Time for rural Minnesota to 'own' its narrative
January 3, 2020
GRANITE FALLS, Minn. — It’s time to write our own rural narrative, according to Neil Linscheid, a University of Minnesota Extension educator and 2017 Bush Fellow.
While people in the media and academics love to write about rural decline and sleepy towns, the facts don’t support that narrative, according to Linscheid. He told members of the Yellowstone Trail Alliance that rural Minnesota needs to tell its own story to counter the negative stories that “continue to percolate and be out there in the ether. We have to push back against this deficit approach,” or what he called “poverty porn.”