[ad_1]
LYONS, Nebraska – Lori Bergman had a dream, but like many small entrepreneurs, she couldn’t get a bank loan to make it a reality.
For four years, the Missouri transplant had run a successful food truck at events in and around its new home in North Platte, serving ice cream in homemade waffle cones, and preparing sundaes and milkshakes.
But she wanted to set up a brick-and-mortar location for her Double Dips Ice Creamery operation in a cool, old building, and she had found the perfect location in downtown North Platte’s Canteen District.
Lori Bergman, with the help of the Center for Rural Affairs, converted her Double Dip Ice Creamery from a food truck to a brick-and-mortar store in North Platte’s downtown Canteen District. (Courtesy of Center for Rural Affairs)
Enter an organization that helps rural entrepreneurs – the Center for Rural Affairs.
‘Mindset to help small businesses’
The center helped Bergman secure a loan through the federal Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program, which helps businesses with 10 or fewer employees obtain her location. And the nonprofit provided workshops in accounting and marketing, which have helped them grow the business from an initial two employees to 14 today.
“Their mindset is to help small business owners,” Bergman said. “It’s been great working with him.”
From humble beginnings in a small office in Walthill to a modern, brick building on Main Street in a Nebraska farmtown northeast of Lyons, the Center for Rural Affairs has been advocating for rural places and residents for 50 years.
It was founded in September 1973 by an ambitious pair of rural American advocates, Marty Strange and Don Ralston.
Since then, the center has expanded from its initial focus of helping small farmers survive to assisting main-street entrepreneurs and immigrants looking to establish new roots, and advocating for renewable energy, small businesses, and health care.
It offers a series of small business “academies” to help rural residents train to open restaurants and child care centers, become truck drivers or construction contractors, even run beauty salons.
And, like the ice cream shop in North Platte, it provides small loans to dozens of start-up businesses, and is now helping rural residents buy homes or install solar panels.
“Our programs have evolved and adapted over time to meet new challenges and needs in rural areas,” said Brian Depew, executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs.
‘move the needle’
“We’re looking for opportunities to move the needle, and how we can help make things a little better in rural communities than they are today,” he said.
Today, the center employs approximately 60 people, who work from their homes or offices in Nebraska and Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota. Since 1988, its annual budget has grown from $500,000 to $7.3 million, funded by grants, foundations and private donations.
“They are huge and cover far more areas than people understand,” said John Hansen of the Nebraska Farmers Union, which collaborates with the staff on many policy issues.
The center has played a role in the creation of federal and state programs that provide assistance to small businesses ranging from beginner farmers and craftspeople to cafes, brewpubs and grocery stores.
Employees regularly testify at government hearings at the state capitol and on Capitol Hill related to tax, protection and economic development policies.
Oakland Meat Processing is one of a handful of small, rural meat lockers that expanded thanks to a grant program supported by the Center for Rural Affairs and approved by the Nebraska Legislature. Pictured is Onabria Zeleny. (Courtesy of Kylie Kay/Center for Rural Affairs)
Most recently, he played a role in establishing a grant program to help small-town meat processors in Nebraska address supply chain problems that led to unexposed meat cases during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This same week, they were named as one of 32 nonprofits nationally that will administer a portion of $8 million in grants from the Program for Investments in Microenterprise Act, which seeks to improve the lives of “disadvantaged microentrepreneurs and microenterprises.” development organizations”.
Depew said that at any given time, the center has about 240 small business “clients” that it is helping with small loans or technical assistance.
more bilingual staff
Chuck Hassebrook, former executive director and former University of Nebraska regent, said the center at one time was recognized as the nation’s largest lender of “micro” loans through the Small Business Administration’s Rural Enterprise Assistance Program.
“If it’s located in a smaller town, we probably took out a small business loan on it,” DePuy said.
In recent years, as the demographics of the small-town Nebraska have changed, the center has added more bilingual staff — now 15 — to help immigrants open businesses.
The Center has not won all of them.
In recent years, the number of farms and ranches in Nebraska has steadily declined – there were 500 fewer in 2022 than in 2021 – and the remaining farms are getting bigger and bigger. The average farm/farm size in the state was 1,011 acres in 2022, up 11 acres from a year earlier.
But despite the growing consolidation of farms and decades-long declines in rural populations, both Depew and Hassebrouck said the center has fought for policies that have helped small farm operations, and carried forward those programs that have helped rural communities.
Dennis Demel of rural Ogallala, current chair of the Center for Rural Affairs’ board of directors, said the center continues to work to build “vibrant” rural communities that can be sustainable into the future.
Demel said most young people who grew up in small towns want to stay there if they have good jobs. The population in her corner of Perkins County appears to be stabilizing, she said, with more young families returning to raise their children.
‘Meet them where they are’
Depew used Lyons as an example – the city’s population peaked at 1,142 in 1990, but was projected to be 811 in 2021. A local doctor’s office recently closed, as well as a popular restaurant along Highway 77.
But he said, development is happening all around the community as well. The previously vacant nursing home is now a fully occupied apartment building, DePuy said, and there are two cafes on Main Street, where there used to be none.
A local business is selling tire shredders around the world, and a new school is being built after local voters passed a bond issue.
“There are communities that rise to the challenges and find the opportunities,” DePuy said. “It’s our job and our mission to meet them where they are, and help them shape what they feel is the right future for them.”
He said, “Lyons isn’t going away.” “The future will look different than the past, and I think we have to embrace that.”
Get top morning news delivered to your inbox
subscribe
Source: nebraskaexaminer.com
[ad_2]
