Rural Partners Network: Connecting Local Community to Government

Collaborative governance—or “co-governance”—offers a model for shifting power to ordinary people and rebuilding their trust in government. Co-governance models break down the boundaries between people inside and outside government, allowing community residents and elected officials to work together to design policy and share decision-making power. Cities around the world are experimenting with new forms of co-governance, from New York City’s participatory budgeting process to Paris’s adoption of a permanent citizens’ assembly. More than a one-off transaction or call for public input, successful models of co-governance empower everyday people to participate in the political process in an ongoing way. Co-governance has the potential to revitalize civic engagement, create more responsive and equitable structures for governing, and build channels for Black, brown, rural, and tribal communities to impact policy-making.

Still, co-governance models are not without challenges. The hierarchical and ineffective nature of our current governing structure is difficult to transform. Effective collaboration between communities and politicians requires building lasting relationships that overcome deep distrust in government. So far, effective models of co-governance tend to be local and community-specific—making it critical that we share stories of success and brainstorm ways to scale.

In this series, we share stories of co-governance in practice. For this interview, New America’s Hollie Russon Gilman, Sarah Jacob, and Alexander Fung spoke with Farah Ahmad, Deputy Under Secretary for Rural Development at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), about the Rural Partners Network (RPN). RPN is an all-of-government program that helps people in rural communities find resources and funding to create jobs, build infrastructure, and support long-term economic stability on their own terms. The Biden-Harris Administration is making sure rural voices are reflected in national policies that will benefit all people in rural communities. This is especially important for communities that have been marginalized, disenfranchised, or overlooked in the past. Through RPN, USDA works with over 1000 partners at the federal, state, and local level to address specific needs in rural and tribal communities. The department has also hired full-time employees in the field dedicated to providing on-the-ground assistance for participating communities.

Could you please describe the Rural Partners Network (RPN)?

Through RPN, we work with rural communities and figure out what plans and projects make sense for them. Every community is a little bit different. There may be one that has a focus on water infrastructure or one on growing entrepreneurship. RPN place-based staff help them get started and learn how to navigate the wealth of federal, private, and public resources.

The federal government has dozens of programs, so it’s about bringing those resources together to connect the dots between what a community wants and how a set of projects could help them achieve their vision. The next step is to partner with them to find the right resources to make their project come to life.

We do this in two very specific ways. First, we have federal staff in rural communities whose sole job is to listen first and work with all the local partners—our “federal navigators” or community liaisons. A lot of rural communities haven't had a good relationship with the federal government for a myriad of reasons. Rebuilding trust is really where we have to start. Our federal staff are often from the community themselves. They have established relationships and built trust. The partners they're working with are their neighbors and friends. They help move communities from a vision to a tangible project, and then transform that project into tangible resources.

Second, we take the lessons we've learned from those federal navigators and from the communities themselves and actually do something with them. Lessons from communities don't always make their way up to federal policymakers. So, RPN has an established interagency group of representatives from over 24 federal agencies who are tasked with listening to the communities and hearing them say firsthand, “Hey, this program isn't working for us.” The federal partners in Washington hear that, and they're charged with doing something about it. They try to break down barriers and discover how their programs can better meet the needs of rural communities.

Can you tell me more about a concrete example that you think illustrates this work on the ground?

I’ll start by talking about Southeastern Kentucky. There was a really devastating flood during the summer of 2022, which President Biden declared a disaster area. During a disaster, a community’s priorities shift instantly. FEMA arrived to do rapid response work, because it was a presidentially declared disaster area. Fortuitously, Southeastern Kentucky was an RPN area so we already had our federal navigator on the ground working with the impacted community.

Thus, from the get-go, there was already a different level of trust. Our community liaison, Rachel Chambers—who was dealing with the impacts of the flood herself because she is from the same communities—helped build a bridge between FEMA and the impacted community. She spoke with people in the community and wrote down a list of short-term needs, like dealing with flooded homes. She funneled immediate requests to FEMA. To her credit, she also started collecting medium-term and long-term needs. That's our role as a long-term partner with rural communities and represents the spirit of RPN.

She realized that what we were hearing from hundreds of affected families in Southeastern Kentucky was that they needed to repair their houses. Their homes were so devastated that they needed quite a bit of funding. USDA Rural Development has a home repair program called the 504 program. That program had a limitation of $10,000 for its grants. As Rachel was talking to these devastated families, she found out $10,000 wouldn’t be enough. Those funds would only repair part of a basement or half a roof, and you can't live in a home with half a roof.

So, she called the national office and said, “Hey, we need to do something for these families, because they're not even going to apply for our funding. It's hard to apply for federal programs, and if they're not going to get the resources they actually need to get back in their home, they won’t apply.” She asked if we could increase the grant cap.

The beauty of the Rural Partners Network is that the community liaison’s job is to ask the hard questions and push policymakers to think more creatively. When she did, we had all our housing experts and our Office of General Counsel look at our rules, and we found that we could, in fact, increase that cap with a regulatory waiver for areas within the presidentially declared disaster zone. We raised the cap to nearly $40,000 and suddenly the game changed for those families. It now made more sense for them to apply and go through the process of seeking funding to be able to fix and stay in their home.

This is just one example of the impact of having the direct line of communication that’s rooted in a community's need. Because she asked that question, we were able to make a change in real-time.

What are lessons that other federal agencies and local governments can learn from RPN?

Federal agencies can have a different relationship with communities. Not talking to communities means we’re not actually serving them. We have to hear from communities about what their ideas are—whether it’s about a new wastewater infrastructure or high-speed internet in their town—to see how we can fit a federal program around their project instead of the other way around.

We often tell communities how their project can fit within the federal government’s box. But the lessons I think many federal agencies have learned is how a federal agency’s program can fit into a community's box. It’s not always one-size-fits-all. That might seem very simple, but it feels a little bit ingrained in who we are at USDA Rural Development.

Another really important lesson is to provide technical assistance. “Technical assistance” of course means a lot of different things to different people. But it can mean helping people understand what it takes to fill out an application for a federal program. It can mean spending a little bit of time answering some questions for a community. It can mean actually doing some of the hard work of figuring out how we can help communities braid different programs together to fit their needs. It's not natural to do that because our agencies are so big. But once they do it a time or two, it starts building that muscle memory to actually go outside their own agency and find complementary programs that can really help communities not just build the infrastructure, but make sure it's affordable and accessible. There was a recent study that identified “no front door” as one of the main reasons resource-deficient communities struggle to access federal programs. RPN is creating a “no wrong door” policy for our rural communities.

Is there anything that we should have asked you that you would like to share with us?

At USDA Rural Development and RPN, we're trying to close the gap between community and the government. The federal government has all of these resources that are the community's resources, and we're trying to get as close as we can to build strong and long-lasting relationships.

Through RPN, we have learned many lessons about who else we need to engage and what other partners need to be at the table. Going through that process and improving every year is almost as important as launching the program itself, because we certainly don't have all the answers. That’s why we're trying to close that gap and actually learn from communities and have our solutions actually come from them.

I would also reiterate that it's not one-size-fits-all. We're working with communities who have had some historic challenges like generational, persistent poverty, and those are things that are exacerbated by today's challenges—whether that's impacts of COVID-19 or a natural disaster. Sometimes we are trying to meet short-term needs, while also building back a better long term.

When I visited Southeastern Kentucky, I met a woman who was impacted by the flood. Like a lot of people, her home was completely washed away. Not only was her home gone, but her actual property was washed away—it was eroded by the floods. So, it wasn't just about getting her back into a home. She had to rethink where she wanted to live, and she had been in that community for decades. It's not just about rebuilding infrastructure, it's also about rebuilding a life and a community. And those are the kind of the pieces that I think we forget about when someone's filling out an application. But through RPN, we have committed to closing the gap between the community and the government, and we are already seeing results. We look forward to more successes in the future—and enriched lives because of it.

We would like to thank Farah Ahmad, Marjorie Wass, Amy Eisenstein, and Alexander Fung for their incredibly helpful comments and editing support. Thank you also to Jodi Narde, Joe Wilkes, and Kelley Gardner for their communications support. This would not have been possible without them.