2026 CDS Annual Conference

We present the context, development, and community impact of a comprehensive youth serving initiative: Statesboro Village Builders. Several incidents in a local high school inspired the community to come together to discuss how we could best support our youth. We collaboratively identified goals and a small team worked to develop a plan for this initiative, designed to leverage the assets of existing nonprofit, faith-based, and private sector organizations and local government to empower young people and their families. We will share keys to success, lessons learned, and other takeaways for participants hoping to launch a similar initiative in their community.

This paper presents a Consensus Framework for Postsecondary Youth Impact in Rural Communities—a theoretical model developed for the University of Nebraska’s Rural Fellows program to help collaborative partners in co-creating and evaluating locally meaningful success indicators. Based on Collective Impact Theory (Kania & Kramer, 2011), Ripple Effects Mapping (Emery et al., 2015), and community-based participatory evaluation, the framework details strategies for aligning goals, monitoring progress, and adapting community-led initiatives over time. It provides practical guidance to improve best practices for postsecondary youth engagement programs with rural communities and supports community-identified efforts to strengthen community support in rural Nebraska.

Keystone Community Partnerships (KCP) is a program of [The Institution] Outreach, leveraging collective resources, knowledge, and expertise of the University in collaboration with community stakeholders to enhance capacity and address community priorities throughout the state. KCP fosters transparent and adaptable university-community partnerships where trust, support, and empowerment thrive. A graduate certificate program called KCP Scholars within the College of Agricultural Science trains exemplary graduate students in the KCP model for community engagement, creating experiential learning opportunities for the students as they become project managers on KCP initiatives embedded in communities.
This presentation will discuss three community based KCP initiatives along with the KCP Scholars program. Three KCP Scholars will share their experiences of community engagement and development implementing initiatives such as mobile medical and veterinary clinics, school-based community gardening through a social-emotional learning lens, and in-the-field workforce development opportunities for high school students. The presentation will highlight programs successes, lessons learned and measurable outcomes for the collaborating communities.

     Community land trusts (CLTs) have grown as an alternative model of land use to limit housing speculation and counter displacement of residents. Emerging scholarship argues the capacity of CLTs for more transformative politics and social justice is often undermined by an over-focus on affordable homeownership production (DeFilippis et al., 2019; Lowe, 2025). A better understanding of the transformative potential of CLTs requires attention to local politics, community control, and embeddedness of local solutions in complex power structures. We use Gaventa’s power cube to perform comparative power analysis of four CLTs in Memphis and San Diego and find that CLTs vary in their potential for community control based on origins, funding mechanisms, approach to partnerships, and vision for the future. Our findings suggest the need for further qualitative research to understand the heterogeneity of CLTs in terms of community power, but also more policy support from different levels of government to support community-controlled CLTs.
       This paper addresses multiple aspects of the conference theme, Community Currents: Navigating Change Together. Historically, individual community wealth building (CWB) models—such as CLTs—emerged as grassroots responses to the inability of public policy to address systemic issues in land use and housing. These models continue to be experimented with to overcome historical marginalization and contemporary shifts in urban and rural governance and development. Nonetheless, the origins, mission, and goals of these models vary widely depending on the mix of stakeholders involved, the requirements of funding, and the capacity available. As such, community development knowledge and theories are essential to assess the potential for sustainability in individual iterations of these models. 

 

Communities face rapid shifts such as U.S. government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) policy changes, rising costs, and demographic transitions. This session highlights three innovative, cross-sector approaches to resilience. First, a mom-and-pop grocery in a food desert partners with local colleges and expands its culturally relevant hot deli to include healthy to-go options. Second, an in-house created video explains how to use SNAP at farmers markets, using visuals, narration, and captions to overcome language barriers and boost sales. Third, a neighborhood economic development corporation leverages a “Food Crawl” to share its strategic plan, recruit volunteers, and connect youth to entrepreneurship.
 

This presentation shares lessons from the redevelopment of Portland’s historic Hill Block, once a thriving center of Black life and later erased by urban renewal and state-led displacement. The project is a Black-led, community-governed organization working to restore housing, economic infrastructure, cultural space, and long-term stewardship to land that sat vacant for decades. Framed through a reparative development lens, the presentation examines how community development in action can move beyond politics toward repair by centering truth telling, redistribution, and community-led governance.

Navigating Change with Rural Stories and Action
This panel will highlight how learning through stories and supporting rural-led action is informing stronger partnerships with rural places for research, funding, network building, and advocacy.  Panelists include university researchers, a not-for-profit, and rural leaders who will share why stories matter in their work and how what is learned from the stories and process are helping to navigate changes for their institutions, in new partnerships, and within rural communities.
This panel focuses on the themes of navigating change together and connecting across urban-rural divides.  The three projects are connected by their focus on collaboration, shared understanding, and aligned outcomes focused on rural voice and power- action steps prioritized in the Thrive Rural Framework by Aspen Community Strategies Group and in the CDS principles of good practice. The panelists represent diverse institutions working across local, state, and national geographies.  They are connecting rural and urban partners and supporting capacity for rural leaders to create more vibrant and resilient rural places through health equity, food access, leadership, and arts and culture.  In a time where decreasing budgets, misinformation, and disconnection are making community change work more challenging, the panelists will discuss the outcomes of their intentional investments - of funding, time, flexibility, and network-building - in strategies focused on rural stories and action. This panel will share examples of how cross-sector and cross-geography collaboration can use stories and connection to move beyond the usual silos toward shared solutions. 
Panel Presentations:
The Rural Missouri Stories Project
From 2023-2024, researchers studied the lived experiences, narratives, and values that shape rural Missouri life and inform perceptions of communities’ ability to thrive. This presentation will share the research process and outreach, lessons learned, and how the data and process are informing other rural Missouri initiatives.
Rural Assembly Everywhere
Rural Assembly Everywhere, a program of the Center for Rural Strategies, is an annual gathering uniting people nationwide who care about rural places, neighbors, and community issues. This presentation highlights how Rural Assembly invites participants to imagine new ways to expand opportunity, share resources, and build a connected rural America.
Missouri EATs and the Missouri Rural Food Access Partnership (MFRAP)
Missouri Rural Food Access Partnership is a network of urban and rural food system partners exploring a statewide food financing initiative. This effort is informed by local strategies and stories shared through Missouri EATs – a program to uncover innovative community solutions for improved food access through community engagement, networks, and local action planning.
 

Despite various criticisms against the media, community radio has made its mark globally as a medium for facilitating community development. While communities face various problems and deliberate on how to solve them, community radio has continuously played pivotal role in providing platforms for engagement among community members, policy makers and non-governmental organizations as they navigate change together. This paper looks at the role that Forte FM plays in providing such developmental opportunities to the community of Alice, where it broadcasts from. The theoretical framework for this study relies on dialogic communication as a normative theory of participatory communication as propounded by Paolo Freire (1973) and the democratic-participant theory, as the study unpacks how participation and communication on radio, help to facilitate development. The study adopts qualitative research method and two focus group discussions were conducted in two areas in Alice among selected listeners of the radio station, while in-depth interview was conducted with the radio station manager to know their views. Study findings revealed that community radio helps to bring change to communities by facilitating discussions and proffer solutions on topical community issues such as poor service delivery, gender-based violence and health issues among others. Additionally, the findings noted that community radio continues to give a voice to the voiceless and facilitates various opportunities for development.

From 2023–2025, University of Missouri Extension united nonprofits, government agencies, businesses, schools, and community organizations to strengthen rural food systems and support local agricultural economies. Through 31 events funded by USDA and state partners, Extension distributed over 19,000 pounds of protein, 2,850 bottles of honey, 250 produce bags, and 1,200 pumpkins, benefiting thousands of households while sustaining local producers. These efforts engaged 25 faculty and staff, 72 volunteers, and 46 partners, creating a collaborative model addressing food insecurity, promoting health, and boosting economic resilience. Extension’s cross-sector approach demonstrates how partnerships can achieve shared goals for thriving communities.

This program centers a community-led ecosystem approach to community development that integrates food systems governance, community economic development, land stewardship, climate and disaster resilience, and policy translation. Using Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and cross-sector collaboration, grassroots organizations, cooperatives, academic partners, and public agencies work together to align vision with coordinated action. The initiative prioritizes shared leadership, community knowledge, and long-term capacity building to strengthen local resilience and economic opportunity. Through participatory governance, data-informed decision-making, and place-based strategies, the program advances equitable development while sustaining community voice and cultural identity. The theme Community Currents: Navigating Change Together reflects how community development unfolds where multiple forces converge—across sectors, generations, geographies, and histories. This program embodies that reality by intentionally working at the intersections of food systems, land use, climate resilience, economic development, and policy implementation. Rather than treating these as separate domains, the initiative operates as an integrated ecosystem guided by Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and community-led governance.