Let me start by saying the title to this blog is misleading.  Seriously!  I was looking for something interesting to describe what is on my heart, and I came up with this title.  But it is not really what I intend to talk about.  Let me explain.

The other day, a friend said to me, “I live in a rural area where the unemployment rate is nearly 22%.  Is there anything I can do to help the customers and clients that I serve.  There simply are no jobs here for us to place them in.”

Well, yes!  There are things you can do.  But they will require radically different ways of thinking, and “extreme  approaches” to job development.  The truth is, nothing is going to help us in America more than a good, old fashioned, resurgence of the entrepreneurial spirit!

If you think about it, most farmers have always been entrepreneurs.  They owned their own business, which was the land and the work that brought food to the family table.  They adjusted and adapted to changing weather patterns, changing markets, and changing technologies.  And they survived — and even thrived — at times.  And as long as the American farmer was functioning as an entrepreneur, America was the bread basket of the world.  The success of rural America, from the birth of our nation until only very recently, has been an entrpreneurial spirit.

Somewhere along the line, a few big plants came to the rural areas of America, and the farmers left the farm.  Oh, some stayed and cut back and worked the evenings and weekends, but for most, their main source of livliehood came from the manufacturing plant in town.  America’s farmers began to forget about their entrepreneurial roots.

But we all know that there came a time when it was more profitable for manufacturing companies to make their stuff in Mexico or China, so they closed up the plants and sent the jobs overseas.  We call it “offshore,” but it is what it is … the jobs went overseas.  And masses of people, especially in the rural areas where a handful of large employers controlled nearly the entire workforce, were left without jobs.

Now it’s time to get real.  Even though there are economic and community development professionals out there packaging the different communities of America and trying to sell them to businesses, the truth is, not many big businesses in America (or the world) are ready to dump huge amounts of capital into rural America today to create new jobs.  If we are going to create new jobs — especially in rural areas — we are going to have to go back to our enterpreneurial roots.

We have a lot of ideas right now on “how to” actually do this.  We will talk about them later. But for now, we want to point out that the types of training that will enable entrepeneurial activities to emerge and survive in rural America are technological in nature.  If we want to retrain our workforce, particularly in rural America, we need to equip them with technology skills and reignite the fires of entrepreneurialship.  You simply cannot hold a man or woman back who has a dream — a vision — the skills to make the dream come true, and a market just over the hill where there are people waiting to consume the products or services the entrepreneur is developing.  And all this can happen in rural America today!