News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Tennessee Tech’s Rural Reimagined program has developed partnerships with Clay and Jackson Counties and some 30 partnerships with local agencies around the region during its first year of work.
The program brings together all of the university’s academic programs, staff and facilities to help rural communities.
“We officially implemented it with the goal to harness science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship and to leverage all of the resources Tennessee Tech has,” Graduate Assistant Kinsey Potter said. “Students, faculty, research, our multiple labs and our centers like the STEM center and the water center. (We) basically go out into communities and to find out what they need and what they need from us and then provide our resources to them.”
Since the March, 2019 launch, Potter said the number one goal has been reaching out to communities around the region to figure out the best way to communicate. She said sometimes local leaders worry programs such as Rural Reimagined are trying to change local communities.
“We appreciate our rural communities and we’re trying to see what are the needs in different rural communities,” Potter said. “Every single different community, every single county has different needs. And so one of the main things we’ve tried to do is just really figure out that communication, what reaches these communities. How do we assess what they need?”
One example of the partnership, Tennessee Tech developed a marketing image for Jackson County to showcase its tourism opportunities.
“They now have an up-and-running website,” Potter said. Now Jackson County is actually exemplified as a tourism county. Before, it was hard for people to find that because they didn’t exactly have branding.”
Potter says the program is working, in part, because it connects Tennessee Tech faculty and staff with its students and the rural communities from which they came.
“We have students that are learning these amazing skill sets at Tennessee Tech,” Potter said. “And we want them to get that passion for their rural communities through the opportunities that Rural Reimagined puts in place for them to serve those communities in hopes that when they graduate, they won’t want to move to a big city.”
