One person who takes that to heart is Shawn Gillen, who served as city administrator in Grand Rapids, in northern Minnesota, for six years before leaving in April for a job in Georgia. The former Iowa Hawkeye offensive lineman spent his time there rethinking the way local government works and lessening his city's reliance on state aid along the way.

Beyond sharing services with the county and neighboring cities, he invested in paperless management systems, new energy technologies, cross-training of city employees, money-saving health insurance programs, and plow trucks that also spread salt and haul snow. "We are just solving our own problem here," Gillen said before his departure. "We would like to be a model city for how to do things. But our goal is to fix our problem."

The imperative to do things differently in rural areas increases with each passing year.

"There's one big challenge that small towns face today," said Charles Marohn, a Brainerd-area engineer, planner, and writer. "And that is, why do they exist? For the most part our small towns in this country exist because they once existed. It is inertia that is keeping them around. They always had a reason to be there . . . whether it was mining, logging, agriculture, there was some core economic reason why they existed. Today that's largely gone and small towns are, for the most part, a lifestyle choice of the people who want to live there."

That can make it hard to get urban people to care about the fate of small towns. "It becomes really, really difficult when you look at the subsidy payments that go back and forth, largely from urban areas to rural areas, to support that lifestyle," he said.

A cultural fault line has emerged. "We sit in the cities and everybody we know goes to the symphony and votes Democratic," said Chicago author Richard Longworth, who was born in Boone, Iowa. "We look down on the rural areas. And people in the rural areas think these (urban) wise guys are telling us what to do and they are corrupt. Rural areas have fewer people and fewer votes." So when these debates come up, a small city "doesn't have as big a voice as it used to."

"At a time when cities are in terrific competition, when we are wondering in Chicago how we are going to pay for major infrastructure repairs, how we are going to fix O'Hare, fix the schools and do all the things we need to do to remain a big important global city without pricing the middle class out of the city, we are not very inclined to share with the small towns downstate," Longworth said.

"They've got to make an argument for their survival. It's like anything else, if you lose your job, you have to go and get a new one."

In response, rural advocates have turned up the rhetoric, emphasizing the potential of rural America and trumpeting the importance of keeping small communities vital. They note the interlocked nature of urban and rural economies, especially when it comes to food, energy, and tourism.

The drive to modernize the image of rural America has led to some desperate-sounding campaigns. In the mid-2000s, Vilsack, then governor of Iowa, launched an effort to woo alumni from the state's colleges and universities who had moved away. According to Carr's Hollowing Out the Middle, the state sent more than 200,000 letters to graduates asking them to return and followed up with invitations to cocktail parties. Vilsack promised short work commutes and a culture that offered more than "hogs, acres of corn, and old people." Another program, called Michigan Cool Cities, sought to revitalize that state's cities, big and small, by emphasizing arts and creating amenities like parks and jazz cafes. That effort, too, fell short.

Minnesota has mainly focused its rural revitalization efforts on economic development schemes like the now defunct Star City program and JOBZ, which provides tax exemptions to companies that relocate or expand outstate. JOBZ drew significant criticism from those who said it had little impact and gave breaks to businesses likely to expand anyway. Earlier this year, the Legislature voted to replace it with a fund that will distribute grants only after companies have met job goals.

Certainly, there are arguments to be made for bolstering small communities, even beyond the simple fact that people live there. "Not to do so is to say there is only one way we should all live, one type of place and I don't think that's healthy," Carr said. "A healthy rural America is good for the country."

The upshot, in Longworth's view, is that small communities need to be more independent and innovative in order to secure new futures for themselves. "They've got to make an argument for their survival," he said. "They grew up as mining towns or railway centers. It's like anything else, if you lose your job, you have to go and get a new one."

To see how finding a new economic driver might happen, look beyond the government initiatives. In Montevideo, a city of a little more than 5,000 people in western Minnesota, Patrick Moore is busy connecting his city and region to the future.

Located at the confluence of the Minnesota and Chippewa Rivers, Montevideo had been slowly losing population for decades. It's one of many towns built along railroad tracks that suffered as farms became larger and more mechanized and as television and cars presented options other than the theater and the grocery store downtown. "It was this series of economic driving forces, and cultural ones, that led to the basic idea that cities are better places to live and small towns are a thing of the past," said Moore.

"To chase the big score, that is dangerous. It's not the way to go anymore."

But lately, there is a new vibrancy here—a bustling main street, an influx of Latino residents starting businesses, and a focus on art and conversation that drew a young native to return to make a feature film.

Most of these changes are linked in some way to Moore, who was raised in the Twin Cities and came to Montevideo armed with a love of the river and a belief in the transformational power of collaboration. Republican or Democrat, farmer or environmentalist, white or Latino, in Moore's eyes you never know what people might agree on until they start talking. Exploiting these points of agreement is how you make things happen.

Or as Moore puts it, "You build the road by walking."

It can be difficult to quantify the larger effects of these local efforts because it's hard to know what would have happened without them. But it's easy to spot the street-level impacts, whether the formerly vacant building that now houses a café or store, the industrial lot newly planted with tomatoes and peppers for the Twin Cities market, or the high-speed Internet connection that allows the local potter to sell in France. Sometimes progress is felt rather than measured. Ann Thompson, a resident of nearby Milan, described the change this way: When she grew up several decades ago, young people who stayed in town were considered failures, and that is no longer so.

This rural part of western Minnesota has done better than many in the state in recent years when it comes to grassroots job growth, whether measured in proprietor income or self employment. In addition, the latest census showed a small uptick in Montevideo's population since 2000, of 37 people. "Our goals are to fill up Main Street and to keep young people," said Moore. "It's happening."

So, while there have been a fair number of sweeping plans floated to save rural America—such as former North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan's repeated attempts to pass the New Homestead Act, which would have provided financial incentives for rural living—small, tailored efforts like the one in Montevideo seem to hold the most promise.

They account for the fact that what works in the Arrowhead won't necessarily work in Todd County. They are rooted in local assets and coupled with the imagination to know what to do with them. "What do we know? What are we good at? What have we done?" Longworth suggests communities ask themselves. "We've always been in agriculture. How can we fit into this new bio thing? If we've had a certain industry here, a certain thing we know how to make, maybe we can go into that."

In the past, small cities have typically tried to draw in a big manufacturer or processor to employ a couple of hundred people and keep the economy going. But that approach hasn't worked as well since the recession. Cities from Long Prairie to Esko to Claremont are stuck with empty, or nearly empty, industrial parks and housing developments conceived of during the boom times.

It's a situation that strikes Charles Marohn as absurd and serves as a cautionary tale. He is trying to modernize the way communities think about development and infrastructure, arguing that building water plants and sewer systems and streets before the buildings and houses are there to use them is inviting untenable long-term costs.

Some of his ideas are viewed as heretical, such as the suggestion that cities let targeted neighborhoods atrophy and some roads go back to gravel. "Small towns need to develop high service areas, where people should have high expectations of service," he said. "And then they need to quite frankly have low service areas, where people are not going to pay much, but they also should not expect that much."

Having grown up on a central Minnesota farm, Marohn has credibility when he talks about a more viable future for outstate communities, even if some aren't prepared to heed his advice. "We've just built more than we can maintain," he said, preaching density over suburban-style sprawl. "A lot of these areas will be used for salvage. Send a machine out and grind up the asphalt."

When it comes to jobs, many communities now are taking a more grassroots approach and trying to encourage local start-ups. Perfectly encapsulating the times, developer Tom Elbert has converted the former Crestliner boat manufacturing plant in Little Falls into a small business incubator. He offers cheap rent and shared amenities and equipment to young manufacturing and fabricating businesses.

A person looking to start a company in Red Wing or Lac qui Parle County might be offered help with a business plan, mentoring, and even in some cases, a microloan. As Pam Lehmann, Lac qui Parle economic development authority director, put it, "If you help 100 small guys get started, you've created 100 jobs. If one or two fail, that's not the impact of one big employer failing and losing all the jobs."

Carr, the Rutgers sociologist, suggests this strategy: "Start working with what you have and go from there. To chase the big score, that is dangerous. It's not the way to go anymore. Communities need to be flexible and be able to adapt to different conditions. Adaptability is a key thing."

"I think it's the smaller efforts that work," he said.

Small communities tend to have fewer resources and fewer formal systems in place to deal with issues and problems. While that in itself can be a problem—it's unlikely a small city would forego state aid in favor of an art crawl, for example —the blank slate nature of rural life does make it simpler to test new ideas.

Some of the freshest approaches come from passionate, driven individuals outside official circles. "I see it as an adaption that's cropping up in interesting and organic ways," said Arne Kildegaard. "Economic development is pretty sterile at the higher levels. People are doing it for themselves."

Still, those passionate individuals often have a hard time coaxing others into the effort. The past can get in the way.

That's what can happen when people like Moore or Dagen or Toenyan step up, people who have the ability to not only spot a kernel of possibility but to incite others to see it also. They have the vision and perseverance to move others to change.

"They are the kind of people that you look at them and you are like, 'Oh my gosh, I can't believe you are doing this,'" said Marohn of community instigators. "Sometimes you get embarrassed because they will stand up at the meeting and pound their fist. Or sometimes they are just the busybody in the room. But after a while, especially in a small town, they tend to grow on you because they are the people who are passionate."

At the hands of one of these people, locals might find themselves cheerfully committing time to pick up bags of litter or spending money to open a restaurant. Before long, they are convinced there is a future out there.

"What brings us together is this history of self-sufficiency around food."

The evidence stretches from the Arrowhead to the Iowa border.

Muriel Krusemark moved back to her hometown of Hoffman, in western Minnesota, seven years ago after retiring from a Twin Cities grocery store management job. But she wasn't retired for long. Now, as the tiny city's economic development coordinator, she's made it her mission to fill every empty building on Main Avenue. So far, she's ushered in a marketplace, an appliance store, a dog grooming outfit, and other businesses.

She also helped raise $6,200 to put a new logo on the water tower. Hardly anybody in town skates by without pitching in, whether by manning the food shelf or opening a store. "It takes lots of people to get things done," Krusemark said. "There's lots you can do without money."

Along the way, these newly trained Latino entrepreneurs can boost the communities where they live. "If we can't figure something out, at least let's not close ourselves to the possibility that someone else may," said Haslett-Marroquin. "And that 'someone else' is most likely going to be someone who doesn't look like us, because if they look like us and they live where we live, they are probably going to think in a very similar way to us."

Bruce Tiffany, a corn and soybean farmer outside Redwood Falls, is working on a way for commodities farming to live alongside improved water quality. He uses a variety of innovative filtering and water catching techniques in his fields and speaks about his efforts publicly, whether to other farmers or environmentalists, enlivening the debate around responsible farming. If you won't swim in a pool of the runoff from your property, he said, "You can do better."

U of M Morris Spanish instructor Windy Roberts, who is originally from Venezuela, is the glue that holds together Morris's white and Latino immigrant communities. In trying to unlock the city's potential, she has helped launch a bilingual social club, a multicultural reading club, and a Latina support group. She has enlisted an army of U of M students and others in these efforts.

She encourages friendships between people with different backgrounds. "In the past, there were these kinds of immigrants who came to work and then they left," Roberts said. "Now we have these more long term (immigrants) and they are with families and kids and they are becoming part of the school system. We feel this needs to be done to make the rest of the community aware of this good thing that is happening."

"This is a rich region in terms of culture and self-sufficiency," said Senogles. "There are a lot of natives, a lot of white folks, and sometimes there is a lot of tension between the groups, so racism pulls us apart. But what brings us together is this history of self-sufficiency around food, whether that be gathering, hunting, fishing or planting."

Carr speaks to groups across the country, and in his travels he's seen a pattern emerge in towns where things are happening. "The places that have been successful seem to have the following: a core group of people who are absolutely committed," he said. "This is a group of people who have had a bunch of small and medium-sized successes. They have become good at doing things. This builds its own civic confidence." In other words, starting a café can lead to saving a doomed historical building on the river.

North of Montevideo, Thompson moved back to her hometown of Milan, population 369, nearly a decade ago after living overseas for 18 years. She came home to spend time with her elderly parents. "I didn't want to live with the regrets of not doing that," she said.

She proceeded to open an arts and gift shop on Milan's main drag called Billy Maple Tree's, named after her father, in a building that's been in her family for generations. Under the same roof, her dad runs an elaborate history museum of his own making. "I wanted to start a business," she said. "I thought it would be easy to do here."

"People are coming back to this area who grew up here or are new people," she said. "With modern technology you don't have to live in the metro areas. They see opportunities here, affordable studio space and affordable accommodations. One local farmer-slash-artist told me, if you are a starving artist in a metro area, you have to spend 90 percent of you time trying to live, whereas here the percentage of time it takes to earn a living is greatly reduced. That's a very attractive thing for people."

"I think Milan has done a pretty good job of adapting to change," Thompson said. "It's not always easy, but it's necessary."

Scratch very deeply and it becomes clear that generating economic development—jobs—lies beneath almost all the conversations about rural America. And five fields in particular tend to excite people: local food, health care, arts, renewable energy, and technology.

In 2009, the city of Long Prairie, in central Minnesota, built a state-of-the-art business incubator on its two-year-old industrial park at the edge of town. At the time it was what a lot of cities were doing. And as in a lot of cities, the park has been mostly empty ever since. "There is the old saying, 'Build it and they will come,'" said Lyle Danielson, director of the Long Prairie Economic Development Authority. "That's not necessarily true. But if nothing is built there is no reason to come."

Four years later, Danielson is working with Jaime Villalaz, a Latino business specialist and tax preparer based in St. Cloud, on a new use for part of the industrial park. While the plots were designed with industry in mind, this summer several acres of land are being used to grow tomatoes, tomatillos, and peppers instead.

Diving into local sustainable foods is an idea that comes up frequently when people talk about reviving rural economies. It has cachet, is connected to at least an urban view of the future, and plays off some of the particular strengths of rural areas— namely, open space, abundant water, and lots of people who know how to farm.

Whatever a city does to survive, said Marohn, the focus should grow from its inherent strengths. "In some ways, you have 60 years of small towns largely looking outside of their communities for their future," he said. "How can we subsidize the business to move here? How can we get a grant or loan that will help us make some advancement that will make us marginally better?"

A solution that "comes from inside," he said, "might not be as big or as grand or as splashy. It might not be as sexy or something you can put in magazines around the world, but it will be theirs. It will be authentic. It will be real. That train of thought gives me a lot of hope because it is one that actually will be here tomorrow."

In Long Prairie, the farming is done by a small, new agricultural cooperative called Agua Gorda, named for the city in Mexico from which its members hail. The co-op, which sold produce to a Twin Cities restaurant last summer, began with the help of Danielson and Villalaz in Long Prairie's community garden. The garden was designed as a low-stakes setting where the city's whites and Latinos could interact. Agua Gorda may become an economic success as well.

The notion that Long Prairie, a meatpacking city, could be a player in local foods is appealing. Danielson doesn't expect the farming effort to flood the city with tax dollars, at least not yet. But it's a start. "It's good for the community," he said, noting that the cooperative will pay rent.

Health care is another obvious building block for rural economies. Given aging populations and a lack of rural doctors, providers are devising new ways to deliver services through technology and the use of so-called "mid-level" practitioners like dental therapists, who have more training than hygienists but less than full-fledged dentists.

Lakewood Health System in Staples, for example, has adopted a forward-looking approach known as the "medical home," which involves treating patient needs as a team. The goal is to improve care while lowering costs. In a rural health care landscape dominated by increasing hospital consolidation, Lakewood has remained independent and has grown.

Renewable energy is a favorite target when rural areas are feeling around for something new. Cities like Luverne and Benson have bet on biofuels, and Chandler, in southwestern Minnesota, is home to a large wind farm.

Carr expects renewable energy to remain a small market, at least in the near term. He thinks the "explosion of the fossil fuel and fracking industry" has changed the energy landscape, lowering natural gas prices and putting green energy at a disadvantage. It's hasty, he said, to "chase the new, good looking thing on the block."

The University of Minnesota Morris campus has invested in wind and biofuels, and Kildegaard points out that excess energy can be hard to sell, making new energy an iffy bet for the small operator. Cheap natural gas doesn't help. "We have a biomass gasifier on campus," he said. "It's the reason my office has heat this morning. It would be cheaper to use natural gas now. Five years from now that might flip."

"Broadband is not going to save them. But it's absolutely necessary."

Longworth is bullish. "There is a lot going on with green energy," he said. "It's about 10 or 15 percent of total energy. That is not miniscule. And it's growing." The industry will accelerate even more, he thinks, once we figure out how better to transmit power from rural areas where it's produced to urban areas where it's most needed. "How do you get the stuff from the Dakotas to Chicago? It is going to take a terrific amount of investment to do it."

According to a November 2012 study published in the journal Energy Economics, for each megawatt of installed wind capacity, a county gains half a job and just over $11,000 in total personal income. Minnesota has an estimated installed wind capacity of 2,987 megawatts. By the formula in the study, that equals roughly 1,493 jobs statewide and $33 million in personal income.

While that's just a tiny portion of the state's overall economic picture, it might be okay if these industries don't spawn the next Hormel Foods or Mayo Clinic. Ideally, a wind or solar farm or an organic milk operation would serve as a vital part of a rural community's larger, more varied economic portfolio.

Overall, Minnesota does better than some parts of the country when it comes to rural connectivity—namely, western states like Wyoming, Montana, Arizona, and Nevada. But it falls below the national average for rural access to download speeds of 10 megabits per second, a common standard for "high speed." While 74 percent of rural residents nationally have access to that speed, only 71 percent of rural residents in Minnesota do. Read the whole report here (PDF).

"We have a couple of hundred miles of fiber built," Buttweiler said earlier this year before the building season began. "We have drops to homes and businesses throughout a good part of Schroeder, Tofte, and Lutsen and part of Grand Marais. We have fiber run all the way from Grand Marais to the mid Gunflint Trail area." He hopes to finish the project by the end of the year.

The goal in spreading broadband across Cook County is to give residents access to more educational opportunities and better health care. If the optimists are right, it will also bring a wider array of jobs. Cook County relies heavily on tourism, which means lots of work in the summer but not so much in the winter. Once the new system is running, people could work remotely via broadband for companies located elsewhere. Also, companies making intellectual products—rather than, say, clothing or furniture—could be headquartered on Lake Superior and do business with the rest of the world via the Internet.

"I think it will increase the entrepreneurship opportunities," said Buttweiler. "It will increase the ability for some small businesses to reach out and expand . . . via online sales." Or it might help with "recruiting younger families to move here because they have the connectivity options available to them."

"The resorts are screaming for it," he said.

"It's not going to save them," said Longworth, speaking of broadband in rural communities more generally. "It will take more than that. But it's absolutely necessary. It's like having a road running in front of your house. If you have a car in your garage, you are not going anywhere if there is no road."

These cities aim to become "rural knowledge clusters," which in plain language means an area that specializes in something, like the way Roseau and Thief River Falls have become the center of the universe for snowmobiles and ATVs with Polaris and Arctic Cat.

Developing a group of workers capable of filling new manufacturing or technology jobs—or those in other emerging industries such as energy and sustainable foods—is an important piece of the jobs puzzle for rural areas. But the endeavor contains a gamble, too. A community might spend precious resources to train workers for an industry that, in the end, doesn't come.

Or local workers might not be interested in learning the particular skills or working for the wages offered. Especially since the recession hit, some companies can't or won't pay enough to draw the workers they complain they can't find or they don't want to train them.

"I'm pessimistic about the idea that, if we develop the set of skills (an industry) will come and drop from the sky," said Kildegaard. "I think that's sort of a Hail Mary pass that these economic development people have faith in." Yet, he acknowledges the need to close a skills gap, at least in manufacturing. "Lots of light manufacturing outfits out there have openings they can't fill."

Kildegaard suggested the best path for businesses might be to start small and local and grow, developing a workforce along the way.

In Fergus Falls, the Minnesota State Community and Technical College launched a hands-on sustainable food production program just over two years ago, but announced recently that the program would be suspended after the current students graduate. The school cited low enrollment numbers as the primary reason.

Sue Wika, the program's coordinator, thinks canceling it is a mistake and chalked up enrollment issues to a lack of promotion. "In western Minnesota, we have the opportunity to become leaders in looking at how the creation and support of local food systems could be a huge step toward moving us toward sustainability," she said. "This is what rural Minnesota needs, people willing to take the risk to be 'ag' entrepreneurs."

"We can all look at the demographics and see rural counties bleeding in their numbers," Wika said. "That was definitely our hope, to make this a place (to come to), so we could have migration to outstate."

People in small communities often talk about young people as though they are a breed of rare animal whose migration patterns deserve the closest scrutiny. And in a sense they are. Young people mean a workforce, full classrooms, a future. They are placed into categories for study, like "stayers," "leavers," "returners," and even "boomerangs."

In Carr's mind, too much energy is spent nurturing the so-called leavers, the high achievers and college-bound kids who move to urban areas and stay there. He thinks, instead, communities should put more effort into the people who are most likely to return or never leave in the first place.

In fact, he said, these kids should be taught to fill jobs in emerging industries, whether health care, precision tooling, high technology, or old-school manufacturing. "You have to say if these are the guys who are going to be here for their entire lives, we have to get them ready," Carr said. "The core issue is, what sort of communal resources are you going to put into the stayers and the returners? To what extent do you prepare them for opportunities in the regional economy?"

The long-standing trend of rural population decline seems hard if not impossible to reverse. Some young people will always be drawn to the cities and their parents will proudly watch them go. They themselves will view this as progress.

"We have developed an education system or even a career system in which 18- to 25-year-olds have been very much encouraged to leave their homes for an education institution that is generally in an economic center," said the Center For Small Towns' Asche.

In the end, it seems clear that some rural cities and regions will thrive, perhaps because of an ability to keep and train young people, because of a wholesale reinvention, because of grassroots job creation, public investment, collaboration, or because of the efforts of a dedicated group with a big idea. And other rural cities and regions will not.

"You can pick out little places here and there and elsewhere," said Longworth. "They are all trying different stuff. They are working with immigrants or trying to get agri-business or looking into bio. Or they are getting into broadband. In this transition right now between the old and new economy, we don't know who will survive. There is a lot of experimentation. The difference between now and 10 years ago is that everybody is looking at this and talking about it."

"Some of these little towns may not have a future at all," he said. "They lose their bank and school, and then it's turn out the lights."

Still others, Longworth said, will exist in a twilight state, not quite thriving but not dying either. They may be places where people buy cheap houses and drive an hour each way to work. "They will survive on that basis, but there won't be much going on there. And it's not the kind of midwestern rural civilization that we were used to. There really was a civilization there."

In Minnesota, Marohn said, "We need to face the facts that we are literally going to lose hundreds of our small towns in this state over the next couple of decades. They are just not financially viable. People are moving out. The infrastructure is old. Without huge outside government support and subsidy there's no way these places will be able to even maintain their base level of service. It's just not possible."

Kildegaard takes a more sanguine view. "The motto of our food co-op is that it's been going out of business since 1970," he said. "That is small-town Minnesota in a nutshell. They are still here. They are not going anywhere. Very few towns are dying. And the ones that are, there is little going on in those towns anyway. It's evolving. There is new immigrant energy in the region. If there are not a lot of employment options, you make something up."

That's what people like Patrick Moore in Montevideo, Ann Thompson in Milan, and Michael Dagen in Hewitt are doing: making something up. They are forging, in their small individual ways a new future for rural Minnesota.

"If you think about walking around town in 50 years," said Dagen, "what will be here unless something changes?"

Fighting for an American Countryside: by Jennifer Vogel, Ground Level project of MPR News