This Rural Organizer Shapes Progressive Activism into Policy

Annie Contractor, 39, is the policy director at RuralProgress, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission to “empower everyday rural Americans with the nonpartisan movement building tools they need to create resilient, welcoming, and equitable communities.” The organization was formerly known as the RuralOrganizing.org Education Fund, after its 501(c)(4) sister organization RuralOrganizing.org, a national network of organizers that engages over half a million people online, as well as 80,000 on-the-ground rural advocates and 4,000 civic leaders.

Contractor describes herself as a “data geek,” with over 20 years’ experience harnessing that expertise to advance equity-based solutions and achieve systems-level change, which she finds crucial to organizing in rural communities. Trained as an urban and regional planner at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Contractor has been a nonprofit leader for most of her career, and helped lead Colorado’s Covid-19 response as a health equity manager with the state department of public health before joining RuralOrganizing.org in 2022.

She lives north of Denver on Colorado’s Front Range.

Can you tell us how you got into progressive rural policy work?

I grew up in rural Wyoming, in Albany County. My “kick in the pants” to get involved in this kind of work came early.

I grew up in a working-class family, in a home that didn’t have consistent running water. My dad was a lumberjack, someone who strongly preferred his own company over that of anyone else. But in the face of his family not having running water, I saw him swallow his preferences and try to organize a water district.

Unfortunately, he was not successful. The wealthy interests in the county had no interest in making sure that lower-income folks had their needs met. His efforts were thwarted.

And that riled me up. As a young person, I couldn’t stand the idea that families like ours would not be able to have our basic needs met because it wasn’t in the interest of the wealthy and because we didn’t have the resources to make it happen. That started my trajectory.

I joined the Peace Corps after college, serving in a village named Nachibanga in the Southern Province of Zambia, which also educated me in the limits of a bad system. And I worked in direct service leading nonprofits before shifting to policy advocacy three years ago.

With RuralOrganizing.org, our work is structured into three main buckets. We have an organizing team with an organizing director, and then we have a strategic communications arm as well.

With the policy team, we do a lot of analysis on rural topics and also push and advocate for progressive rural policy through legislation. Our programming is primarily a legislative. We identify ideas that can be turned into policy and work on getting those policies passed as legislation.

We lean into the legislation piece because a lot of folks do great work bringing awareness to issues, but to see something change, we need to see things passed into law.

With about 100 days to go until the 2024 general election, what issues do you think rural organizers should be putting to the fore in the campaigns they are involved in? 

First and foremost, folks that care about rural issues need to be talking about abortion. Abortion is a popular, urgent and imminently winnable issue for rural people across the country.

It cuts to the core of what it means to have equal rights, what it means to have equal freedoms, regardless of who you are. It touches the deepest part of our need to have control over our bodies, to have control over our futures, to have control over our health and our financial situations. Taking away the right to an abortion affects everyone, but it affects rural communities in particular because of the distances that people have to travel, because of the kinds of disenfranchised communities that are rural in places, where the restrictions are the are the greatest. And we’ve seen that organizing around this issue works.

Last November, Ohio passed a referendum to secure the right to abortion in the state constitution. Kentucky and Kansas both rejected abortion bans in their state constitutions. Wherever we see this coming up, we see that rural folks are turning out to say loudly and clearly we want to have the right to safe, accessible abortion and reproductive care.

RuralOrganizing.org was instrumental in the statewide movement to pass that Ohio referendum, through deep canvassing and other organizing efforts. What lessons did you learn from that campaign that are applicable in 2024?

First of all, I need to give a huge shout out to our Ohio state director, Brent Edwards, who led that campaign, and did so by leading with a commitment to values of equity and justice. He showed that when equity and justice are placed front and center, it proves crucial to getting such campaigns across the finish line. That campaign affirmed that reproductive rights and abortion rights are winnable issues in rural communities. But it’s an issue that has to be tackled by building coalitions. We have to work together with people who have shared interests to get something like that across the finish line.

When people are forced to make decisions against their will about their reproductive health, it becomes not only a health issue but also an economic issue. It impacts families budgets. It impacts people’s ability to work in a job that they want to work in. It affects their ability to go to work at all if they need child care. As a result, our policy work starts from this place of seeking how we can reduce the cost burden on rural people. Increasing jobs and wages and improving quality of life are core economic and community issues and the issues that we engage on at RuralOrganizing.org flow from there.

As a movement, to advance a progressive agenda, we need to center values of equity and justice and work together and understand the places where we can have the greatest impact and where we can lean on our partners.

What does that look like on the ground in communities and in the policy and legislative work that you do?  

One of the ways that that shows up is that we put our focus on supporting communities that carry the greatest burden, economically and socially.

One way we do that is by crunching numbers. When you look at the counties in the United States with the most persistent rates of poverty (where a community has been over a threshold of a 20% poverty rate for over 30 years), about 90% of those counties are rural.

That is a compelling reason for anyone who’s focused on equity and justice to pay attention to rural communities. Not every rural community is suffering, of course. I live in Colorado. We have some of the wealthiest rural communities in the country. But there are a lot of places that are rural that have been disenfranchised in a number of ways for a long time. And so we first pay attention to the systemic issues that are holding folks back in those areas, and that’s where we put our resources.

On a policy level, how would you compare each the vision for rural America that the Republicans and Democrats have put forward?

We have lots of information and research that has compared policy proposals from both a conservative perspective, from Project 2025, and from the legacy of the Biden administration over the last several years.

We can see a big difference in how those two visions might play out for people on the ground. The current Biden administration is striving to make it easier for rural communities to engage with federal government and make available those collective resources that are meant to reduce inequality and improve outcomes.

That’s the vision that we see being implemented through Biden’s rural-focused initiatives—for instance, the Rural Partners Network, the Interagency Working Group on Coal & Power Plant Communities & Economic Revitalization, the Federal Interagency Thriving Communities Network, the Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers (TICTAC) Program. I could go on.

In contrast, the over 900 pages of Project 2025 shows cut after cut, and slash after slash. There’s no clear vision for how we’re going to support our rural communities and make sure they thrive, or and how we’re going to ensure fairness in the distribution of collective resources. That’s absent.

I think it’s important to note that contrast.

Another prominent issue supported by RuralOrganizing.org is access to child care. Project 2025 would eliminate Head Start, severely restricting access to childcare in rural America. Does RuralOrganizing.org have plans to organize around the issue of childcare in 2024?

Absolutely. In fact, our organizing around child care has never stopped.

Last fall, we worked with partner organizations to organize comments on proposed rulemaking opportunities that came out of the Child Care and Development Fund. We submitted comments to ensure that those funds continue to be available and accessible to rural communities, and to ensure that we streamline the accessibility of those programs. 

Last year, we worked with 36 rural communities in 13 states across the country to develop applications to the Recompete Pilot Program, which supports economic development by providing grants to communities in need. Child care was a key need in quite a few of those communities, and this is one of the first federal funding opportunities that had the flexibility to invest government resources into innovative child care solutions. We championed it as a piece of legislation. We helped rally rural voices around it to get it fully appropriated in 2023. And we have continued to work to ensure that policy makers include rural communities as the program gets implemented.

We’ve also advocated in this Congress for the Expanding Child Care and Rural America Act, which is sponsored by Sen. Sherrod Brown. It’s in both the House and the Senate versions of the farm bill drafts that are currently under negotiation. We’re really proud of that.

In my role as the RuralOrganizing.org policy director, I sit on the Congressional Child Care Advisory Council led by Congresswoman Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.-7). That’s a place where I bring real priorities in the national child care conversation regularly.

Last year, I was able to meet with the House Minority Whip, Katherine Clark (D-Mass.-5), through that council. She’s made access to child care a core part of her platform. And it’s been a great opportunity to elevate the rural particularities of a national issue so that when we get when we get a bill that’s ready to pass, rural communities will be included.

One in three child care centers in rural communities are Head Start programs. It’s critical to rural families and communities that we defend this essential piece of infrastructure against the cuts that are proposed in Project 2025.

It would decimate rural parents’ ability to work. It would create hungry and sick kids because they would have less access to food and health care that comes through those wraparound supports that come through a Head Start program. We know that some children get 80% of their calories through their federally subsidized child care-provided meals. It would undermine rural economic growth in places where communities are gaining traction. And it would exacerbate disparities in wealth and well-being that already exist in rural communities.

Why is child care important in rural America?

Child care is a critical piece of infrastructure for an economy. And it is completely broken right now. It is a public good that is treated as private.

We fund child care through people’s pockets. Child care businesses run on extremely thin margins. Child care workers make poverty wages. The vast majority them are eligible for subsidization through SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and WIC, the federal supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children, and other social support programs because they don’t make living wages.  And the rural components of child care exacerbate those economic factors that make child care businesses not work.

A typical center might be open from, let’s say, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. But if you have to be at work at 8 o’clock and you have over an hour-long commute, you can’t use a child care center that opens at 7 o’clock. You have to have one that opens earlier. Or if you are a farming family that needs to be in the fields late at night to get things in during the right season, you need child care that might go outside of normal hours. And those are pretty atypical child care offerings.

Child care is an essential service. And parents can’t afford it and business owners can’t afford to run the businesses, but somehow we just have to keep providing it. So there’s this whole host of benefits to a community by having child care available that we’re missing out on when we treat child care as this private luxury instead of the public good that it is.

You got me on my soapbox. Good job.

This year, RuralOrganizing.org has hosted online workshops around issues of white nationalism and religious extremism, and you all are starting a program called the Rural Defenders Union. What is it like to do work organizing around progressive policies in rural areas at a time when many people in rural communities are concerned about rising authoritarian movements and feel unsafe expressing their political views?

Early this year, Shawn Sebastian, our organizing director, surveyed our membership, asking them about the political conditions in their communities. We had about 1,000 responses across all 50 states, overwhelmingly rural communities and small town respondents. We asked about local-level things, like, “Are you seeing book bans? Are you seeing anti-LGBTQ policies? Are you seeing voter suppression? Are you experiencing anti-immigrant rhetoric?” Over 25% of respondents had experienced all of those things.

Two-thirds of respondents had experienced at least one. And the most chilling thing was that 25%of respondents experienced some political violence or a threat of political violence themselves. So, the first thing we want folks to know is that this feeling of being unsafe is real.

It’s not just hypothetical, it’s really happening. It’s widespread and it’s everywhere in the country. It’s not isolated in one place.

The second thing we want folks to know is that our members are standing up against these authoritarian threats, and they are doing so with creativity and bravery. That’s every bit as important to as highlighting the presence of the threat.

People who identify with the political left are usually outnumbered in rural communities. In many places, they never really stand a chance of winning a legislative race or a local race. But those folks are showing up and doing incredible organizing anyway, even though they know they’re not necessarily going to win. But they are doing it to marginalize extremists, and doing so in sophisticated ways.

The policies that we are talking about—the book bans, the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, voting limitations, etc.— that stuff’s really unpopular. People don’t like it. And our members are reaching out to moderates and building those alliances to push back against those anti-democratic changes getting rammed through.

Our folks are showing up to school board meetings. They’re organizing mutual aid projects. They’re participating in economic development. Folks are just finding lots of ways to build community and open up civic space for participation. And they’re finding success pushing back against extremists.

What should folks who live in urban areas or suburban areas understand about what it’s like to organize in rural small town America and build coalitions across rural and urban areas?

First, that the feeling of isolation is real. We see that. We hear it a lot. We feel it ourselves. The feeling that we’re all kind of doing this in these siloed little pockets.

It can feel lonely. But we can benefit from being connected. We can benefit from being connected to the statewide infrastructure, for one. We can benefit from that expertise and experience and from support—the camaraderie, the feeling that you’re not alone. That can really support these rural fights.

And on the other side, you know, urban and suburban goals, they get strengthened by rural voices.

And if you get down to the brass tacks of how politics work, rural voices can really strengthen any issue campaign. And so we see benefits in both directions to collaborating and really building those bridges and building that solidarity across geographies. It’s important—and it sure would feel nice.

Justin Perkins

Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is currently finishing his Master of Divinity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The son of a hog farmer, he grew up in Papillion, Neb., and got his start as a writer with his hometown newspaper the Papillion Times, The Daily Nebraskan, Rural America In These Times and In These Times. He has previous editorial experience at Prairie Schooner and Image.

Joel Bleifuss

Joel Bleifuss is Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher and Board President of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is a descendent of German and Scottish farmers who immigrated to the Upper Midwest in the 19th Century to become farmers in Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas. His grandmother was born in the Scottish Highlands to parents listed in the Census of Great Britain, 1881 as “farm servants” on land owned by the Duke of Fife. Joel himself was born and raised in Fulton, Mo., a small town on the edge of the Ozark Highlands. He got his start in journalism in 1983 as a feature writer and Saturday reporter/photographer for his hometown daily, the Fulton Sun. Bleifuss joined the staff of In These Times magazine in October 1986, stepping down as Editor & Publisher in April 2022, to join his fellow barn raisers in getting Barn Raiser off the ground.