Add this to the rural development mix

Posted on | November 25, 2005 | Comments Off

You see, this is what I was talking about in my white papers, The Entrepreneurial Economy and The Microbusiness Way of Growth — only, instead of one company hiring hundreds or thousands of rural-based IT workers to supply large corporations, I was envisioning hundreds or thousands of rural-based microbusiness IT firms offering their services to large and medium-sized firms that need to do that kind of outsourcing but either want to keep those jobs here or just find that foreign born help isn’t going to get it done for them.

I really do think that finding ways to keep well-educated young people in rural areas and letting them work remotely should be a major strategy in rural development. It would keep some of the best minds in those communities, where they need the kind of leadership those kids could provide. It would keep higher-paying jobs there, too, and bring money into the community for the benefit of everybody else who lives there.

There’s probably at least some of that sort of thing going on around the country but, of course, we don’t usually get to hear about it in the national media. So, if you know of an example, let us know.