Bowling Green is in the second cohort of communities picked to participate in the Reimagining Rural Regions program through the Center for Regional Development at Bowling Green State University.

The origins of the Reimagining Rural Regions – or R3 – program came from the problem of young people leaving their rural communities, attending Bowling Green State University, and then, instead of returning home, moving to big cities like Columbus or Chicago.

Russell Mills, senior director of the Center for Regional Development at BGSU said that, since his team works with workforce data and economic development matters, they subsequently spent a lot of time thinking about how they could create a program that could provide the capacity to rural communities to make them more attractive to young people.

Two years ago the R3 program was born out of this thinking, centered around workforce attraction and retention.

The program is funded through a USDA Rural Placemaking Innovation Challenge Grant for a further two years. The inaugural cohort of communities in the R3 pilot program was Gibsonburg, Marysville and Van Wert.

“What it really is, it’s a concept called placemaking,” Mills said.

Placemaking can assist communities in planning, and looking at their spaces – for instance, vacant buildings – and thinking about what, in a perfect world, they would want to put there that would be unique to their town, and that would give it a sense of pride and place that would also be attractive to young workers.

The R3 program includes a nine-to-12-month public engagement and planning process for the communities.

An informational document on the R3 program provided by Mills notes that it “begins with the development of a steering committee of residents from diverse backgrounds that represent a cross-section of the community. The steering community works alongside CRD staff and students to ensure a community-led public engagement process that identifies and prioritizes unique assets to be developed or enhanced to improve quality of place and aid in workforce attraction and retention. This community-led public engagement process results in a placemaking action plan that prioritizes projects to be implemented by the community with assistance from CRD.”

This public engagement and planning process can incorporate methodologies including surveys and one-on-one interviews.

“It takes quite a while to do,” Mills said, “because we do a pretty thorough job” of including perspectives that aren’t often heard.

“We really try to help them think outside the box, to get different voices,” he said.

A four-to-five-month implementation process for the projects, that the communities ultimately select to work on, is student-driven, Mills said.

Throughout, each community works with a CRD staff member, as well as a BGSU graduate student working with the CRD, often from the university’s Masters in Public Administration program.

“They’re their lead through the whole 15-month-long process,” Mills said.

Additionally, there are undergraduate PACE (Placemaking and Community Engagement) fellows “who go through a very rigorous semester-long training program while the planning is going on in the community.”

These fellows additionally work with the steering community on the implementation process “through additional background research, surveying, or feasibility studies,” the informational document states. The CRD staff additionally can assist the communities move their projects forward by looking for federal and state grants.

“I like to call it, it’s community-led, student-driven and and it’s quality of life focused,” Mills said.

Also selected for the cohort were Mansfield and Paulding.

In a statement, BGSU President Rodney Rogers said the university is committed to supporting growth of rural communities that power the state.

“We are so pleased to engage the City of Bowling Green, the City of Mansfield and the Village of Paulding – these communities create so much good in our region and in Ohio,” Rogers said. “As a public university for the public good, BGSU is committed to supporting the current and future growth and vitality of our rural communities that power our state. Our R3 initiative is another example of how together, we can make our region stronger and position Ohio for future success.”