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SOURIS - Throughout its 11-year history, the nonprofit Strengthen ND has been looking for ways to give North Dakota's rural communities more control over their own destinies.
That effort received a boost when Megan Langley, founder and executive director of Strengthen ND, recently was selected to be part of an inaugural cohort of the Rural Research Fellowship, an initiative of United WE that is supported by the Patterson Family Foundation. A $20,000 grant will enable Strengthen ND to advance its research in "Trust as Infrastructure: Rebuilding Rural Economies Through Community-Owned Capital Systems."
"At Strengthen ND, we’ve been working for over a decade to try to understand in what way we can spur more growth in rural communities. The more and more we dug into it, the more we just started to understand the barriers to accessing capital in communities, even capital that is available within the state and specifically designed for rural communities," Langley said.
Prior to and during the 2025 legislative session, Strengthen ND and rural communities worked on a campaign to support Senate Bill 2097, which would have set up an endowment fund for communities of 1,000 or less in population. The bill was defeated.
The community stories behind that Senate bill campaign inspired the bulk of the work that the We United grant will help advance, Langley said.
"A part of this work is also inspired by the community-owned financing tool that we piloted in Sheyenne with Sheyenne Grit," Langley said. "Through our Creative Community Solutions grant-making program, we provided them basically with $300,000 unrestricted for the community to decide what they themselves wanted to invest in, and the only string attached to that whole grant was at the end of the six-year grant period, just try to have $300,000 in that account. It was a total risk, but we thought there’s this community that has been doing so much with so little for so long, and we trust them, and they trust us - let’s go on this kind of journey together. And they have had just such incredible outcomes."
Sheyenne Grit has pulled together housing projects, attracted 50% more business to its main street and spurred a new generation of leaders with its revolving fund, she said.
The goal going forward is to identify where more of that community wealth building is happening and find a way to replicate it, she said.
"That's what this project is really all about. In what way can we identify and evaluate where locally governed, community-owned wealth building is happening? What are the good elements of it? How can we utilize those good elements to influence policy so we can make more of that happen in a reasonable way and actually get these communities the resources and decision-making authority so they can actually have agency within their community again. That’s what I’m hoping to uncover in the next year," she said.
Starting with communities that were active in the legislative campaign, Langley hopes to work with at least 100 communities to gain feedback on their existing readiness potential and their development barriers while beginning to look at where investment dollars might come from. Already, work is ongoing to raise money for a statewide rural community endowment.
"At the end of the first year, I would love to be in a space where we have some solid policy recommendations, and I am a big believer in keeping it simple. So, if we have between three and five policy recommendations for how we can support rural communities to access capital at a greater rate, I think that that would be an incredible achievement," she said.
United WE, a national, nonprofit think-and-do tank headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, has a nonpartisan mission to look into economic improvement, particularly for women. It has focused on childcare, elder care, paid family leave policies and occupational licensing reform.
"We do our best learning in town hall settings to really understand what are the kitchen table conversations that are occurring for women and their families," said Wendy Doyle, president and CEO of United WE.
Those conversations led to discussion around rural community opportunities. To investigate further, United We launched the Rural Research Fellows Program, a three-year program with three different one-year cohorts. Doyle said a national request for proposals drew 70 applications, from which six were selected for the first cohort.
"What we hope is at the end of this project we'll have 18 unique ideas that could enhance, economically, rural communities," Doyle said. Also important to the organization is that the research be applicable to any rural community in the country, she said.
The grant dollars and the opportunity to network with other fellows not only will be huge for Strengthen ND, Langley said, but the connections over the next year and ongoing visibility through United WE's initiative will help showcase North Dakota.
"It’s a really great opportunity to shine a light on the really cool things we have going on here in North Dakota and the way that we are pushing for programs that better support our rural communities and the needs of those rural communities," she said.