So far during my time in The Dalles, Oregon as a RARE member there was an event that not only expanded my experience in professional environments, but also gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of people who are now becoming familiar faces. This tour gave me important insight into people truly living rural, their accomplishments, their needs, and their day-to-day lives.

The event that truly showed me a new part of Oregon that I had never experienced before, even as a Oregon native, was the South Wasco Familiarity Tour hosted by the South Wasco Alliance on October 11^th, 2024. Where a group of about 25 people coming from various organizations got a guided tour of four rural towns in southern Wasco County, Oregon.

The day began with Anna Peach my colleague and a fellow RARE member, Lanier Fussell our colleague at the time as well as a former RARE member, and I driving down to Maupin, Oregon. Fun fact, Maupin is known as one of the best towns in Oregon for white water rafting. Maupin has a population of 418 people (2023). We also heard about the new world-class athletic field called the Maupin Deschutes River Athletic Complex, this track is Olympic-level quality, yet not many people are aware it exists in north-central Oregon. After introductions and snacks at Maupin Works, a local coworking space, we all got onto an old bus to carpool to our next destination. Pictured below is our bus going down the spiraling roads in Maupin towards Shaniko, Oregon.

Next we drove through Shaniko, Oregon. A town with a population of 31 people (2023). Our bus driver, Pamela Brown lives there with her partner Mark Haskett. Pam and Mark own and operate the only gas station in Shaniko, it is the only gas station for the 75 miles between Moro and Madras (South Wasco Alliance, 2023).

12 minutes south of Shaniko is Antelope, Oregon. Another very small and rural town in south Wasco County. Antelope may be a recognizable name to some, as it was a town once overtaken by the Rajneeshpuram, a religious community that started a huge movement in the 1980s after around 7,000 people took over the town for 7 years.

Antelope, Oregon was a very small and quiet town. There is an abandoned café, a postage office, an old school that is not currently operating, and a museum dedicated to Rajneesh items and memorabilia. Currently, the main attraction that brings people through Antelope is the Washington Family Ranch Young Life Camp down the road. This camp is 64,000 acres and can accommodate up to 2,00 people at a time. Touring this town opened my eyes to rural life. This portion of the tour was led by a local, Brandie McNamee. Brandie is also someone who will be a part of one of Wy’East’s newest projects. Antelope, Oregon is one of the rural towns that Wy’East RC&D intends to send a BEAM unit, a mobile EV charger, to which will usually be used to charge the EV’s of people coming to the Young Life Camp. But they can also be transported during power outages, fires, and other emergencies when power is needed elsewhere. Thanks to a CREP grant that the Oregon Department of Energy and Wy’East were recently awarded we are beginning the implementation of these units.

After seeing Antelope we made our way to Tygh Valley, Oregon with a population of 54 people (2022). Kathleen Willis led this portion of the tour, she is a Tygh Valley local, she is also a Board Member of the South Wasco Alliance. In Tygh Valley we were all served lunch at Molly B’s Diner, a staple in the town. We got to meet Molly herself and enjoy chicken fried steak, biscuits, croissants, and more.

Our last stop of the South Wasco Fam Tour was Tony, his garden, and the Tygh Creek Sustainable Farm Stand operated by his daughter which he stocks with his produce. Tony’s property was awesome to see, as someone who wishes they had the time and land to grow produce in a regenerative and sustainable way. Tony spends his days harvesting, maintaining, and watering his gardens. We got to hear Tony explain what he grows, his routines, his beliefs around sustainability, and his daughter's role in the Tygh Creek Sustainable Farm Stand. Of course, I bought some sweet potatoes and honey sticks while we were there. The farm stand is constantly open to the public and is full of fresh produce as well as value-added products. They operate on an honesty policy, where you weigh your produce yourself, calculate the price based on the $/lb listed, and Venmo their account before you head home with your organic and local items.

Overall, this tour of South Wasco was extremely beneficial and enjoyable for me. I not only got to meet people I continue to work with, but I also have gotten to be in the towns that Wy’East is working with now as well as in the future. Before my time with RARE and Wy’East I had never heard of places like Dufur, Shaniko, or Antelope. It helped me better understand their needs, see the large amounts of progress that locals have already made, and make connections with people throughout Wasco County.

It all begins with an idea.

About five months ago from the time I am writing this, I was at the RARE Program Orientation discussing results of a strengths assessment. The assessment had named context as my dominant theme. My results explained that I understand things best after taking the time to understand the complete background. I began to feel uneasy as I looked over the list of strengths and noticed the ones I didn’t identify with. The RARE motto of “getting things done” echoed through my mind as I read about themes like activator, developer, command, and achiever.

Still wondering how I’d make it in this program without the skills of a commanding achiever, I started my service year in September with Wy’East Resource Conservation and Development Council. I spent my first month at Wy’East sitting in on meetings and learning the ins and outs of USDA’s Rural Energy for America Program. In my position, my primary responsibility is to help agricultural producers and rural small businesses apply for grants to make their businesses more energy efficient or install renewable energy systems. I help applicants by verifying applicant eligibility, decoding federal regulation, providing technical writing assistance, and compiling a final grant application in compliance with USDA requirements. I shadowed Michael, a Wy’East staff member who had served in my current RARE position the year before, in meetings with new REAP leads.

I wrote down every bit of information I learned, trying to connect the dots. Agricultural producers are only eligible if at least 50% of their gross income comes from agricultural operations. All projects must use commercially available technology. Projects with a total project cost of more than $200,000 require a one-line electrical drawing and structural drawing of solar structure and racking system. Small business size limits depend on the entity’s NAICS code. Most nebulous of all was the application process.

This was a commonly asked question with no solid answer. The consensus seemed to be that  there was no clear process, you just had to chase down the information you needed until you  had it, and then you put it where it belongs in the application. Each project was too different to develop a repeatable process.

On one quiet and meeting-less afternoon, I embarked on a mission to try anyway. I had the time and resources, so how hard could it be? Using a timeline-based project management tool, I arranged all the pieces of an application – federal forms, utility bills, environmental screenings, business documents, production reports – into something that resembled a flowchart. It functioned as a to-do list that denoted which tasks had to be done before others could be started. As I worked through my list, the seemingly unrelated details I’d learned started to click together.

After a few months, the time came for me to lead conversations with REAP applicants. My first solo mission was to call a potential applicant who was looking for guidance after trying to read through the regulation himself. I stayed quiet as I listened to him express his confusion, conscious of my role as a technical assistance provider. I wanted to appear knowledgeable and dependable, but I had felt exactly how he did a couple months ago. I thought back to the tools I had made for myself and wondered if other people would find it helpful.

I condensed the process flowchart I had made into one document, broken up into three phases. I color-coded the tasks in this cart to denote if the tasks were to be completed by the applicant, the project developer, or Wy’East. In my next meeting with an applicant, I tentatively mentioned that I had a document that might help clarify the process. I shared my screen and began explaining the connections, growing increasingly nervous. Surely I was the only person that needed to look at the applications this way– I was just wasting this person’s precious time. I held my breath.

“Can I get a copy of this?” the applicant replied. “I feel like I’m finally getting it.” I began to bring up the flowchart and other representations I had made more often. I found that approaching the process in context, rather than focusing on the details and requirements, had the best impact in informational meetings with curious producers and business owners. Leaning into my strengths translated into more outreach based responsibilities at Wy’East, culminating in my current project of improving our online presence. Our website is our most effective way of sharing information with the community, and in this work I’ve focused on how to make our shared knowledge and program information as accessible as possible.

Five months into my service year, I no longer worry that I have the wrong strengths for this work. I learned that getting things done isn’t only about marching ahead and blazing a trail– progress is most effective when the time is taken to share knowledge.

We often hear the words disruptor or innovator and think of larger-than-life corporations like Apple, or tech CEOs with innovative market changing products like Elon Musk’s Tesla. These companies are headquartered in places like Santa Clara County, CA (Silicon Valley) or Austin, Texas, where the population swells to nearly 2 million people. What if I told you that such innovation is also happening in a city of 604?

Enter Dufur, Oregon, and Wy’East RC&D. Wy’East, Sustainable Northwest, Forth and, Bonneville Environmental foundation: Four Oregon based nonprofits have created a team to revolutionize the agricultural field, bringing rural Oregon to the forefront of new technology. This collaborative effort has launched a program to put some of the nation’s first electric powered farm equipment into the hands of rural agricultural producers across Oregon. Think free car share program but with electric tractors and Rivians…

As I’m writing this I just got back to our office after meeting Senator Merkley (D-Ore.) who recently helped our Rural Electrification (E-Farm) team secure $1.5 million for this project through the U.S. Department of Energy. A month ago, Wy’East just recently hired our fifth staff member. We are not a large nonprofit, and yet as Titus the Director of RARE AmeriCorps often likes to say, “we are getting things done for Rural Oregon!”

When I first moved to Oregon before the start of my service year, I didn’t know what to expect. I moved to Oregon from a smaller suburban community in Southeastern Wisconsin. Now, the rural communities I have had the privilege of working in these past few months would laugh at my definition of small, but nonetheless it was a huge change for me. I packed up my life in Wisconsin and moved quite literally across the country to a state I’d never been and began working for an organization that prior to RARE I had never heard of. Even with all these unknowns at the outset, this has been one of the best decisions of my life.

Even my first day was a wild and crazy adventure! After touring my new office and workspace in The Dalles, a larger city just north of Dufur right along the Columbia River, I hopped in the truck with my supervisor Robert. Next thing I know we were on the freeway heading to Missoula Montana, electric tractor in tow. Now, it’s not every day that I’ve gotten to talk with the governor, show off an electric tractor in Montana, or have a conversation with a senator. But every day has been a new adventure. My work is centered around creating a rural energy network in Oregon. The goal is to help rural small businesses and farmers in the best way possible when it comes to energy efficiency and renewables. At Wy’East we often talk about saving folks water, energy, and money. A major part of this is bringing people together. Connecting farmers with incentives through their local utility, helping them write grants and receive funding through USDA Rural Development or simply hearing about their business, and their farm that’s been a part of their family for generations. These are the kinds of conversations that I will never forget. I came to Oregon and to the RARE program looking for the space to gain real world boots on the ground experience before pursuing graduate school. While I have learned all about irrigation efficiency and on farm renewables, or even USDA programs, some of the most rewarding learning experiences have been seeing “Rural Oregon”. Cliché I know. I’m not from a large city like Milwaukee or Chicago, but there is something special about these small rural communities. The way I was welcomed into Dufur and The Dalles with open arms was truly special to me. Seeing the community come together for one of the most heartfelt Veteran’s Day school assemblies I have ever attended. Taking conference calls outside of the market while people go about their day, and occasionally having a conversation with some of the local farmers as they pick up an order at the store. These are the memories that will stick with me far beyond any of the fantastic practical work experience that RARE and Wy’East have given me. Not only the memories but a fresh perspective on some of our nation’s most vibrant communities. Communities that the national news sadly glazes over. Things are happening in Rural Oregon and in Rural communities across the country. New things, exciting innovations, and they are being spearheaded by some of the state’s most passionate people. Next time you turn on the news you never know, you might just hear about a small community in Oregon and how the people there are changing the world one farm at a time.