Jeff Yost keynotes North Country Symposium on rural community building

This morning, I talked with Jeff Yost during the 8 O'clock Hour -- he's head of the Nebraska Community Foundation, which is a sort of umbrella organization for lots of small community organizations/foundations.
He's another person with good ideas about how rural communities -- and most he works with are under 1,000 people --, can actually make progress toward long term sustainability. (He's just been in Washington, DC, sharing his ideas with Congress.) In his keynote speech at the North Country Symposium at St. Lawrence U. this morning, he talked about a strategy called HomeTown Competitiveness, subtitled A Come-Back/Give-Back Approach to Rural Community Building. He's working in an area that has fewer people, spread over greater distances, than even here in this region, and he's reporting out some pretty impressive stories. The four strategic areas? Leadership development, youth development, local charitable assets, and entrepreneurial development.
Last week, Greg Gardner said there is no silver bullet to solve this region's economic challenges. Yost used the same words. They also agreed that economic growth has to be "homegrown," that loss of young people is perhaps the greatest challenge of all to rural areas (and solving it offers the greatest opportunity), and that this'll take a while.
But as I said -- Yost has encouraging news.