By Allen Smart

Crossing lines of disciplines and duties is an important standard of civil society in rural America. Individuals play many roles concurrently to keep rural places running.

We’ve met a Louisiana pastor who drives a school bus, pastors a 150-member church, runs a daycare, and is part of every civic committee concerning troubled youths.

There’s also a school board member who pieces together three jobs and coaches a team vying for the small school state championship.

In many rural communities, juggling these multiple civic roles is the norm rather than the exception. This provides a breadth of awareness and civic knowledge that can be elusive in larger urban settings.

(It’s also true that individual rural towns can function as islands unto themselves, missing opportunities to build mutually beneficial relationships with neighboring towns. This may be a new frontier for expanding civil society in rural areas.)

Rural communities also can be perfect laboratories for understanding myriad ways in which social issues intersect and how to address them in a multi-faceted context rather than a hyper-focused one. An effort to create a school-based nutrition program in a small community, for example, can more rapidly surface interconnected issues such as transportation, oral health, or parental substance abuse. And a common local understanding of causes and available resources to address these problems can create a ripple effect of positive, community-wide impact.

The demise of locally owned businesses and their leaders —- both main street stores driven out by big box chains, and small enterprises obliterated by the likes of health system conglomerates and corporate agriculture -— has diminished the civic energy of many rural communities.

In addition to diversifying rural economies, locally rooted institutions often are the first to support local ideas, give young people their first jobs, and participate in efforts that help the community move ahead. As they disappear, they pull mightily at the fibers of the civil society magic carpet, which communities must invent new ways to reweave.

We often hear the question, “If rural communities are struggling so hard, why don’t people just leave?” Time and time again, rural residents have told us that they would rather stay and work to build the future for their communities than abandon them. They are more than willing to work cooperatively, even when they strongly disagree with or dislike one another, because they recognize that they are ultimately neighbors who will fly or fail together.

In a time when the overall fabric of our civil society appears to be unraveling at an unprecedented pace, we believe rural communities can remind the rest of us how to reweave, lift off, and, subsequently, soar.

Allen Smart (@allensmart6) is a veteran philanthropist and principal of consulting firm PhilanthropywoRx. He regularly consults with regional and national foundations on rural and philanthropic strategy. Smart is former director of the Health Care Division at the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust.