The plight of rural philanthropy is a perennial story: Small towns never seem to get their rightful share of national philanthropic spending. And when the spotlight comes — as it did in November 2016 and again in January 2021— the news hooks can seem patronizing. If big national foundations had only paid more attention to the hinterlands, the commentators seem to argue, angry rural folks wouldn’t have elected Donald Trump or stormed the Capitol.
What has been missing is a more nuanced view of the needs of rural areas, and how donors and foundations can help, says Erin Borla, executive director of the Roundhouse Foundation. She aims to change that with a new podcast she hosts on rural philanthropy, called Funding Rural.
Borla is the granddaughter of Gert Boyle, the colorful founder and former CEO of Columbia Sportswear. When Boyle died in 2019, a gift from her estate contributed the vast majority of the assets in the $376 million Roundhouse Foundation.
A long-time trustee of the family foundation, Borla became Roundhouse’s executive director in 2020. In 2022, she was selected for a fellowship at the National Center for Family Philanthropy, where she came up with the idea for the podcast.
Funding Rural describes the surprising overlap between urban and rural needs — and points out that stereotypes and bias can hinder rural charities, just as they often hurt BIPOC-led charities in urban areas. One episode features Wynn Rosser, president of the T.L.L. Temple Foundation, which makes grants in rural east Texas. During the pandemic, Rosser says, he gave up on attending national Zoom calls in which foundation leaders brainstormed strategies to provide immediate help to charities, since no one on the calls seemed to understand rural areas or want to help.
“We spent a lot of time over the last few years talking about inherent bias,” Rosser says. “Well, we have inherent biases about rural people in rural places, too.”
In another episode, Kali Thorne Ladd, CEO of Children’s Institute, which works to improve the lives children in Oregon from prenatal to fifth grade, says she went into the job in 2021 thinking a single strategy would work for rural Oregon — but quickly realized that the widely varied rural communities would each require unique approaches.
“Just like any group of people, they’re not monolithic, and as a person belonging to a racial minority group, I know very well that we can make a lot of assumptions about people without actually understanding their story and their narrative,” says Thorne Ladd, who is Black.
The first four episodes of the podcast dropped in mid-March, and Roundhouse plans to roll out the remainder of the 17-episode season once per week through the end of June. A second season is in the works.
The Chronicle recently caught up with Borla to discuss Funding Rural. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
What do you hope to accomplish with the podcast?
I think so much of the urban-rural divide that we hear about is because we think we’re saying the same thing, but it’s being interpreted in a different way. That’s why we started with Beth Marino, a researcher focused on climate change, linguistics, and language, in episode one. That sort of sets the tone.
We’re in a finger-pointing stage right now, and that’s not advancing anything. In the philanthropic world, we say that our mission is to improve climate change and be the solution. Well, we sit behind a desk. So our job is to empower those who are on the ground doing the work. If we’re funding the research, how is the research getting to the practitioners? If we’re funding the practitioners, how are they sharing that information with the researchers? We’re missing a piece of the connection.
Hopefully, this podcast opens up an opportunity to have a conversation with somebody who you wouldn’t otherwise connect with. There’s an episode with CC Gardner Gleser, who’s another fellow within the National Center for Family Philanthropy. She’s a Black woman living in Detroit who has been in philanthropy for years. The more she and I talked offline as we were building projects, she was like, ‘Well, that’s the same thing I hear in this inner-city community.’ The throughlines are the same.
We’ve gotten accustomed to ‘othering’ people. Different communities can have similar issues. They’re not exactly the same, but I think we can find humanity by talking to each other.
If your podcast catches the eye of foundations or donors that want to get more involved in rural America, how can they get started?
Well, there are several rural place-based funders. We’re hard to find, but we do exist! So I would say, reach out to any of those folks — we’re always ready and willing to talk. What’s interesting right now is that we have so much federal capital aligned for rural and indigenous communities. What we often don’t have in rural communities is capacity to do those applications. That’s where bigger philanthropy can come in and say, “I see that you’re eligible for this solar grant, but you need a solar engineering assessment beforehand — that’s an assessment that we can fund.”
Native Americans often seem left out of discussions about philanthropy and the country’s racial reckoning. How can foundations and donors do more to meet needs on reservations?
Native Americans in Philanthropy released a report in 2019 about the philanthropic investment in Native-led or Native-serving organizations, and it sits at 0.4 percent — less than 1 percent. That’s a devastating number, obviously. It’s something that was important to us as we expanded our footprint. You know, if we say rural, that means reservation, and how do we do that correctly?
There may be some fear not knowing how to build the relationships. It’s a longer-term investment, and it truly is trust-based and showing up and being a participant. It’s not just, “Hey, I’d like to give you a check, and then you go do the thing.”
Sometimes our partners in philanthropy are like “Whoa, I don’t know how, I’m afraid I’m going to screw it up, so I’m not going to try.” Well, sometimes you are going to screw it up. There you go — that’s the best thing to know. At Roundhouse, we’ve been doing the best that we can. There’s some really important and powerful work happening in Native communities.
The rural parts of this country are so different — what are some common philanthropic needs for rural areas, whether in Mississippi, Maine, or South Dakota?
We’re seeing similar things to what you’re seeing in urban spaces, right? Issues like access to equitable health care, community food systems, early-childhood education. We talk a lot about child-care deserts in urban spaces. We’re seeing that same situation in rural spaces, and yet sometimes the policies put in place to address child-care deserts are set up to support urban spaces, and not rural. The same thing applies on housing and homelessness.
What I think is a little bit unique in rural is that all those pieces are interconnected. In an urban space, you may have one organization that works on housing, and one on mental health, and so on. In rural areas, they’re often intersectional. We can’t talk about work-force development without ensuring that we have early-childhood education and housing for the folks who are coming to teach the young people who will then go work in the hospital. All these pieces are interconnected. We can’t be siloed in our funding.
Do you have an example of a national issue that needs a different approach in rural areas?
We have a lot of large funders talking about gun violence prevention across the country, which is a very critical issue. But 63 percent of gun deaths are suicide, and that rate is 29 percent higher in rural communities. How do we have a dialogue with folks who have firearms as part of their daily work or their recreational life? How do we have conversations about keeping people safe, and mental-health challenges, in a way that doesn’t feel othering?
You start by recognizing that there is often a need for firearms. If you’re living on a ranch, you might have critters that come and try to take your livestock. I’ve lived and worked in a rural county here in Oregon. We had a horse go down, and we were three hours away from a vet. Putting the horse down was the humane thing to do.
Being able to recognize those things in person is a really important piece — just having a conversation, human to human.
