A few months ago I attended the DoSomething.org awards show at the Apollo and was surprised to learn that Mark Rembert, a fellow graduate of my alma mater Haverford College, was a finalist for a $100,000 grant for his organization Energize Clinton County (If you like him, go vote for him!).  Energize Clinton County is a nonprofit that seeks to strengthen Clinton County, a small town in a rural part of Ohio that was devastated by the closure of the town’s largest employer.  I was excited when Mark offered to share his thoughts and experiences on social change, philanthropy, and supporting rural towns and found the interview to be incredibly rewarding.

Tell us about yourself:

As a person who loves places, its nearly impossible for to talk about who I am without talking about where I am. I am proud to say I live in my hometown of Wilmington, a small rural town in southwest Ohio. As a kid, Wilmington was a pretty ideal small town to grow up in. It provided a quiet and peaceful environment, I had good friends, I had fruitful experiences in school, and I generally enjoyed life. But after I graduated from Wilmington High School in 2003, I did what I was supposed to do: I left. I ended up leaving the mid-West for the East Coast, and spent about six years in and around Philadelphia attending Haverford College and living in West Philadelphia. I loved Philadelphia and learned a great deal and community and place while living there. But I ended up deciding that I want to try out a new place, so I enrolled in the Peace Corps to expand upon the training in economics that I had received at Haverford.

As I was awaiting to ship off to Ecuador to begin my service, I was drawn home by a crisis that had struck Wilmington. In May of 2008, DHL Express announced that it would be closing its US overnight shipping hub at the Wilmington Air Park, laying off the 8,000 people employed at the Wilmington facility. Realizing the magnitude of the economic shock of this decision, I decided to spend my time waiting to leave for the Peace Corps in Wilmington. I came home knowing that the town I would come back to after the Peace Corps would be completely different the town I grew up in. Within just a few weeks of returning home in August 2008, I began to realize that my calling to serve was not in Ecuador, it was in my own hometown.

Tell us about Energize Clinton County

Energize Clinton County is a non-profit community economic development organization that I co-founded with my childhood friend Taylor Stuckert. We have a pretty simple mission: we want to make our hometown a vibrant place in the world again, and we want to demonstrate a new vision of possibility for small towns and rural places across America. Working in a small town setting, we’ve adopted an approach which acknowledges the uniqueness of any community and works to strengthen the rootedness of communities.

Our efforts to facilitate change begin with assisting community organizations, institutions, or individuals to clearly visualize new opportunities through planning and design. As projects move from planning to action, we provide support in assembling the tools, knowledge, and resources required for bringing about sustainable changes that improve the economic, social, and environmental life in our community.

What motivated you to start this organization?

Although our community’s economic crisis played a major role in bringing Taylor and I home, we did not set out to create 8,000 jobs to replace those lost at the Air Park. Instead, we were inspired to get involved by the energy and creativity of our friends and neighbors that wanted to fight to preserve their home by inventing the community from the ground up with new ideas. We were particularly motivated by a problem that many of people who were excited and ready to get to work rebuilding the community lacked a way visualize and communicate their ideas so that action and resources could mobilize behind seizing new opportunities. With our backgrounds in communications and international development, we felt like we had an opportunity to provide some the tools needed by the community to realize a new vision for its future, and move it towards achieving its goals.

We are also motivated by a pressing need in our country to reinvent rural America. For decades, rural places have dealt with chronic economic and social challenges, and as a result continue to lose population and decline. Yet, we still hold the belief that small towns and rural places are not only important to preserve, but that in doing so they will be capable of greatly contributing to the new innovations and ideas that will help drive the country through the 21st Century.

What do you find most rewarding about your work?

Without a doubt, the best thing about doing the work we do in our own community is that we are the direct beneficiaries of our own successes. Service is so often framed in terms of sacrifice, or about the good feeling you get for helping other people. But for us, we’re actually the direct recipients of our work, which is pretty great. As the community improves, it actually improves the quality of our own daily lives.

Another especially rewarding aspect of our work is the creative opportunity it provides. There are no instruction manuals for revitalizing small towns, and when resources are scarce there is an every great demand on the creative design process. There is a lot of excitement around feeling like we are on the frontier of developing innovative solutions that can benefit small towns across the country.

What do you find most challenging? How do you work around those challenges?

One of our greatest challenges is overcoming the stereotypes of small towns. Having both lived on the East Coast for extended periods, we are keenly aware of the perceptions that small towns are backward, boring, culture-less places, where uneducated, non-worldly people live. If as a country we’re going to seriously work to revitalize rural areas, we have to first dispel the myth that places that attract people looking for a more humble, community focused lifestyle lack creativity, innovation, or a desirable quality life. We have experienced the exact opposite, and value greatly the innovation that we have seen take from and grow very quickly in tight-knit communities that are experienced in working together.

We are also greatly concerned by what we see as a systematic failure in addressing the serious economic and social challenges of rural areas.

Rural places are home 19 percent of the population, and 20 percent of America’s poor, yet rural places receive less than 7% of all grants distributed by the top 1,000 U.S. Foundations, less than 2% of all philanthropic grants made by Fortune 500 companies, and receive between $401 and $648 less per capita in Federal government funding than urban areas. Even more worrisome are policies that address rural poverty by moving the rural poor to urban areas instead of investing in small towns and providing them with tools to address poverty locally through community economic development.

If we are to preserve our country’s small towns and rural places, and address the serious social, economic, and health crises facing our rural communities, we must begin to change our perception, and begin re-investing in rural America.

What advice or resources do you have for young people wanting to launch social change organizations?

In our experience, the easiest way to create lasting change is to do it in your own community. When we started ECC, we did so with little experience in community development, and almost zero resources, so our success has not been the result of years of experience, or a wealth of resources at our disposal. The change we’ve created has been the result of our ability to mobilize our friends, families, and neighbors to make changes in the they live, work, and spend money in our community.

We encourage young people to look for inspiration in the things that make your community special: history, local culture and traditions, the natural landscape and environment, unique local businesses, or the power of neighbors coming together to make their community better. Tapping into the energy, experience, and knowledge of your community is the best starting point for getting an idea of the ground.

How can people support you or get involved?

We’re working to expanding our efforts to surrounding small towns in our region, and are always looking for resources to assist us in that effort. We’re currently raising $6,000 to hire a Co-Op from the planning department at University of Cincinnati for the fall quarter to assist in our community economic development planning efforts. If you would like to donate, you can do so here: http://bit.ly/donate-ecc

We’re also always looking for new ideas. If you live in a small town tell us about why you love it, and share your stories about innovative efforts that have improved the quality of life in your community.

The most important thing rural communities and small towns can do is share ideas, experiences, and what works. If you’re trying to get new ideas off the ground in your community, let us know how we can help.

You can share your ideas with us by e-mailing mytown@energizecc.com.