EXCERPT: “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.’ ‘If you don’t own your story, somebody else will,’ he said. Linscheid spoke Nov. 22 to members of the Yellowstone Trail Alliance of Western Minnesota at the annual meeting in Granite Falls. The Alliance is a grassroots organization of residents in communities along U.S. Highway 212 from Buffalo Lake to Ortonville. They work to promote the communities as places to visit and live. They are part of the original Yellowstone Trail Association, an alliance of communities that spanned the country from Plymouth Rock on the East Coast to Puget Sound on the West Coast and promoted tourism in the early days of automobile travel along the route to Yellowstone National Park.” FULL STORY: http://bit.ly/2OQ6sdv
