Leaders from a five-state northern Great Plains region, including three from SD Rural Enterprise, are participating in the Meadowlark Project:  A Leadership Laboratory on the Future of the Northern Great Plains. The Meadowlark Project is an intensive 18-month social change project designed to find new ways to address long-standing, systemic problems in the region.

The selected members from South Dakota are Rural Enterprise president Beth Davis and board members Paul Batcheller and Christine Hamilton. Other South Dakotans involved in the project are Ken Barker, Belle Fourche; Jason Crain and Diana Vander Woude of Sioux Falls; Chas Jewett, Rapid City, and Joe Bartmann of Montrose. Each participant has committed 30 full days of time over the next 18 months.

The Meadowlark Project will approach its goal of demonstrating that the northern Great Plains can be a place of opportunity for all people by focusing its work on some of the most complex problems that the region faces including: migration of youth from rural areas, on-going racial divisions, hidden and insidious poverty, increased non-resident land ownership, implications of global warming for our land use and water availability, impacts of rapidly changing national and global economic structures, and a belief that the region must accept whatever future the market determines for it.

“If our region is to reach its fullest economic, social, environmental and spiritual potential it can no longer seek new vitality through an old paradigm of technical solutions, said Jerry Nagel, president of Northern Great Plains Inc., the group initiating the work. “Solutions to long standing problems lie at a much deeper level—at the level of our beliefs and habits. It is from this place that significant changes can be built. The people chosen to participate in the Meadowlark Project are the kind of bold and creative leaders who can learn and create together in order to surface practical pilot projects which will strengthen regional life.”

The Meadowlark Project will have three primary outcomes:

• Establishment of an ongoing social network of corporate, government, education and civic leaders who will continue to work together on regional change;
• Design four to five pilot projects ready for implementation that will demonstrate how the region can make deep changes to improve the way our economy works and how our society functions;
• Creation of widespread civic dialogue to examine the policies, beliefs and practices which can help the region realize its full potential.

2006 AUTUMN REPORT
	Statewide groups strategize for future
	Micro-enterprise a major priority
	Combine products to boost development
	Training sessions put NMTC to work
	Ten years - and growing stronger
	Meadowlark Project

Paul Batchellor (L), Christine Hamilton (R)