Emporia copes with ‘brain drain’

A small city in Kansas is determined to prove The Onion wrong.

Folks in Emporia weren’t laughing when the satirical paper named it “best town to escape from” in 2017. In fact, the “brain drain” from rural areas has been a problem across the country for decades. Since 2000, Emporia’s population has declined more than 7 percent. It’s now home to 24,724 people.

“We understood that nobody was going to invest in us if we didn’t,” says Casey Woods, executive director of Emporia Main Street, a non-profit that advocates for local businesses and heritage.

Woods and other city leaders think they have a solution. They plan to make Emporia a rural tech hub built with local investment in a fiber network, assistance from the Rural Innovation Initiative, and a long-held entrepreneurial spirit.

Emporia was, after all, “named after the marketplace, the emporium,” says City Commissioner Rob Gilligan said. “Business and enterprise was always that founding idea.”

That idea dates back to the end of the Civil War, when Emporia become a big railroad hub.

“Broadband is the new railroad,” Woods says. “Broadband is that new iteration. It represents commerce, just in a digital format.”

That’s where Emporia had a leg up. A local company, Valu-Net, had raised enough through local investors and a federal Small Business Administration loan and built a fiber network that debuted in 2011.

The network was built with “small town wealth,” says Valu-Net’s president, Rick Tidwell.

“There were a lot of people interested in investing in us locally,” Tidwell says. “Over about a two-year period, we raised almost $6.5 million locally, with local investors that are the people you see on the street, the people you deal with every day.”

That embedded fiber network was one of the prerequisites that helped Emporia get help from the Rural Innovation Initiative, a non-profit founded by a former Google executive that focuses on communities in economic distress. Other requirements were a partnership with an existing college or university (Emporia State University), available real estate and an existing non-profit organization to lead the initiative.

The Rural Innovation Initiative offered technical assistance to Emporia, helping build a business incubator and fabrication lab attached to Emporia Main Street, large now-empty rooms looking out on Commercial Street.

The goal is to provide support for 45 entrepreneurs who will launch at least nine business and create 30 new jobs for the region. To do that, the city has applied for a $750,000 matching i6 Challenge Grant from the U.S. Economic Development Association. The city has already raised $800,000 though it’s “Homegrown Campaign.”

Leaders also hope to combat the brain drain by partnering with Emporia State, Flint Hills Technical College and local school districts.

Tyler Curtis, assistant vice president for advancement at Emporia State University, says the grant money will help with training students through the incubator or within the schools. They hope that will attract younger people to stay put in Emporia, he said.