When I graduated from Ilwaco High School, in a class of 69 students, the resounding message, pounded into me since kindergarten from community members and teachers was, “Do well in school. Do everything you can to get into college. Get out of this town. Be successful, and you’ll never come back.” I did the first three things, and then the fourth too. But I did come back, at the ripe age of 22, to start a small bakery. I remember my mom telling me once, shortly after starting the bakery, that people kept saying, “We heard Madeline moved back to town. Is everything ok?” Something had to be wrong for me to want to move back to the town that had raised me.

This is a familiar story for many millennials who make the choice to move back to, or stay in the rural, often downtrodden, small community they grew up in. Success equals getting out and staying out for good. But many millennials are changing that narrative. We see the potential a small community offers to build a lifestyle that urban areas cannot: a slow pace of life, an appreciation for dirt over concrete, the chance to wear many hats and the ability to directly see the change you can make, to name a few.

After six years of diving head-first back into rural life, buying a home in a community of 450, and running a successful small business, I realized I wanted to connect with others my age who cared about rural livelihoods as much as I do. Serendipitously, I connected with two women from Port Townsend, Washington who wanted to do the same thing, and from there, Rethinking Rural was born.

In March 2018, we invited 50 millennials from rural communities across nine states for two days of conversation in Port Townsend around why our communities matter and how we can work together to make them better. By the end, many tears were shed. These were people like me, who wanted to fight hard for their town but more often than not it felt like just banging their heads against a brick wall. But maybe if we started working together as like-minded young‘uns, we could get more done and impact more than just our community.

From those conversations, we created a three-year plan, which includes three more of these place-based celebrations and conversations about rural life, all led and hosted in their own towns by participants from our first event. Planned events are set for 2020 in Nauvoo, Alabama,  2021 in the Pacific Northwest, and a third in 2022, details to be determined based on preceding symposiums.

In order to do all of that, we’ve partnered with a national nonprofit that has led the way on rural community development issues, the Rural Assembly. This partnership will broaden our reach and allow us to work under a larger umbrella. We’re also building many smaller, regional partnerships across the country to help guide our work. And at the end of May, we are launching a crowdfunding campaign to propel us towards our larger goals. We plan to raise $40,000 in start-up funds to use as leverage for other funding opportunities, so if you care about the future generation of leadership in rural, head over to Chuffed.org and donate, even just a few bucks, to our campaign.

I now have a one and a half-year-old and she is being raised in the same community that both of her parents grew up in. She was recently pulled in a wagon with all of her stuffed animals in the Loyalty Day Kids Parade that I walked in every single year. I now have similar hopes for her as many in my community had for me. I hope she moves away and goes to college. I hope she is successful and finds something she loves to devote her life to. But I also hope that one day, she decides to move back and invest in the place that raised her. Rethinking Rural is about making sure there is something for this generation and the next, and the next, to move back to. And that rural America is a thriving, culturally diverse, healthy place for people to set roots.

Madeline Moore is a baker and co-founder of Rethinking Rural.