Urban vs. rural communities

Community challenges

Working in rural places is different than working in urban places and rural communities tend to have their own culture and norms. It is important to approach this work with humility and open curiosity. One challenge you may face is that rural people tend to be less trusting of people outside their community.

Reasons for resistance

There are many reasons for this, but here are a couple for you to consider when you face resistance or resentment when trying to work with rural folks:

1. Historically, rural places have not been well compensated for their contributions to the construction and maintenance of urbanization. For instance, rural communities are almost always the first to have hospital funding cut in favor of centralizing health services in urban centers, despite the raw materials extracted from their communities to build the urban health infrastructure.
2. In addition to generally exploitive historical policies that favored urban people and places, rural Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) have experienced additional oppression being forced to live in rural places not of their choosing and long being denied basic civil rights and access to community-building resources.