Big plans for Growing Small Towns

Cass County Electric Cooperative teams up with community development nonprofit in Oakes, N.D.

When Rebecca Undem stands in the facility spurred by her founding of the nonprofit Growing Small Towns, she’s enveloped in both the history of her hometown of Oakes, N.D. and the promise of the community’s future. The consultant, speaker and author moved back to Oakes after nearly a decade away, and something soon pulled her to the old Ben Franklin storefront formerly owned by her grandparents. She had a mental image of an innovation hub that she knew she wanted, for herself – and for her rural neighbors.

“I kept envisioning being able to create a space that felt really good, felt really modern and was equipped with the things that I missed,” Undem said. “It would give flexibility for co-working, too, and we’d be able to invite people to Oakes instead of always needing to travel to people. I wanted to bring the people to us.”

Undem’s vision was cemented when she officially launched Growing Small Towns in 2019 and began designing and renovating the nonprofit’s Oakes home in 2020. The multifunctional event and co-working space opens its doors to any individual or organization that is looking to grow. Undem says in the short few months the facility has been open, they’ve held art classes and vendor shows; hosted a threepiece Irish trio performance for 150 people; supported vaccination clinics; and welcomed many more traditional community meetings and gatherings.

The space has also become a landing pad for statewide resource providers that serve the southeast region but don’t have a brick-andmortar center near Oakes, such as Job Service North Dakota and the North Dakota Small Business Development Center. “They are coming out here regularly because they have a space where they can be,” Undem explained. “That provides some consistency for not only those providers, but for the people in our community who need access to those resources.”

The Growing Small Towns space is also available as a rented co-working room for those who are kicking off new businesses and entrepreneurial ventures in or near Oakes, as well as those who can work remotely and prefer a small-town life.

In addition to the beautiful new co-working and event space, Growing Small Towns provides hands-on consulting, innovation and teambuilding sessions to help organizations, rural companies and small-town developers overcome obstacles that may keep their communities from thriving.

“I’m a big believer in practicing locally and sharing globally,” Undem said. “I get calls from people in other communities in North Dakota saying they would love to do something like this. And I’m absolutely willing to sit down with them to talk about what it would look like.”

Small-town collaboration When Undem publicly introduced Growing Small Towns in July 2021, she decided to do so with a Rural Resources Road Trip bus tour from Fargo to Oakes. That’s where she met Paul Matthys, vice president of Member and Energy Services for Cass County Electric Cooperative (CCEC).

“I was encouraged and intrigued by Rebecca’s drive and dedication to helping spur economic growth and prosperity in small rural communities in North Dakota,” Matthys said. “I invited her to meet our communications team, and we discussed ways Cass County Electric could partner with Growing Small Towns.”

Participants in this year's Rural Resources Road Trip stop by one of Oake's murals

CCEC has a history of supporting the small towns of its territory, and Matthys recognized that Undem’s rural service footprint overlapped with his own. They decided to kick off a collaborative relationship to utilize the strengths and expertise of both entities.

“I think cooperatives, whether it’s telecomm or electric cooperatives, have this enormous vested interest in our communities surviving, because they have millions of dollars in infrastructure built out in these communities. They want them to succeed. So I have found our cooperatives to be wonderful partners,” Undem said. “It’s less about their financial contribution, and more about their actual intellectual, social, emotional, physical – like their whole being – partnership with us, when we end up working on things together.”

Through Growing Small Towns, CCEC will sponsor and host an Innovation Works™ session in Arthur, N.D., in October 2022. The opportunity will bring Arthur’s leaders and community members together with CCEC employees to discuss pressing challenges and develop innovation-based strategic plans to surmount them – displaying the co-op principle of Concern for Community in a deeper form.

Undem says these sessions are a fantastic way to bring in outside perspectives to see and deconstruct community issues from another angle. She’s worked with several organizations who have gained significantly from the exercise.

“If they’ve done a good job investing in their people, which Cass County Electric has, then that intellectual capital and that social capital actually gets to land in a meaningful way in a community that they care about,” she said.

“Rebecca is a champion for the rural communities we serve,” Matthys said. “Without people like her, I think the idea of small-town USA would someday dwindle.”

Learn more about Growing Small Towns and its services at growingsmalltowns.org.