Jenny De Groot, a children’s librarian on Orcas Island in the Pacific Northwest, reads some of her favorite books while sharing how her remote community found ways to connect during the pandemic. Dr. Chuck Fluharty, founder, President, and CEO of the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI), explores the future of rural and urban communities through a public humanities lens.
Learn about the Humanities Washington Prime Time Family Reading program that Jenny De Groot’s library hosted. Find out more about RUPRI and take a look at its Comprehensive Rural Wealth Framework.
Read more about this episode’s topic and guests at our website.
Sydney Boyd: Hello and welcome to Making Meaning, a podcast that explores how and why the humanities are an essential part of our everyday lives. In this series, we hear stories from our nation's humanities, councils, and leaders across the greater United States about the role that humanities have played during the pandemic and are playing in our recovery.
I'm Sydney Boyd from the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Today, I'm curious about how rural communities have found ways to stay connected during the pandemic and how our of rural communities are changing.
Orcas Island off the coast of Washington State is a 90 minute ferry ride from the mainland. It has a population of about 4,500 people. Earlier this year, Orcas Island's one and only library planned on hosting a family reading program called Primetime Reading. Jenny DeGroot, the children's librarian, envisioned evening conversations over food. But the ongoing pandemic forced a change of plans.
Jenny worried that canceling the program would leave children and families feeling isolated. In a community the size of Orcas, the library plays an important role in bringing people together. But with the help of Humanities Washington, Jenny was able to adapt the program to fit the needs of the moment.
Jenny DeGroot: The primetime family reading program had originally been an in person program where children meet with their families and they have a storyteller, which was my position, and a humanities scholar. And we read books to kids and then we discuss different topics that come up with those books.
So, when Humanities Washington told that they had a virtual program, we really jumped on it. We hadn't had any programs. We had started opening the library, but just for short periods of time. And we hadn't had a lot of families coming back necessarily to the library in the same way that we had in the past. So, when we started the virtual primetime, and here I had 15 families with kids snuggled on couches in their pajamas, and they were interested in listening to a story and they wanted to talk about the story and sometimes they had so many things to say that they couldn't contain themselves. It just made me laugh and it reminded me why I do the job I do, because kids are inherently excited about stories and they want to know things and they want to talk about it.
Boyd: Beyond it becoming virtual, were there other ways that you had to adapt the program?
DeGroot: Yes, thankfully the program allowed us, instead of providing food for families, we were able to give families a gift certificate for the local grocery store. The children were also allowed to keep the books for their own personal library.
Boyd: I'm wondering, I know that you read a lot of wonderful books as part of this program. Can you talk about one book that really stands out in your memory?
DeGroot: Well, we read Last Stop on Market Street, which is one of my favorite books and I think I keep reading it and I love it even more every time I read it. And it was written by Matt de la Pena and it was illustrated by Christian Robinson. You almost have to tell a little bit of what the story is, but it's really about a young boy that takes the bus with his grandmother, his Nana, and they go to all these places across town to get to a soup kitchen at the very end and throughout the whole bus ride and the walk sees all different kinds of things, but he sees them differently than his grandmother does until he gets to the very end.
Being a parent myself, I can completely relate to seeing the world differently sometimes and it was a beautiful story about a looking through other people's eyes.
Boyd: And did that come up in conversation too?
DeGroot: Yes. We had specifically asked the kids, the main character was CJ, if he was glad he went to the Soup Kitchen and exactly what changed his mind. Because in the very end, he said that he was glad he came with his grandmother. But you wouldn't have gotten that sense in the beginning of the book. When we asked them, what did he see that changed his mind, the children told us all kinds of things. They said they saw a man that was blind, who actually didn't see, but could hear, he saw through his ears. They ended up seeing the world through another person's eyes and I think maybe that's why I love the book so much.
Boyd: What you're saying about childhood imagination is so special. And I think it's also one of the things that, when I think about the pandemic and the effect that it's had on kids, it's one of the things that gets me emotional the fastest. Just thinking of that imaginative power of children and how difficult it must have been this last year.
DeGroot: I think so. We were dealing with particular themes, like bravery, empathy. One of the things we did with the humanities program that's not part of their usual program is that we ask kids after to actually draw a picture of a situation that they were in which they felt they were brave or that they felt empathetic. And then we ended up putting it on our website and it was really lovely to see kids just imagining their world and how those types of themes were part of their experience too.
Boyd: Can you tell me a little bit about reading the book, The Proudest Blue, at your library? Because I love that book so much.
DeGroot: I'd love to. That was another book that we read, which was the Story of Hijab and Family by Ibtihaj Muhammad. And it's about a girl who sees her sister wearing her hijab for the first time and we talked about the topics of courage and about what that significance meant to someone. And for a lot of kids, maybe they'd never experienced it. And I was told by one family member that it was the first time they had a conversation about that. And I think it was really ... Oh, Sydney, it was such a good book. It's almost so hard to tell you about the book without reading parts of it, honestly.
Boyd: Go ahead and read parts of it.
DeGroot: It will, because I think it's really lovely. This is Asiya and she is talking about her sister. And of course you can't see it, but there is a picture here of a girl and she's wearing her hijab and there are clouds and birds all around it.
And she says: Asiya's hijab isn't a whisper. Asiya's hijab is like the sky on a sunny day. The sky isn't a whisper. It's always there, special and regular. "The first day of wearing a hijab is important," Mama had said. "It means being strong."
You can't look at that picture and listen to those words and not feel the same way, that her act of wearing a hijab is powerful.
Boyd: We've talked a lot about how you've adapted the program and kept it going and why you kept it going and the program went through some changes and it sounds like people participated in ways that you never anticipated. And I'm curious, as things slowly return to normal, what do you think might change about the program based on what's happened?
DeGroot: I can't say for sure. I do know that this program, a lot of people were very receptive and at the very end of the program, they had asked, "When are we going to do another one? When would we do that?" And I do hope that we can do another one in the future, but I can't say for sure.
I would say that I think some of these types of programs might not go away. I feel as though, being a parent myself, I understood how challenging it was to get from work, to pick up kids for their after school events, to bring them to a program where they might not like the food as much that was provided. This is just a way that I think we can still communicate with families in their own home with their own meals.
The essence of what we're really trying to do is bring a story in, talk to them about it, without all the extra things that we have to do to set up a program and specifically in our community. That is challenging with a small library, to do that, to get at all of the volunteers to do that. So, I think there are programs like this that we can continue to do virtually, potentially. And that might be a really good thing for us.
Boyd: Do you think the idea of Orcas as a rural community has changed at all?
DeGroot: I definitely do. And I actually think the pandemic has helped us to connect in other ways that we hadn't potentially done before. Not only with the books that we talked about, but really having access to other communities with different situations. I actually have a book club of kids grades four through six, and we ended up reading a book, The Crossover, and I told the kids that they needed to get up at a certain time because the author was reading the book in London and I think that this potentially is where we're going, is that we're becoming more connected. Even if we're in a place that is very small and remote.
Boyd: When we say rural or urban, what does that actually mean today after a pandemic has changed the way we look at so many things? And do the humanities play any role in how those distinctions are shifting? How we're connecting?
Dr. Chuck Fluharty has thought a lot about this. Chuck is founder, president, and CEO of the Rural Policy Research Institute, the only organization in the country that assesses how public policies affect rural communities. I asked him about recent trends he's seeing across the quote unquote, "rural urban divide" today.
Dr. Chuck Fluharty: Rural America and urban America are not binary endpoints, but a continuum across space from central city to frontier cabin. And that is only exacerbated over the last five years.
Boyd: So, are you thinking about the pandemic when you say that or are there other factors?
Fluharty: Yeah, I am. One in three Americans live in a rural place right now. That's twice as many as the official stats for that. And population growth in rural America over the last decade, 21% of the people in rural America right now are people of color, but they represent 83% of the growth.
So, I'd say if you think about rural, there's probably five various rurals out there that are important. High amenity areas, that's where there are colleges or beautiful scenery. Metro adjacent, and that's where metros keep moving out. Extractive regions, that's resource based industries, including commercial, single crop agriculture. And then the very remote rural that's at the end of the road.
Those only are important for this reason: If the 500 counties that were classified as non Metro moved to Metro in the last 30 years, weren't moved, but were left rural, we would have triple the growth rate. What that means is, you're rural until you're large enough to be classified as Metro. And when you are, you go away. And the issues that unite us now in categories of rural are less space and density and more other issues about the human experience that public humanities badly need to engage.
Boyd: I wonder if you could talk to about how the humanities figure into thinking about some of the inequities you've alluded to, that especially the pandemic has laid bare in rural communities, but just generally too.
Fluharty: So, 85% of our counties in the country that are poor are rural, and reality is right now in the current dynamic we face, there's a huge shift between space and density. And distance right now is more of an asset than it's ever been. It's not a liability any longer because of the pandemic. So, that's the first thing that's huge.
Now, what goes along with that is a growing awareness in urban citizens that the climate awareness that is the challenge really is going to have to be ameliorated by rural areas. All you hear about anymore is heat islands, the concrete and metropolitan America that's 20 degrees higher than out in the countryside where trees were. That is leading a lot of rural places to actually rethink, what is the most important thing for their future? Is it just GDP, gross domestic product, or is it wellbeing? And how do they define that and what does it mean?
Boyd: It sounds like there's a real difference in what our perception of rural communities is and what the reality is. Can you talk a little bit about that too?
Fluharty: I've kind of traveled all over rural America over three decades, and I believe the false dichotomies that we are accepting as the gestalt of our nation are badly influenced by two things. The first is this media and public information consolidation that's just where ground-truthing is so badly needed by public humanities. There's 10 companies out here every day defining what truth is. They are almost a monolith today in a lot of rural areas.
The other issue is, and this is a mass inequity that has not changed in the last 20 years, and that is the continuing federal and philanthropic underinvestment in supporting rural development and rural community development. And those challenges together simply reinforce the other. The reality is the disaffection of rural people, as it's clearly evident to urban citizens, has a basis in fact. And there is a market that enjoys making that disadvantage perception worse and defining why it occurred.
And that is where the humanities, where I have seen it done so well, where we actually get under the institutional and cultural shorthand and build an honest local dialogue, can truly matter.
Boyd: How are you defining public humanities and what they do?
Fluharty: Okay. First of all, I'm not stupid enough to weigh into the final definition of what public humanities will be. But I would say this: Walt Stagner said, "I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from." If place is not primary, if it does not have primacy, you are missing an awful lot of what rural is. And the work I've seen the councils do that is so important is coming to a safe place with a dialectic to bring, with a discussion to lead, with true to surface, and dialogue about, in a place where folks are comfortable coming together.
Sadly, those are getting smaller and smaller as our institutions have largely, frankly, taken a powder. So, it's critical that truth becomes its own arbiter and who else but the humanities would do that? The reality is there's four really priority areas that urban people should care about rural places for. Food, water, energy, and natural amenities. And all that the humanities bring to laying out why that's so critical for our human experience on this continent, that simply has to happen.
Boyd: I have lived in the country my whole life until I became an adult. So, I grew up in the communities that you're talking about. You've given me a totally new way to think about where I came from and where I'm going.
Fluharty: Humanities are critical in driving our rethinking of what our human experience is right now, in a rural urban continuum. And we need more humanities writing about the future of rural America and we need more participatory analysis of it by the folks that are engaged in institutional humanities.
Boyd: Thanks to my guests, Dr. Chuck Fluharty and Kenny DeGroot. At the top of the show, you heard the voices of Sierra Fisher, Sue Skaliski, and Dr. Artika Artina. And that author Jenny's book club woke up so early to hear from over in London was New York times bestselling author Kwame Alexander.
Making Meaning as a podcast from the Federation of State Humanities councils and is part of its Humanities in American life initiative, which is generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. You can learn more about our work and member programs by visiting our website at statehumanities.org.
The show is produced by LWC. Elizabeth Nakano is our producer and sound designer. Jimmy Gutierez edited the series. Jen Chien is executive editor. Cedric Wilson is lead producer. You can find more episodes on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. I'm Sydney Boyd. Thanks for joining us.
CITATION: Boyd, Sydney, host. “By the Book: Connecting Rural Communities” Making Meaning, LWC Studios. October, 27 2021. statehumanities.org/