Consultant Terry Woodbury on how struggling rural communities can pull back from the brink

When Terry Woodbury was fresh out of his masters program at Princeton Theological Seminary in the late-1960s, an internship with a wealthy Kansas congregation—essentially an experiment in changing local racial relations—sent him on a career path as a community organizer. Terry shares his story of facilitating dialogue between Black and White community members in Hutchinson, Kansas. Terry is white and was given a mandate to lead the process of forging relationships with black neighbors whom the congregation's leaders knew they were disconnected from. In today's terms, he catalyzed difficult conversations that the community needed to have.

A little further into his career, Terry was tasked with assembling a community's bid for a highly competitive national recognition. That experience spurred him to an idea about the four key sectors of any community: local businesses, schools, government, and human services. He sees all those sources of leadership as integral to address the most serious local challenges. They comprise the public square, and he named his consulting business Public Square Communities. Indeed, Terry developed a specialty in helping local areas confronting near existential-level threats. He says that he's typically contacted by someone "worried about things going south."

This episode was a great chance to explore the differences and interrelationship between organizing and policy change advocacy. Where most of Terry's work delves deeply into local power structures and life conditions of community members who've been marginalized, policy advocacy is aimed at whatever changes can be achieved without the heavy lift of mass mobilization. Host David Shorr was connected to Terry because of a shared interest in the workings of the public square. But David's notion of the public square is focused on the deliberations and decisions in the government sector.

Which is why it was especially interesting to hear about a turn at advocacy that Terry took recently on rural water and irrigation issues. The title of the episode—"Twenty years left"—was the degree of threat that an area of Kansas faced  due to the overuse of water by a small set of large farms. With all of the consensus-building and bridge-building work that Terry does, it is noteworthy that he ventured into advocacy in a situation where he faced powerful self-serving businesses who closed themselves off from changes to the status quo.