Episode 9: Strengthening Rural Communities Through University Partnerships

Our Indiana Episode 8 Transcript


[INTRO MUSIC]

Denny Spinner
Hi, this is Denny Spinner from the Indiana University Center for Rural Engagement. Welcome to Our Indiana: Stories from Rural Hoosiers, recording today from the Daviess County Government Center in Washington, Indiana. Joining us today is Cindy Barber, the county extension director and community development educator at Purdue Extension Daviess County, and Scott Burgins, clinical assistant professor at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Welcome to the show, Cindy and Scott.

Scott Burgins
Thank you, Denny.

Cindy Barber
Thank you.

Denny Spinner
Cindy, we've had a great relationship between IU CRE and Daviess County for a long time. You recently wrapped up your stint as a Sustaining Hoosier Community partnership with IU and Daviess County. Tell us how that partnership began. How did that all originate?

Cindy Barber
I would say the partnership with IU CRE started long before Sustaining Hoosier Communities was something that we really went after. So then IU and Purdue Extension have been partnering in Daviess County for several years on health-related needs and topics, and Sustaining Hoosier Communities was kind of a great culmination of how to continue to make great things happen here in a partnership. So we first started back in, I mean, I want to say it was 2017, 2018, we did submit an application for Sustaining Hoosier Communities, whatever you guys call round one. We were not accepted, but we watched what happened in the other communities, and were thrilled when we had a chance to actually step up and become a Sustaining Hoosier Communities county this year.

Denny Spinner
And we'll touch more on that in a little bit. Again, kind of laying the groundwork. Scott, tell us about your course at IU and how it connected with Daviess County and SHC.

Scott Burgins
Denny, the course I teach is a graduate level course called Community Development Planning. It's seen through the lens of a planner. We're always looking to get real world experience. In fact, O'Neill School of Public Environmental Affairs stresses that students get experiential learning. We're always looking for partners, and I was very happy when the Center for Rural Engagement set us up. They had a partner, set up, they had stakeholders, they gave support photographs, set up meetings, so it made it very easy for the students to get out, get into the community and do some work.

Denny Spinner
That two-way relationship is what's very important. And what we wanted to kind of hit on here today, Scott, you've had that collaboration with partners in this. You mentioned how that was all set up for you. What are the lessons that you learned as a university partner and the students took away from your experience here in Daviess County.

Scott Burgins
One the things that I stress with the students, the students are going to get something out of this experience. It's going to be great. It's going to be a lot of fun for them. We're always concerned about the communities. We can't just parachute in, give them 140-page report and walk out again. We have to build local capacity. In fact, just recently, I think we finished this plan, about six months ago, Cindy and I have been talking to keep it going. So the main thing I learned is that even after we're gone, to go back, support the community, check in, see what you're see what's going on, and I'll continue to offer support.

Denny Spinner
I think that's one of the key elements. And we talked about Sustaining Hoosier Communities as a program at CRE, is what you just said, Scott. It's not a “drop in, glad to work with you, and we're gone.” It's a relationship that is developed and hopefully will be a long-term relationship the next time an issue comes up that the resources at the university would be available, and welcome an opportunity to work with the county once again.

Scott Burgins
Sure.

Denny Spinner
Right. Cindy, so was there anything that surprised you? What was the “ah-ha,” maybe, when you started working with SHC and got deep into, I don't know how many projects there were on the list, what were those, some of those aha moments, maybe for you, that said, “Wow, this is really something that's special for us”?

Cindy Barber
I think one of the things that really stands out to me about our experience with was with the students. I mean, of course, colleagues like Scott, who led the projects and brought the students to us, we could not do it without them. But I think the enthusiasm of the students, and honestly, I've continued to bump into those students at different programs or events. They want to talk about it, like Scott said. I mean, the, you know, sustaining that beyond when the class is over and the term comes to a close and they've moved on.

I've just really been impressed by the students who continue to reach out or care about what we do with what they provided for us, which is meaningful in real life. I mean, we will implement, you know, maybe not every single piece of that 140-page document, but it's definitely, there's definitely pieces that we’ll make happen here, which, that's beautiful to me.

Denny Spinner
Well, Scott, let's go into the weeds a little bit on your project. You did a cycling access study. Working with one of the smaller communities, when we think about building capacity as one of our goals, and you had the opportunity with your course to work with a small community with an issue that they saw as important to them. Tell us a little bit about that project and what the outcomes were from that.

Scott Burgins
Sure, one of the things we try to do is, you want to make sure not to get too far out ahead of the community. So here in Washington, there was clearly an interest in bike and pedestrian safety, and yet maybe it was an 80/20 type of thing. The 80% hadn't been support. So one of the things we wanted to be careful to do was to build up a soup-to-nuts thing, starting with the promotional campaign about why bike safety is important. We came up with some models from other communities about how they've started to slowly go into these things. We built some regulations, an ordinance that the mayor could come out with in support of bike safety, and then we follow that up with some other ordinances, again taken from similar communities, about how they could slowly, gradually start to build their capacity to bicycling.

Then the last two projects were infrastructure related, where we talked about how they could, striping, and different types of things promote safety, and we told them where to get the grants. So when you're a little ahead of the curve in a community, you really have to show a step-by-step thing. I think the teams did six different projects, each one with a component, and every component had backup and samples and case languages and things like that.

Denny Spinner
And what you said there at the beginning, again, going back to the groundwork at the very front of this is what really makes it successful. We call it asset-based community development, but really getting a good idea of where the community is before you start any kind of action forward, I think that's a real solid form of development and is exercised greatly throughout what SHC does. So tell us how you begin that relationship.

Scott Burgins
Well, I've worked in Washington County as a private consultant for years. The town's looking great. There's a lot going on. There was construction when we were here, and that always gets people talking about traffic. We visited the local plant on the on the edge of town, and we saw that many people travel and walk and bike that way. We helped, we photographed that and showed where you could put in lanes, nice, very wide roads.

Here, I was just driving around coming into town. It's built on the old model, Washington is, so there's plenty of room for sort of bike paths and things like that, but you’ve got to ease people into it. It's like, well, we've never had them before. What do we need them for now? And so we want to slowly build the case while working with people like Cindy and Beth. And we had the mayor come out to meet us. We had a county commissioner and a city council member and just sort of showed them what other communities are doing, how, and how they can do the same thing.

Denny Spinner
And Cindy, again, this idea of IU riding in town to save the day is not part of it. I think that's one thing that, from a community aspect, how did your citizens react? What was the relationship as they saw this opportunity to work with the university? What were the takeaways you see from that?

Cindy Barber
To be honest, to back up just a little bit, the project that was pitched was a bike-pedestrian master plan, a trail plan, and we've talked about that for years. That was a lot of the projects that we submitted were things that we've either had in other plans or just hadn't, hadn't had the bandwidth to actually help those wishes and dreams come to fruition.

So I want to commend Scott and his students for listening the way they did to the conversations that we had around that master plan development, where a stakeholder, Beth Gabhart, who works with the YMCA, is also an avid cyclist herself, a triathlete, actually, so she in, you know, really honestly deep conversations that we had with Scott at the beginning kind of took us down that path, pun intended, I guess, of really thinking that the best thing we could do is address the safety issues first, just based on her own experience as a cyclist. So that was really helpful, because that took us down the path that led his Scott students to be inspired by what the possibilities were to build up to, you know, having bike lanes, or, you know, designated paths.

So there's a lot of listening and then bringing the students here too. I mean, I don't think they could sit in Bloomington in a classroom and come up with, you know, as robust of a plan as they did, but that spending that day here, I think, was really helpful, and hanging out at the coffee house with our elected officials stating their case, what their, you know, what their thoughts were initially, and then going out and seeing firsthand what that would look like if we tried to, you know, make those projects happen.

Denny Spinner
And there was a level of trust established in that early part as well, that showing those who were passionate about their project, that the students and the university were listening to their concerns, and that trust enabled, long-term, the project to be much more successful. Talk a little bit about how that that works in all fields, but this, this was a real example of that.

Scott Burgins
When we started, it was cold. I remember, February, it was very cold, when we showed up at the local coffee shop, and then the mayor was there. I think I had maybe 20, maybe 15, 20, students with us. The mayor was there, again, the city council member. They sat on the nice little sofas over there. They talked to us about it. I think the students really saw that this is something that could, could really happen. And then Beth gave us an extensive tour around the town. And I just could tell the students were a lot more engaged after that. They could talk about, we did something on Walnut Street and something over on Memorial Avenue, when they were looking at maps of the community and saying, Well, it would work here down by the park, but not somewhere else. So that site visit, and then having local people show up, the local stakeholders and officials show up, I think really helped get this project kick started.

Denny Spinner
And I think one of the things about building capacity that we've always talked about, so many local governments, smaller communities, the leaders of the community have to take care of those daily things, and the budget is pretty well tight to do that. But this is an aspirational type of project. Probably not room in the budget for something this extensive. How does that change the game for a local community to have a resource that can really expand your thoughts about what is possible in a community of this size?

Cindy Barber
When you're talking, Denny, a few things come to mind. Great point that there's just a lot of other things happening for our elected officials, important things that need to take place. So these projects tend to need other champions with their blessing to make them happen. And I think not only at the local level, but I was thinking of like our partners at the state, Pete Fritz, I mean, looking at Safe Routes to Schools, those resources that we have to, and like you said, to be able to fund some of the things we'd like to do.

What I loved about Scott's plan with the students is there's parts of the plan that we don't really, honestly, need much funding for, or we can use local funding to make those things happen. There's still larger wishes that will require greater funding opportunities that we'll need to take advantage of, but I definitely think and that being here, present in person, the students and Scott, there's buy-in, for sure. And it's just a matter of, yeah, continue to bring people together to make it happen.

Scott Burgins
When you bring in the real models that people have seen in the community like this, if you're going to push something new, for instance, again, the ordinances we took were from communities just like this. And the resolution that the mayor could do to support bicycling, you know, was not from Minnesota or Massachusetts, but from another community just like this. So everything we had either had their funding attached, or they just actually did the work. They wrote the regulations and for the community to review and do with as they liked.

Cindy Barber
And you know, Denny, I think about, you remember as mayor, it's been fun. I emailed Scott this week. You know, we've got our Business 50 project going on, and we have our first new sidewalks in town that are actually large enough for pedestrians and cyclists to share the space. And so I've seen, it's a long stretch of road street, but, you know, it goes right through the center of town. The opportunity that we have there to begin to really, really publicly address the safety issue, especially, is just the timing couldn't be better for us.

Denny Spinner
This project, by itself had a lot of successes, but the long-term look at this is, in the future, you would see Washington as they plan for future expansion, for future development, that this is now part of how they think. They think about, what about the bicyclists? What about the pedestrian part of it? So there's, going to be a longer-term impact of this type of work.

Cindy Barber
Absolutely, like proof of complete streets as being a best practice. Yeah, I definitely agree with that.

Scott Burgins
It's so important to plant these seeds. Again, I've been a consultant in southern Indiana for 25 years. I remember Martinsville 20 years ago was a pretty quiet place. I was just there a couple weeks ago. They have a great cigar and bourbon bar. We had a delicious meal at a local Italian restaurant. The whole Courthouse Square had the facade improvement program. And 20 years ago, people would have sort of forgotten and thought downtown could never be like that. Not to be on a theme, but I hear Bedford now is going to get us a nice cigar bar. They're doing some work, and I see a lot of great work going on here. So you have to plant these seeds so communities can see over time, that change can come.

Denny Spinner
And that's happening right here. I mean, I've seen it. I was a mayor in an adjoining town, Huntingburg, and Washington were great, great partners, worked together on a lot of things. And you can see that. This is a spark that leads to, I would call it a can-do-attitude, that we as a community have the ability to take on maybe an issue that that we didn't know how to handle, and now that we can do that, that gives you the spark or the positivity or the encouragement to say, What's the next thing that we can do? And Washington has done, and Daviess County has done a great job of really grasping that spark and really forwarding it.

Cindy Barber
I agree. When you were talking, I was thinking about a mutual friend we have that's an elected official who, one day I said, you know, what is it? Like, why can't we get things moving and going? This was several years ago, and he said, I think for a lot of people, their attitude is, good enough is good enough. And I think we've moved on from that. And I could not be more excited, because we're going from good to great and more, and this kind of a project, and working with all of our university partners on ways we can really make these rural communities thrive is just such a blessing.

Denny Spinner
Well, we are all passionate about rural Indiana, or we wouldn't be in a podcast about rural Indiana. And one thing that Cindy and I have talked about many times, we've had relationships in all the different roles I've played, Cindy and I have had chance to work together, but working together between you know, as we said, you are Purdue University here in your community. And it can't be without saying this, this is a great example of how we can use resources of our state universities together to multiply what we can do, rather than try to fight each other over something.

And this was, this was a great example of that, how your resources at Purdue matched a lot of the work that you needed to do, but the resources that Indiana could bring to it added to what your capabilities were. I just, this is an example that I hope we can take and spread across our state. The resources that we have in our state, we need to take advantage of everything that we can do about that.

Scott Burgins
I don't want to leave out what the students get out of this. You know, this finished in the spring, last spring, and they graduate, like, a week later. I guarantee you that many of them updated their one-page resume to highlight this, and that the interviews that they did in the months afterwards talked about the community development. And I think some I've heard from some of them, they, you know, either yes, I could see get something done on a local level, or no, it's not for me, but it's just a terrific experience for these students to sort of get in there as some real hands on stuff.

Denny Spinner
And do you think, Scott, that with this experience now, even though it may not be here in Daviess County, the students that were involved would be more likely to address work professionally in a rural area than they were before?

Scott Burgins
I’m gonna go more than that. I'd say that not only would they address it professionally, but when they live in a community and they hear that the community is trying to revitalize downtown or build a new senior center or something like that, that they're much more likely to understand how that gets done and that it can get done, and take part in building their own communities no matter where they end up.

Denny Spinner
Cindy, talk a little bit about the relationship. What was your takeaway from working together with IU that that is going to be a longer-term impact with maybe between the two universities working together?

Cindy Barber
So when you were talking, I was thinking, ever since the establishment of IU CRE, I'm fortunate because we don't have community development appointments in every county. We have extension, Purdue Extension in every county. So the work that we do in community development does align really well with a lot of what IU CRE is trying to do. There was never going to be a benefit to our rural communities if we saw each other as competitors, and our community members didn't, you know, hear from us that we're here to link and leverage our assets to support you. And that's so important to me, because no one's winning if we're both coming in and, you know, vying for who's going to get to do projects or work with communities. We know there's enough work to be done for us to be in these communities together. I'd like to think of Daviess County as a good example of how that works and when it works well.

Denny Spinner
Scott, one of the things I want to get from your perspective as well is, you know, there's an emphasis on campus for experiential learning. Going forward, a lot of your colleagues, maybe on campus, are thinking about how we do that. What would be your advice to your peers about getting involved and becoming engaged in rural affairs in rural communities and what that benefit is, not only to the students, but to you as a faculty member as well?

Scott Burgins
My advice would be, get out of the ivory tower, you know, to get out into the community. It's the only way to do it. I've always been envious of Purdue's extension program, and I'm glad that IU finally has developed a similar type of thing through the CRE, and I'm doing more work with CRE now, because, again, they are a support system. So for professors out there and think, oh, they're talking about this experiential, giving a capstone or things for students to work with, there is a support center out there. I can't tell you how important it is that they make the initial calls, set it up, plan the Zoom, send a photographer. Those kinds of things means that the professors can just focus on the work they do and not be worried about the hassle of setting something up. So there is a system in place now for this. And I know CRE on campus is really pushing to try and widen out the net of professors who know about it.

Denny Spinner
Cindy, I know we've talked about lighting the spark. What's next? You're now an SHC alumni. What are you looking for in Daviess County's horizon that would be things that would maybe be next for your list of things to achieve?

Cindy Barber
So what I love, and this is what I've loved about our relationship with CRE from the beginning, is there's so many ways that we interface through honestly, CRE, and School of Public Health has been our other one I want to lift up because that work with Dr Barnes continues. So I think we'll let the community drive what that is, to be honest, of course. And being good community development practitioners, we want to make sure that's always a priority.

I think the other opportunity that comes to mind, and when Scott was talking, I was thinking about that visit I was able to make to campus with Scott's class the first time. He really prepped them. And I'm sure they're wonderful adults that love to engage in conversation about community needs. We had a stakeholder on Zoom, but I was able to be there in person. But their questions, he really prepped them well, like, their questions were really helpful, I think, not only to frame what they thought they might want to be working on or be passionate about from a project standpoint, but also,just for learning more about rural challenges.

So anytime we can do that and bring those real-life experiences and conversations to any of our universities, I think we should take advantage of that to try to move whatever we can forward here locally.

Denny Spinner
Scott, were there any noticeable, I guess, attitude changes about maybe students that weren't so sure about coming into a rural community that, once they got that experience, you could see that that changed their attitude a little bit?

Scott Burgins
We had a local. We had a Washington boy on the thing, and he was maybe, maybe not all that crazy to come right back home again. But of the other people, again, very few of my students are from small, rural southern Indiana towns. And I think just the experience of walking down the street, they saw the construction going on, they saw the cool coffee shop. There were too many of us to eat in the hamburger, what's, what's the…

Cindy Barber
It's The White Steamer.

Scott Burgins
There's, there's too many of us.

Denny Spinner
Yeah, you can't come without go into the Steamer.

Cindy Barber
Yeah.

Scott Burgins
Well, we tried to, but there were too many of us. But I think they really saw a town, people moving around in the streets. The theater was lit up that day. I think it really just gave them a different perspective of not just a flyover type of place, but things where people live and work and are trying to get things done. So, yeah, I definitely think there's some changes.

Denny Spinner
And we talk a lot about quality of place when we talk about work in rural Indiana, and I guess that work amplified the fact that there is a quality of life in a community of this size that students and young people can get a hold of.

Scott Burgins
Yeah, they just don't have that, you know, just don't have that experience normally.

Cindy Barber
I think, too, one of the things I loved is in trying to think about, of course, helping people make connections for the greater good is something I am really passionate about. But you were right. It was February, it was cold, and so we have a local small business downtown that has electric scooters and bikes and that. I mean, honestly, I think about Denny, years ago, we were at an OCRA conference, and they rode their bikes into the conference. Do you remember that? Like they had gotten a grant to get a bike loan program?

Well, this gentleman, we were so pleased as a, I'm also involved with our downtown organization, when a private entity went out and purchased these electric bikes and scooters. So I reached out to him when the students were coming, thinking, in a perfect world, we'd get them all on bikes, and they could bike around and really get a feel firsthand for what that was like. I don't think that worked quite like we thought it would, but maybe…

Scott Burgins
It was too cold!

[LAUGHTER]

Cindy Barber
But he didn't have those. They had been, you know, stored up for the winter, so he was more than happy to pull those out if the students were wanting to actually get on a scooter or bike. So all the behind-the-scenes things,and getting the elected officials, that wasn't a difficult ask, but it was a Saturday morning, and, you know, getting them to come out, it was obviously important to them.

Alan Brown was the other one. Nathan Gabhart was there. Of course, mayor, Mayor Rhoades doesn't miss being present for any of the things that are important to the community. So, yeah, all the stars aligned. But, yeah, people come together. It's just sometimes I think you got to work at really making all those connections.

Scott Burgins
And I'm looking forward to, as you guys start to move through some of the things, to reach out to the students. You know, I find them now on LinkedIn, where they're at. A former student of mine’s talking to my class later today, he's now doing economic development up in Lincoln Park in Chicago. And I just reach out to some of these students and tell them, Oh, they've done this, they've done that, and remind them that the work, the seeds that they planted, are still growing.

Cindy Barber
And that was just one project.

Denny Spinner
Right!

Cindy Barber
That's the cool thing, y

Denny Spinner
Yeah.

Cindy Barber
Yeah, because flashing through my mind is, like, you know, so many other opportunities that students had to…this morning, I was thinking about, not to get off the subject of the cycling and the safety, but I was thinking about the Black History Harvest that we did, you know, I don't think we spent all the time that we should on the history of, particularly Washington and the Washington area, and connecting with Beulah AME and getting the students connected, to be able to go out and talk to the community and record histories from people that we…and I believe, actually, if I'm not mistaken, there was a death that happened kind of shortly after, so being able to have captured that person's input for a lot of that cataloging of Black history here was…And that was a partnership, also, with Indiana landmarks, with the Lilly funding they have to capture Black history across the state of Indiana. So I love that my friends at IU CRE and I share that love of, again, leveraging, linking and leveraging what we can for the betterment of these rural towns, it's really beneficial, and I'm proud to be a part of it.

Denny Spinner
Well, you lead into my next question. The SHC program is continuing. They're in the application process of selecting the next community. What's your words of advice if someone in one of our neighboring counties is has never been a part of it and are thinking about it? How did you all approach that, coming to that decision? And what would you suggest to those who might be interested in doing that?

Cindy Barber
I think one of the keys is to pull together anyone in the community that has been project-minded or has expressed needs or has those projects on the shelf that they haven't been able to implement. And I feel like I'm not one to sa, you throw something against the wall and see what sticks are. I don't use that phrase very often, but you can't have, I don't think you can have too many projects submitted. I don't know, because I'm not on the application side, but I think that was probably in our favor, that we put every single thing over the last, I'm going to say 10 years that we've had either on people's minds, a part of plans, and we've had a lot of those plans. I'd like to think we're not a shelf plan, on-the-shelf kind of a community. I think our leaders do a good job of implementing those plans that we invest in, but we probably had 40 or 50 projects, and really lining those out. But honestly, Scott's class is a perfect example of being flexible enough to realize that you're going to pitch a project, and what may be a good fit and ultimately better for the community may not be what you have on paper when you submit your application. So I'd say, put it all in. Just pitch every possible project and idea you can, and let it gel out as it will because of the process that they have in place.

Denny Spinner
And one thing that your team did as well that I thought was very, you know, we spoke about these projects, this specific project, a lot, but there was county-wide involvement. Nearly every community in Daviess County had some touch point in this work that you did with SHC, which also brought your communities closer together. They were sitting in the room together, talking about things that they were aspirational about, that maybe somebody in Odon didn't know what was going on in Montgomery, you know, but now they do, because they're hearing that conversation.

Cindy Barber
I love the geography point, because this was an opportunity for us to put in front of our smaller towns and unincorporated towns, the opportunity to get projects done. I think the other thing that comes to mind with that is, I would encourage communities who become a part of SHC to try…I know you can't keep everybody informed as much as we would like to, but we had, there was a little bit of misconception that it was all going to come with money, and so I think that was so I feel like that's something that needs to be clarified up front. They're wonderful projects. Between the two universities, we are equipped to help people identify funding and go after funding, but it doesn't come with funding.

But if you're willing to put the work in and establish those partnerships and welcome the community, welcome the students and faculty into the community, yeah, we're one of the counties of among many who are proof that it does make things happen, and that's great.

Denny Spinner
So you work, specifically, Scott with Daviess County on this one. But how is this work continuing? What do you see in the future for you working with communities around our area?

Scott Burgins
I'll be doing another project with CRE in the spring. It'll be the Monon south, the very exciting 50, 50-mile-long path through some small Indiana towns. I mean, these are some pretty small places. I think the client there is going to be Radius. One of the things I learned from this project is to get to some of the towns, and again, either get local people to get things done, like Cindy, or get elected officials. Not that they can't be the one in the same, but get as many stakeholders as you can up front. Let the students see that the community is serious about it, and then they will go to work. So I'm excited about trying to duplicate this effort down in some of the small towns in southern Indiana next spring.

Denny Spinner
Cindy and Scott, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a great pleasure. Always enjoy talking with you. To be able to sit here and discuss what we're doing here and what the impact is is very important, and getting the stories out to other rural Hoosiers that things are possible. And I really appreciate your time today and for joining us. We thank our listeners again for tuning in to another episode of Our Indiana: Stories from Rural Hoosiers.

[OUTRO MUSIC]