two thousand eight recession, and many grantmakers and institutions pulled out after that recession when their philanthropic holdings, when their principal took a hit in that recession, they they made, you know, hard choices about what they were going to support in a time when everyone was struggling. And many of them pulled out entirely of rural America by 2012. By the time this episode comes out, a piece that I wrote for the chronicle on philanthropy will have been published.
Savannah Barrett:And the central argument of that piece is that in 2011, secretary Vilsack signed an agreement with the council on foundations to transform rural investment, to try and bring rural investment from an estimated one to 5% depending on who was measuring up to not even parity, but 10%. And by the time secretary Vilsack left office in 2016, we had lost ground.
Ellen Wolter:What do you think it is about philanthropy that ignores rural America? Why do you think that is?
Savannah Barrett:And I must say, of course, that this isn't true of all grantmakers. There are incredible champions for rural America, many in Minnesota where you live. Right? Yep. Midnight Foundation, Blandon, incredible champions.
Savannah Barrett:And I think when you look at at national foundations that are really rooted on the coast and the folks who work at them, Many of those people come from a class background that doesn't really prioritize or value connection to place in the same way. So we were talking earlier about the, you know, spiritual experience of belonging to a place and being accountable to that place and sort of in some ways, like, I think a lot of country people would say that, like, they don't own land loan land owns them. And they feel really called to care for it at any cost. You know? Too many of the folks who are running these grant making programs that have a rural commitment don't understand what it means to be a somewhere because they come from a generational background of anywheres.
Savannah Barrett:Anywhere the opportunity is, any school that gives the best education for a child, any community that has the best amenities, where somewheres stay committed to a place despite what that place lacks because they feel an a real commitment to the history and the future of that place that has really cultivated them, poured into them. I think the failure of this country's institutions to appropriately invest in rural people and places isn't, you know, one of malice, but is one of just not understanding how to do it. And so not doing it appropriately and deciding it's just too hard. I think it all really boils down to that concept of commitment. Commitment to place.
Savannah Barrett:Right? Like, neighborliness is about commitment, not about tolerance. And that's the other really essential point, I think, of this moment. You know, commitment doesn't minimize differences. It eclipses them.
Savannah Barrett:I think what we are doing as a culture in this moment is focusing on what differences we hold and how we can overcome them by talking about them, which is never the path. I don't know if you've ever had a conversation with your spouse.
Ellen Wolter:Well, that's the one we often understand. Right? Yeah.
Savannah Barrett:Right? It's never the path. The path is commitment. It is saying, despite our differences, our connection is worth more. And so I'm going to pour into the thing that is valuable to me.
Ellen Wolter:I don't know if you follow, John Powell's work on bridging. I'm sure you do. I love that he brings in that complexity is just what you're talking about. You know, sometimes we can bridge, sometimes we can't. It's sometimes it's a long bridge.
Ellen Wolter:Sometimes it's a short bridge. That's okay. It's not just about this idea of bridging and we all come to common ground, which brings me to this New York Times article that was written about bridging efforts in 2024. And listeners, I'll be sure to link to it so you can read it, which I have to admit, I did find a bit cynical and a little bit dismissive. I don't know how you felt about it, Savannah.
Ellen Wolter:But one of the questions I had is your quote in there was when you look for common ground, find it, but conversation can't be about conversion. And I wonder if you can share a little bit about the complexity of that and why that's such an important concept for people to understand.
Savannah Barrett:You know, I think I learned that lesson. Well, gosh, Ellen, I think I've learned that lesson a 100 times, and I'll probably learn it a 100 more. And I'll I certainly learned that lesson through the work of RUX, but I also learned that lesson in conversation with family members and friends from my home community who I really lost ground with in the two thousand two thousand sixteen election period because I was frankly being pretty pedantic about what I thought I knew and what I thought they didn't know. And, you know, I wasn't entirely wrong. Right?
Savannah Barrett:I was working for a policy institute. I had, like, a an up close and personal view at some of the policy implications that would come to rural America from that shift in power, and I failed to really appreciate how deeply harmful the disregard that people felt from the sort of national conversation. And not just the disregard, but also the real condescension had impacted people. And that was really the problem with that New York Times piece. I think the missed opportunity of that New York Times article is that it really focused on the divisiveness of American politics and failed to recognize that that experience of division is really a symptom of a deeper cultural issue.
Savannah Barrett:And it uplifted RUX alongside many examples that were chapters of national efforts to bring folks together. And in that article, you heard quotes from folks saying, I don't think that this is going to change the work. I don't think that this is going to change my mind, but it feels good to do. And then you heard RUX members talking about how being in relationship with one another had changed their lives. And I think the real failure of that essay is that it didn't go far enough in highlighting the contrast between these strategies and instead dismissed the deep relational work that we've done for more than a decade in Kentucky as a frill.
Ellen Wolter:One of the things they called the bridging movement was a kumbaya industrial complex, which I think just epitomizes everything that you're saying about the condescension and limiting of the real valuable nature of this work. The New York Times does amazing reporting on international national stories. They do a real disservice to rural communities. They miss the complexity of what is really happening in communities. I have a long list of how they can improve their reporting because they have a real way in which they can provide valuable knowledge about the complexity of what's really happening in communities.
Savannah Barrett:I mean, I couldn't agree more, Ellen, and I have to uplift my boss at art of the rural, Matthew Fluharty, who's the executive director and lives in Winona, Minnesota. Winona, as y'all like to say. We have Winona, Judd. So it's you can understand my confusion.
Ellen Wolter:Yes. Of course. Of course. I hadn't even thought about that.
Savannah Barrett:Matt has been subscribing to rural newspapers across the country since 2016 alongside the New York Times and and juxtaposing clips of how they are covering the same story and just has an incredible archive on essentially the lack of rural competence or the urban normativity of this cultural moment. I think the real opportunity for us in 2026 and for the institutions that can support this kind of work is to simply concede that they haven't been in right relationship to not just rural people, but to the somewheres of this country, to people in communities of all population densities who are deeply bound to a place despite whatever might happen to that place and how they can invest in them to build the future that we all need. Because these people are actually also the most likely saviors of this political moment. It is that commitment to a place that can be leveraged to build the kinds of civic renewal that we need to get back to a thriving democracy. What I will say though about that New York Times piece is that the photographs that John Cherry took were all of Kentucky RUX.
Savannah Barrett:They were telling the story of a bunch of different efforts, but the story that those photographs told was one of people having profound experiences in Middle America. Those were photographs that any small town paper would print.
Ellen Wolter:I just there's just the one that I saw, and it I that's so funny that you mentioned that. And I did think that is such a beautiful photo of just people gathering.
Savannah Barrett:John Cherry, y'all. RUX member, a self taught photographer, and a Pulitzer winning photographer in Louisville, Kentucky.
Ellen Wolter:It shows.
Savannah Barrett:Call him up.
Ellen Wolter:Hire him. Okay. Alright. Listeners, did you hear that? We'll put a link into the notes to John Sherry's info too.
Ellen Wolter:The other thing I wanted to ask you, Savannah, about that article is one of the quotes in there mentioned, they said, I don't think the answer is talking about politics more. I think it's talking about politics less. And I was curious your perspective on that.
Savannah Barrett:I absolutely agree with that. I think the work of RUX, our strength has always been that we help people show up as their whole selves. And I don't think that people's political identity is part of their core identity. I don't think it's, like, who they really are and what they really love about themselves. I think it's pretty close to the top.
Savannah Barrett:So it's absolutely true that there are many RUX members who I just don't know their political affiliation. You know? I think I know that they're right of center, but I don't I don't know how they vote. I don't know how they think about some of the more divisive social political issues. I just don't know.
Savannah Barrett:But I do know what their memoir's name is and what they the places that they love best and what they are most likely to bring to a potluck. I think we're perhaps at this moment, the shift moment in this effort to strengthen the connectedness of our communities and their efficacy, their capacity to move forward together. And it reminds me of a sort of moment in the creative placemaking field where folks didn't need to talk about creative placemaking or focus on the phrase creative placemaking anymore, and instead could focus on the impacts of what happens when artists engage in community processes. I think we are in a similar moment with the Bridging and Democracy movement where perhaps we can stop talking about the word bridging and the concept of bridging and instead start talking about the impact of connection and efficacy. You know, I don't know if you know this.
Savannah Barrett:I think we talked about this the first time that we connected that, you know, though RUX is comes from Kentucky and is stewarded in Kentucky that we worked with Minnesotans and the native nations that share that geography to engage in RUX practices up north. From 2020 to 2024, we did a pilot there. And it's you know, we've learned so much. I've learned so much from my northern neighbors about how this work can adapt and really find the bridging space that it needs to adhere to. And it was so interesting to see how that work has taken shape there.
Savannah Barrett:Some of the engagement that happened in Winona County led to this really deep collaboration of intercultural exchange with Dakota led organizations around the Prairie Island Indian community and Honoring Dakota Project between them and local local organizations that were on the host committee of of Brux, like Engage Winona and the Winona Historical Society to do not just intercultural exchange work, but also, like, intercultural competency work for city officials in Winona County and to really have conversations about a geological formation called Sugarloof. That's a really important part of the Dakota origin story and to talk about what it would mean to return rights to the ancestral people of that place. It's been really incredible to witness, and that work is continuing to evolve to maybe be a more regional version of intercultural exchange in the art of the rural portfolio. Keep an eye on that in 2027 in Southeastern Minnesota. There there's so much to unpack there.
Savannah Barrett:I think it's really slow trust as foundation kind of work, and to see it take root in that region through the stewardship of Matt Flewhardy and art of the rural and honoring Dakota and engage one owner of so many great people has been inspiring. It reminds me of where we were when we started RUX. Right? We weren't trying to solve a problem. We were trying to create the conditions for us to be able to be in the kind of transformative relationship that could build a collaborative future.
Ellen Wolter:Well, thank you so much, Savannah,
Savannah Barrett:for coming on today.
Ellen Wolter:It's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks so much for your time and your expertise.
Savannah Barrett:Thank you so much for having me, Ellen. It's been a real pleasure to be here with you, and I'm grateful that you do this work.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Wolter. Special thanks to Jan Jekula, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits. You can find episodes of Side by Side wherever you get your podcasts.
Ellen Wolter:I'm Ellen Wolter, and this is side by side.