The Rural Studies Institute (RSI) at Georgia College is working to support the sustainable development of rural communities in the southern United States.
Veronica Womack, who serves as RSI’s inaugural Executive Director, was asked to launch the Institute to help address the challenges that rural Georgia and communities like hers face.
“For me, the academy serves as technical assistance,” Womack tells Food Tank. She strives to use what’s available through the instition to meet the broader community’s needs. This work can include surveys to better understand residents’ needs, collaborating with people outside of the college on grant projects, or offering a lecture.
At a time many people are currently grappling with questions around the value of higher education, Womack believes that this work is the answer: It’s about “being able to use the resources of the institution to solve community problems, regional problems, state problems in a very unique way.”
Womack focuses on the Black Belt, which extends from eastern Texas to eastern Virginia. She says has the region has seen a great deal of underdevelopment and underutilization and, as a result, is often overlooked and undervalued.
In spite of these challenges, however, “there are so many opportunities in the Black Belt region for people and their communities to advance,” Womack tells Food Tank. There’s also immense resilience. That’s why she wants to use RSI to encourage entrepreneurs, from farmers to restaurant owners to entertainers, to build their businesses in the local community. And she hopes to show young people that these rural areas are places worth living and investing in.
Storytelling, Womack believes, is an important part of this work. “I have always felt that stories can really connect people. Because deep down, regardless of whether you’re rural or urban, or you’re from Appalachia or you’re from the Black Belt, we all typically come from communities that have traditions of storytelling,” she says. And a story “allows people to really engage on a human level.”
Some of these narratives can be found on the Black Farmers Network, a platform Womack launched that allows rural, African American food producers, including those in the Black Belt, to share their stories.
There are “treasures to be uncovered” in the region, Womack tells Food Tank, if only people are willing to do the work. “I think that it’s important for us to write a new narrative for the Black Belt. And that’s what I hope that I’m doing.”
Listen to the full conversation with Veronica Womack on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” to hear more about why the Black Belt region has been dismissed for too long, the infrastructure that’s needed to support food producers and other entrepreneurs, and some of the projects that Womack is leading at the Rural Studies Institute by clicking HERE.
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Photo courtesy of Frances Gunn, Unsplash
