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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, ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
Drew Arrieta:I grew up in New York City, Brooklyn, New York, and that was, like, my first time I really engaged with someone who lives in a rural community. And I think for me, I also had this almost a fear of rural communities for a really long time, especially the politics of our world right now. And I think I was surprised by the diversity in terms of, like, cultural backgrounds and then also the diversity in terms of thought and philosophies and ways of living. There's a lot of projections onto rural communities about how people who live in rural communities live and act and what they believe in, and I found that not to be true, especially when I dive into deeper conversations.
Michele Anderson:We at SpringBoard, because we've had the Fergus Falls office and Saint Paul office now for fifteen years, and we started just naming rural urban solidarity just in our internal conversations as we were troubleshooting very local issues with one another. So we realized this is a great opportunity. We have the coalition, so let's help them support artists to do projects around this prompt of rural urban solidarity, knowing that artists would have all kinds of interpretations and approaches to what that means and to hold a lot of space for all the complexity that we were experiencing as a country.
Ellen Wolter:That's Drew Arrieta, a Minneapolis based documentary photographer and interdisciplinary visual artist. And Michelle Anderson, world director at Springboard for the Arts. And they're talking about the art of rural urban solidarity project, which asked artists to create work examining why rural and urban communities need each other. Drew created an anonymous phone booth project between Red Wing and Minneapolis and invited people to share community misconceptions and pride. And both Michelle and Drew discuss how their rural urban identities shaped assumptions about places they had never visited and how those assumptions changed through lived experience when they discovered diversity and deep community connections in both small towns and cities.
Ellen Wolter:And they talk about the importance of using art to create social infrastructure by fostering curiosity and complexity and play rather than urgency and division and debate.
Music (Jim Griswold):When they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Walter, and welcome to the Side by Side podcast. Michelle and Drew, I'm just gonna start with a very easy question, which is can you tell me just a little bit about your work and what you do? Well, my
Michele Anderson:name is Michelle Anderson. I'm the rural director at Springboard for the Arts. Springboard is a community and economic development organization, and we're based both in Saint Paul and Fergus Falls. So as the rural director, I focus on how to support rural artists and their communities. And we've been doing the rural work for about fifteen years, but Springboard works across the entire state and does some national work as well.
Michele Anderson:What about you, Drew?
Drew Arrieta:I'm Drew Arrieta. I am a documentary photographer and multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My work sort of carries across photography, textiles, printmaking, collage, building out art experiences, and inviting the public to participate in them. I'm really interested in themes around resilience, solidarity, archives, and memory.
Ellen Wolter:I'm curious, the both of you, do you consider yourself a rural, urban, or suburban person? Do you identify with one of those or a couple of those? What does that look like for you?
Michele Anderson:Yeah. I I definitely identify as a rural person or a small town. So I grew up in a very small town of Dundas, Minnesota, which is just outside of Northfield. When I was living there, it had about 450 people. It's gotten quite a bit bigger since then.
Michele Anderson:So for me, small town was was really it really shaped who I am. I did move to Portland, Oregon for about eleven years and then came back for the springboard job to Fergus Falls, partially because I think living in Portland helped me really realize that I I have a a passion for small places and wanted to return to that and see what I could give back to rural Minnesota.
Ellen Wolter:Listeners, Michelle has a really great editorial about her experience moving from Portland and back to a small town in Fergus Falls, and I'll be sure to to share that out with everyone. What about you, Drew?
Drew Arrieta:I consider myself a urban person through and through. I grew up in New York City, Brooklyn, New York. I did not have any experiences with rural, you know, communities or, you know, even visited a rural area until I moved to Minnesota, and I started to do my first project was working on regenerative agriculture in farming communities in Minnesota, and that was, like, my first time I really engaged with someone who lives in a rural community throughout multiple generations and hearing their history. And I think for me, I also had this almost a fear of rural communities for a really long time, especially the politics of our world right now. And I think doing projects you know, a lot of the projects I have done, I've I've done them out of curiosity and to learn from, and, I'm grateful that I've been able to do it.
Drew Arrieta:And it's allowed me to sort of personally bridge my identity with rural communities coming from such a big city and then living in Minneapolis now.
Ellen Wolter:There things about rural communities you know, if you've seen one rural community, you've seen one rural community, so I don't wanna generalize to all rural communities. But are there things that surprised you, and and what were they?
Drew Arrieta:I think I was surprised by the diversity diversity in terms of, like, cultural backgrounds and then also the diversity in terms of thought and philosophies and ways of living. I expected, like, rural communities to be very homogenous and people sort of to live and act and talk the same. But I was really impressed by different ways of thinking, politics, cultural backgrounds, and that's what sort of, like, I think softened me up to to rural communities. I think a lot of that is not evident on the surface, and that there's a lot of projections onto rural communities about how people who live in rural communities live and act and what they believe in. And I found that not to be true, especially when I dive into deeper conversations.
Ellen Wolter:And, Michelle, I'll turn that question to you too. But in the reverse, when you moved to Portland, are there things that surprised you about being in a more urban place?
Michele Anderson:In some ways, yes. I think I realized pretty quickly, especially once I was out of college and just living in different neighborhoods and working, that you can create really similar deep senses of connection and interdependency in a urban space just as just as well as you can in a small town. And I think when I first moved away, there was sort of this, like, romanticism of being being anonymous, you know, and in a way, maybe even not very accountable to anybody else that I think I quickly was very humbled by in the city. And I think the the other piece of that was people making kind of assumptions of me as well, you know, assuming that I didn't know a lot about the world or have experience with other cultures. And that, you know, it was interesting to navigate.
Michele Anderson:The other thing that surprised me was just that there was, in some ways, less of a range of relationships as far as age and experiences than I had experienced in a rural place and that I that I feel now. It was just almost too easy to be surrounded by all the other musicians in their twenties, whereas in rural places, it's not an option to surround yourself with people that think and are interested in the same thing as you in the same age and life life experiences.
Ellen Wolter:I always love hearing people's assumptions about a place and then how when they go to that place, that assumption changes. Mhmm. Typically, not always, but typically. Right? The stereotype, it tells one story, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
Ellen Wolter:Right? Well, let's let's move on and tell me a little bit about what is the Creative Change Coalition, and what is the art of rural urban solidarity?
Michele Anderson:Yeah. So the Creative Change Coalition is a national initiative that SpringBoard started a little over a year and a half ago. And it's a network of place based organizations, all of whom center people, art, and creativity as tools for for transformation. And as many people might know, SpringBoard has always focused on individual artists and the the idea that artists are essential to every community. Started the Creative Change Coalition because we were meeting and hearing from a lot of organizations across the country that believe the same thing but needed ways to connect.
Michele Anderson:So they were kind of less traditional than your typical arts nonprofit and a lot more embedded in being responsive to communities, being part of social change movements. And so it felt like this kind of new generation of arts organizations that needed their own platform and space to connect. So that program has supported a number of things, a lot of learning across organizations and technical assistance and sharing when the coalition began around the same time of the twenty twenty four election. And so there were definitely some conversations among the organizations just about how are we supporting artists during this time? How are we making space for the nuanced conversations that need to happen?
Michele Anderson:And the art of rural urban solidarity came out. We at SpringBoard, because we've had the Fergus Falls office and Saint Paul office now for fifteen years, we found ourselves collectively, you know, just as we were collaborating across those two geographies, we found ourselves feeling kind of frustrated of the concept of, like, healing divides and bridging divides. It just felt a little surface level or, like, there's one one solution, and then we'll all be okay. So we we really started talking about what what are we doing? What does this feel like?
Michele Anderson:And we started just naming rural urban solidarity just in our internal conversations. So this concept of rural urban solidarity really felt better and more accurate as to what we were doing and also way more accurate to what we saw happening across the country among our peers and our colleagues and many of the artists. And we knew too in anticipating the twenty twenty four election that our differences would be very highlighted. You know? That that fear kind of serves a purpose, and it benefits certain people to have us be suspicious and afraid of each other.
Michele Anderson:So we wanted to put some attention and care into a different story of what rural and urban communities can experience together or do together or work together on. And so at SpringBoard, we love supporting many small projects instead of, like, one really big one, one really splashy one because we feel that it unearths a lot more information. It builds a lot more relationships. So this was the first time we realized, like, this is a great opportunity. We have the coalition.
Michele Anderson:We have this concept of rural urban solidarity that we already see happening, and then we have this lots of little models. So let's work with some trusted partners across the country and help them support artists to do projects around this prompt of rural urban solidarity, knowing that artists would have all kinds of interpretations and approaches to what that means, and that's the whole point is is to hold a lot of space for all the complexity that we were experiencing as a country.
Ellen Wolter:What drew you to this work and to being an artist as part of rural urban solidarity?
Drew Arrieta:Yeah. And just to add on to what was just shared, I what I love about Springboard for the Arts and their ability to sort of do these smaller grants is I find that they're, like, very responsive to the needs of the community and to artists because they're allowed to be a lot more flexible and fluid, and so I'm really grateful that they exist in Minnesota. And and for me, specifically, drew me I to this project, I I think solidarity is a is an idea, concept, or something I love to see in practice, and I love really exploring it as a theme. And so once I saw that, that was, like, what they were looking to explore, and then it being an election year, especially when there's a lot of conversations around the rural urban divide, especially around politics happening, I really wanted to do a project that felt intimate and personal and encourage people to build that that solidarity. And so the project was called the crossing lines.
Drew Arrieta:I I worked on it with a a rural artist, a woman who is a natural dye farmer in Norfield, Minnesota, and so we collaborated on this project together. And it was a interactive phone booth project where we developed two phone booths, one that was in a rural community in the town of Red Wing, Minnesota, which is actually a city of about fifteen, sixteen thousand people, and then we then we also had one in Minneapolis. So over the course of one day, it was on October 12, and we wanted to have it as close to sort of the election as possible when people were feeling probably the most anxious about the rural urban divide and really invite people to have anonymous conversations about the misconceptions of their own community. And we developed these phone booths to almost feel like you were stepping into your own living room. They had these, like, very soft walls, a hanging light, art on the wall, plants, and candles.
Drew Arrieta:We wanted to feel as if you were talking to a friend who was located in a different location. And this is the first time I I participated in a project like this, and so there was a lot of really interesting learnings in terms of, like, inviting people into the booth, how to make people feel most comfortable, what prompts do we need to provide, do we even need to provide prompts, what guardrails should we set up. And so it was really interesting to just sort of see the conversations unfold throughout the course of the day. We hosted around 40 different conversations with people that were based in Minneapolis and and Red Wing throughout that day.
Ellen Wolter:So, yeah, Drew, talk a little bit about how that worked and what were some of the prompts and how did you encourage folks to make that call? And and if you I don't know if you overheard it in the conversations, but maybe some of the things folks maybe talked about. Mhmm.
Drew Arrieta:Yeah. And so, you know, in the Red Wing location, we had the booth set up at the Red Wing Fall Art Festival. And then in Minneapolis, it was at the the Minneapolis Farmers Market, and then there's a popular restaurant called Centro. We had it outside. They're having this festival called Korn Fest.
Drew Arrieta:And so we wanted to have these the phone booths outside of locations where there was a lot of, like, natural foot traffic and just really grab people off the street and really create these sort of unexpected moments for people that they weren't people we didn't really wanted to make it a destination, but also something that people participated on because they just happened to be in the specific spot or location during that day. And so, initially, you know, when we invited people to participate, we had a list of about 10 different community agreements where we wanted people to agree to before they stepped into the booth. Whenever we would show that to folks, they would say, no. I don't wanna participate. People would get really nervous about maybe I'm not ready to have this conversation.
Drew Arrieta:Maybe I shouldn't, you know, I I don't think I I I can do this, and people start to overthink about what the conversation may turn into. And the community agreements were things about, like, being an active listener, being respectful, not using hateful language, things that make a lot of, like, common sense. And so very quickly, we pivoted into we had, like, a physical phone that people would use to have a conversation, and so people who were passing by the booth, I would just hand out the phone to them and say, hey. There's someone in Red Wing, Minnesota who wants to speak to you about your community. And that itself where they had less of an opportunity to think about it, they were more likely to participate.
Drew Arrieta:And so people would take that prompt and step into the phone booth without even really knowing why we're there, what we're looking to do, but just that, hey. There's someone who wants to speak to you about your community. And then when they got into the booth, there was a series of prompts on the wall. You know, what are common misconceptions about your community that you feel are are not correct? What are things you love about your community?
Drew Arrieta:What are things you wanna share and that you're proud of about your community? So really straightforward things, and we also allowed people to just talk about really whatever they wanted to talk about. Those prompts were sort of just suggestions. And so we had a range of conversations. The conversation we really wanted them to be anonymous, so we didn't record them.
Drew Arrieta:We really wanted to create a a safe space for folks so they can show up as their their true authentic self. And so we had people talking about butterfly monarch migrations, people talking about photography, people talking about queerness and that how that shows up in rural and in urban areas. And a lot of the people, after they had that experience, many folks described it as almost therapeutic in ways. They felt they were seen and held by someone on another end that they didn't really get to exchange names or any personal information, but they got to exchange a personal side of themselves, something that matters to them, and that was received and held in a respectful and kind way. And I think that was, like, really what made that project really special for me is just providing that, like, moment of levity and lightness to people's days.
Drew Arrieta:I think we're all carrying so much in our daily lives with everything that's going on, and so giving people unexpected joy and lightness is really rewarding.
Ellen Wolter:Drew, did you run into any challenges? You know, you had to hold up the community agreements and say, hey. Wait a second. You know, be respectful, or did you not have to even think about that?
Drew Arrieta:Yeah. Didn't didn't didn't have to think about that at all. Everyone I think that was it sort of, like, almost gave me renewed my faith in humanity, like, trusting that people wanna be good people. People who don't you kinda have to go out of your way to be a jerk or or rude, And so people generally are just kind, wonderful people, and especially if someone on the other end is is carrying that same energy as well. And so we didn't have any instances where people felt offended or alienated.
Drew Arrieta:People really took the opportunity to listen and be in conversation, and we had a wide range of people participate. Some people who you know, this is the first time they they were in a phone booth even though it was a very, like, untraditional phone booth. We had a 12 year old kid step up and wanna participate and have a conversation. And so it was really nice to just provide that that access and opportunity for people to be to for those conversations.
Ellen Wolter:What do you take away from that project?
Michele Anderson:Hearing Drew describe those interactions, what it makes me think about is how important joy and play is in in building solidarity. I you know, I've been invited to different conversations or meetings or whatever about bridging all kinds of divides, not just urban rural, political divides, etcetera. And first of all, I sort of to kind of poke at that word a little bit, it it feels like it's a one and done thing, like build a bridge, walk over it, and we're good. It's sort of ironic because we make it seem urgent. And I think the urgency is what what keeps us from finding that solidarity.
Michele Anderson:It doesn't necessarily mean we are agreeing on everything, but we are hearing each other. We're building relationship first. We're starting with joy and memories and curiosity. So I think the the phone booth is is so perfect in so many ways. There's also just this underlying story about communication in general and how we communicate and what infrastructure is out there for us to connect.
Michele Anderson:How can we create that social infrastructure for those moments of joy and connection? And then trust, you know, not not ask for all the answers, not not have to write some smart article or whatever about how we solve this political divide, but trust that people will do what they can with those connections and relationships simply because of shared humanity. And we saw that with a lot of the projects. So this this program supported projects in Kentucky and Colorado and Michigan and then Minnesota. And even though artists use all different mediums and mechanisms, we had quilting, we had theater, zines.
Michele Anderson:Another exchange that reminds me of the phone booth is a pen pal exchange where people in Minneapolis and Otter Tail County were each given one of those disposable cameras, and they were just supposed to take pictures around certain prompts in the community they lived in and then mail them to each other. But I think at the heart of all of that is taking away the urgency and and just finding a way to share an experience together. And these were small projects. They were meant to to help us learn, but I think they also demonstrated that can we can only achieve this idea of rural urban solidarity one relationship, one conversation, one person at a time.
Ellen Wolter:Drew, what about you? What are some of the things that that you took away from from your work, your project?
Drew Arrieta:Yeah. I think, you know, the need for people to have this space like, there is an interest in building a connection between rural and urban. I think there's a curiosity there, but there isn't a lot of, like, opportunities and outlets. And just hearing what both of you have shared so far too is, like, how can we make this ongoing and something that is sustained and not just a once, you know, pop up experience for people, but people can engage with on a on a daily basis? Like, to me, solidarity is something that shows up continuously.
Drew Arrieta:And so now I'm thinking about, like, how do how do I show up for rural communities on a continuous basis, and how can rural communities show up for urban communities? And I think there's so many values that are in alignment. I think the distance is actually not as far as we think it is. There's geographical distance, but in terms of our values and beliefs, the distance isn't as wide as we think. And so, like, I'd love to see more ways we can continue building these bridges and going back and forth over these bridges, continuing to use that analogy.
Drew Arrieta:Mhmm. Not just building it, but, you know, making it a a thorough way that that people go back and forth on. And and I think this project too really brought up for me how personal hearing someone's voice is and how audio is a really beautiful way to connect with individuals. There's something really personal about it, especially if you don't see someone physically, but you just hear their voice. You you try to get a sense of their personality, who they are, where they're coming from, and it's almost less threatening in ways or, like, your a lot of your preconceived notions fall back, and you just hear this voice, and you're sort of painting a picture about what they say.
Drew Arrieta:And I think audio is a really good way, and and someone's voice is a really good way to sort of, like, bridge those divides and connect to people on a personal, intimate way.
Ellen Wolter:As you're both talking, what comes to mind for me is, is it not as hard as we think it is in terms of coming together and finding solidarity, or would you not agree with that?
Drew Arrieta:It's a good question. I think for me, I'm an optimist, and I always see the light in things. I do think a lot of it comes down to just having people in the same room and being in conversation with each other and creating and prioritizing it. I don't think that's something that's been truly prioritized. And I think if if we do wanna build rural and urban solidarity, we have to make it a priority and sustain that work and fund it, and and people have to make the choice as well.
Drew Arrieta:I think there's many people who aren't making that choice or aren't prioritizing it, but I do think there is there is a curiosity. It doesn't serve our best interest to be divided.
Ellen Wolter:Well, and as Michelle, you pointed out before, I mean, there is a a way in which that divide is exploited. Right? There's a way in which that divide is used to people's advantage, and so it's hard to get away from it.
Michele Anderson:Yeah. I would love to say that, oh, you know, just fund a bunch more of these projects, and we'll solve it. I mean, it's what I think about is just that it's hard when we are trying to come up with the one solution, and it's less hard when we're remembering that we all share a future together. We share a planet. And I think another kind of misconception that goes in both geographies is that people are only centered in urban and rural.
Michele Anderson:And even though Drew and I both kind of define ourselves urban and rural pretty clearly, I think the more common experience is that people are really multicentered. And so we are being told to to be divided and not trust each other and fear each other when when actually there's so many people here in Fergus Falls that I think would identify as urban and just happen to live here right now and just happen to be caring for this community. And then so many of my classmates that grew up in Dundas and Northfield that are now living in Minneapolis. And so it's not even just the two geographies being asked to be pitted against each other. It's also like our own experiences that have shaped us in those different geographic contexts.
Michele Anderson:And so it's almost like asking you to fight with your own internal values and narrative. And that's something that makes it harder to talk about because it's like you're supposed to take a a stance or you're supposed to defend one because it's not getting enough of its story told or whatever. But I think when you can use art and culture to hold space for these conversations, and it's not like we're collapsing all of the differences and finding, yay, we have this in common, but it's just giving us a place to hold it all. The experience of a creative process, even if it's a hard conversation or if you're talking through past harms or grief, the joy that results from that does make things feel easier. I think it gives people power when they previously might have felt powerless.
Ellen Wolter:Could you talk a little bit about some of the other projects and other takeaways if you have them?
Michele Anderson:Yeah. A lot of the projects were about exchange and stories, people using art and culture to kind of meet each other across geographies. But one that really stuck with me that was really taking a different approach was an artist named Libby Barbie. She's in Colorado, and she made a series of billboards that were installed, I think, on the outskirts of Denver. The project was called Your Sky is My Sky.
Michele Anderson:My Sky is Your Sky was billboards that depicted skies of clouds. You can kind of un see the message there is that we share land, we share sky together no matter where we live, and this is our shared responsibility. I also love that it was put up during a time when we were just infiltrated with political billboards all over the place. So using that that mechanism to do the opposite of what all of the billboards and political ads were doing at the time, which was don't trust these these people. Fear this approach to politics, etcetera.
Michele Anderson:And so in this case, it was just so simple. My sky is your sky. So I really I'm just really struck by that. I'm also just a fan of artists taking over billboards and talk about meeting people where they are. Like, somebody driving down an interstate, seeing that, like, how does that give them pause?
Michele Anderson:What does it make them think about? How do they how are they interpreting it? We can think of things and see things in another way. Let's see. Back closer to home here in Minnesota, Micah Leanders did a beautiful project around the descendants of Rice County's early African American residents.
Michele Anderson:She invited descendants of those African American residents from Red Wing to come to Red Wing. So many of them live in the Twin Cities now and do memorial mosaics for them. And I just love that connection of thinking about genealogy, about human migration, and the fact that many of Minnesota's small towns, even if they may not now, did once have a very significant African American population. And just, like, surfacing that, I think that history is really buried. It's part of Fergus Falls history too.
Michele Anderson:And so lifting lifting those stories out and then inviting that very purposeful exchange that literally is about family.
Drew Arrieta:I think it was really inspiring for me that at the same time my project was going on, there was a cohort of other artists, and we were able to connect over Zoom and have conversations and learn about the projects that they were doing. I think it was really grateful just to know that all of us collectively were working on trying to sort of solve the same problem or challenge, but through different lenses. I am always, like, blown away inspired by how artists have different types of creative approaches based off of their own lived experiences and their art practices about how do we we bridge this gap. And so it was really enlightening and inspiring to hear about the range of different projects that people are taking on.
Ellen Wolter:Michelle, is there anything in the works for doing something similar down
Michele Anderson:the road? Right now, SpringBoard has a guaranteed minimum income program for artists. And right from the start, we knew we wanted to pilot this program both in Saint Paul and in Fergus Falls, not just because we are here and we want to support our communities, but also because too often, projects that are trying to research or understand the potential of new policy are only tried in an urban context or sometimes rural, but it's often urban. And so trying to do some of this learning in tandem and in parallel with the geographies that we have our relationships with and trying to demonstrate and just influence other organizations to to think similarly. And I think those are aside from all the human connection that we've been talking about, is also just how do we have that diversity of geographic research and evidence for the world we wanna create.
Michele Anderson:And my hope is that that that also gets both geographies on board quicker because too often, it's like, well, I can't tell you how many times I've been presenting to a rural community, and I'd use one urban example, and people are just like, well, we don't have that many people, or we don't have that kind of fence in this town. And so I think if we can really demonstrate on the ground in many geographies of the different models and systems that we wanna recreate, that we will get to them more quickly. We'll have more buy in. We'll have more more evidence and stories to get get those systems made.
Ellen Wolter:This is a little bit tangential, but I just happened to see this research that a lot of the mistrust in science is because people don't see themselves reflected in the science. And so thinking about rural communities, and there's many communities that are not reflected in science. Right? But from a rural standpoint, if we're gonna build effective communities, that has to include the communities right now that are included, and that is rural communities.
Michele Anderson:I I mean, I think I think that's really important. And I I do wanna say that that also reminds me of something that I've learned that urban folks don't think as much. And when they hear this, they really appreciate the difference, and that is around just community organizing in rural spaces. So I've helped with a couple of political campaigns. But even just the the time it takes to knock on all of the doors in a senate district and have them meet you and hear about what you're about, or if even if you're just working on some kind of policy issue and you're not a candidate, it can take an hour to get from one town to another, and you still have barely scraped the surface of that entire district.
Michele Anderson:You know? Whereas, of course, in an urban neighborhood, you can walk those blocks pretty fast. There's a certain type of person that can make the time to do that all of that driving and traveling. And so I think when I've talked to some of my urban colleagues about that, there's sort of a moment of, like, okay. That makes a lot of sense and also eases a bit of the frustration of why it's so hard to make change and organize in rural spaces.
Michele Anderson:And there's literally a physical barrier that takes 10 times the amount of time to to address.
Ellen Wolter:What did these projects and, Drew, for you, your project teach you about the role of of rural urban solidarity and what you feel could or should happen next?
Drew Arrieta:Yeah. I feel you know, it taught me that rural and urban solidarity is necessary. I think often when we think about a lot of the our societal challenges that we we're facing in our world, we view it through sort of, like, the communities specifically that we live in or through the urban context and not sort of, like, how rural urban communities intersect with each other. A lot of people share their lived experiences exist in rural and urban areas. And so we already have a really strong foundation for building that solidarity because many people do have those experiences in both of those locations.
Drew Arrieta:And so I think tapping into that, and I think that the the work is just beginning. We we have so much more work that needs to be done.
Michele Anderson:Yeah. I mean, I guess just that it's not optional to me. I mean, rural and urban places need each other for so many reasons. And I hear a lot about, you know, just if you read if you go down the rabbit holes of reading common news articles and things, one of the things I see all the time is that rural places deserve the deficits that we're experiencing because of the political trends. So for example, I know some hospitals in Minnesota have closed in recent years, and that's a place where I've seen people say, well, they voted for this.
Michele Anderson:You know? I think that we need to remember that when systemic things like that happen in either place, in in a rural or urban place, that there is a ripple. There's a ripple into how it impacts our our lives and our resources and the well-being of our shared humanity. And how can we remind each other that when you reduce these places to stereotypes, how is that impacting our collective well-being? And I'll just share, like, something that gives me hope is is the next generation because I think they do have a just kind of a different understanding of of what what place means.
Michele Anderson:And I'm not sure I can quite put my finger on it, but I have a six year old. And we haven't traveled to very many big cities together, but he still calls himself a city kid. And I'm kinda trying to, like, understand, like, what does this mean? Do you think do you think Fergus Falls is a city? Did he dislike that one weekend trip we took to Minneapolis?
Michele Anderson:But I think also we say a lot of bad things about social media, but I think they also just have a different sense of what a community can be, what a network can be. And so my hope is that we take time not just for that social infrastructure of connecting adults around these political or not political conversations, but that we also find ways for kids to have experiences in a lot of different geographies. That's not something I really got a chance to do as a kid in a rural town. And a lot of my urban friends say similarly, like, oh, it would have been really cool to, like, go to a small town and just learn more. At the time, I think there were a lot of stories being told on behalf of rural.
Michele Anderson:I think now there's there's a lot more coming straight from the ground from rural people. We need to resource that storytelling in both geographies, the storytelling from the people that live and care about these places. It has been a pleasure to talk with
Ellen Wolter:you both. Thanks for sharing your wisdom today and your expertise.
Drew Arrieta:It's a privilege.
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 Walter. Special thanks to Jan Jackola, 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 Walter, and this is side by side.