On Wednesday, January 15, 2025, PorchLight hosted a webinar with Ben Winchester on “Living in the Middle of Everywhere.”
The notion that rural residents live “in the middle of nowhere” continues a negative narrative that is not based on the reality of community life. Modern life is complex as we live, work, shop, and play in a wide region. At the same time, most of our planning is done at a city or county level. In this webinar, Ben covers the implications for tourism, marketing, transportation planning, resident recruitment, and housing to better understand this web of regional activity as it varies by age and interest through an Asset-Based Community Development exercise that has some simple, but deep, learning outcomes.
With humor and academic rigor, Ben Winchester’s tour de force explains why rural communities benefit when they collaborate, how demographic changes will affect rural communities, and why people move to small towns.
About Ben Winchester
Ben Winchester is a rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota Extension’s Department of Community Development.
Ben has been working both in and for small towns across the Midwest for over 25 years. He lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota with his wife and two children. Ben is trained as a Rural Sociologist and works in the Extension Department of Community Development at the University of Minnesota. His conducts applied research on economic, social, and demographic topics surrounding a theme of “rewriting the rural narrative”. He received the international Rural Renewal Research Prize in 2021 for this work.
