The Dakotafire Café event at the Granary Rural Cultural Center, near Groton, S.D., on local food was held a little later than planned, but worth the wait—at least as far as those attendees who enjoy eating were concerned. Read More »
The countryside of the Northern Plains would look much different if it were populated by more people like Gabe Brown. Read More »
As rural communities grapple with local challenges and embrace opportunities, design:SD offers a fresh approach to community development strategies. Here’s Webster’s story. Read More »
Small hospitals serve a vital role in the Dakotas’ rural communities, but having full-time specialists available for major emergencies has been impossible until recently. Read More »
We rural folks sometimes get a bit of an inferiority complex: We assume that things from the city are somehow better. OK, and sometimes they are. In terms of health care, some city hospitals are justifiably famous for the care they provide. Read More »
All three levels of government—federal, state, and local—contribute to education funding. Read More »
This spring, students in a Lyons, Neb., government class learned an important government lesson: How to be good citizens. Read More »
The talk in many areas of rural education is of declining enrollments and strained resources—maybe not where you’d expect to see capital improvement projects. But some schools in the Dakotas are building. With enrollments no better than the typical Dakota school, they’ve found the resources to invest through community generosity and local ingenuity. Read More »
On a Tuesday afternoon in July, when some of their colleagues were probably enjoying a deserved break from the intensity of the last school year, about 60 teachers were in Wolsey, S.D., working on plans for the next one. Read More »
The loss of small farms and the loss of small schools in this country are indisputably connected. At the most obvious level, the disappearance of small farmers meant the disappearance of farm children and, thus, the disappearance of small rural schools. But the connection is deeper than that. Read More »
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