Dee Davis and the Center for Rural Strategies advocate for rural America

After spending 20-plus years working on the problems of Appalachia at Kentucky-based Appalshop, Dee Davis decided to turn his attention to the problems of all of rural America. From that plan was born the Center for Rural Strategies, which adds public advocacy and coalition building to the mix for bringing attention to rural issues, James Nold Jr. writes for Kentucky Living, the managzine of the Kentucky Association of Electric Cooperatives. "The Center’s goal is as simple, and profound, as changing the meaning and connotations of a single word — the next to last one in its name: rural," Nold writes.

Davis, who is a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, spent 18 years as the executive producer of Appalshop Films and Television. In 2000, he left Appalshop to form the Center for Rural Strategies, also based in Whitesburg, Ky., after noticing rural Americans from South Dakota farm country to the Sacramento Valley to coastal Maine, were "facing the same challenges, and in the same straits," Nold writes.

Among the early successes of the Center was a campaign to stop CBS from producing "The Real Beverly Hillbillies," a show that would have placed a poor rural family in a Los Angeles mansion. "We found ourselves learning to be spokesmodels," Davis told Nold. "It was a very interesting tutorial on how the media work. . . . You’d go on these talk shows and find out that everybody was crazy." He said no one expected them to stop the show, and the center simply hoped to "raise the issue that it was wrong to employ rural people as national laughingstocks." But in the end, CBS decided not to make the show.

Now Davis is promoting the idea that we don't have to think of being rural as a deficit. "All of our communities have assets and strengths that we are not necessarily inclined to see the first time we look at them," he told Nold. Justin Maxson, president of the Berea-based Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, notes, "Dee’s a master at connecting systemic issues or problems with individuals and their conditions. He knows policymakers and legislators respond to individual stories, not just ideas." (Read more)