Fighting for All of Us in Rural AZ

Fighting for All of Us in Rural AZ

Like many of us I suspect, I vacillate daily between wanting to jump in with both feet to try to save the world and just giving up because I don’t see a way out of the mess we are in. Last Saturday though, I attended a Rural Action Summit hosted by SOSAZ and Indivisible in Florence at Sun City Anthem. Participating organizations included Arizona List, the AZ Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (ADLCC); Healthcare Rising; Environmental Defense Fund; Instituto; Rural Arizona Action (RAZA); Indivisible; Save Our Schools; Children’s Action Alliance; Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network (GLSEN); Pinal County Democratic Party; RenewUS; and Arizona Center for Economic Progress. It gave me hope.

We Need to Meet These Communities Where They Are

Nicky Indicavitch, Outreach Director for SOSAZ welcomed the 100-plus attendees prior to the beginning of workshops focused on community engagement, organizing 101, messaging/social media, and direct community contact. I caught up with her a little later and asked about the genesis of the summit. “It was born out of the idea,” she said, “ that we need to go meet these rural communities where they actually are. We cannot continue to claim we support rural communities when we never go there, never give them the tools they need to fight back, and we isolate them. So we decided we would take it to the counties, where it needed to be. That we would take all of this organizing power we have in Maricopa County and Pima County and really use it for local activists in rural spaces.” 

Park it in Pinal

I asked Nicky about the opportunities for progress offered in fast-growing Pinal County. She said one of the things that frustrated her about the 2022 cycle was that SOS AZ was on the ground early for the 2022 cycle, but [in the rural areas] nobody else was really there yet, so the ground game wasn’t built up. So, she said,

“We decided we are just going to park it in Pinal. This is the place to be for so many reasons. First of all, it’s a competitive LD in a rural space. We need to play here in a big way.”

It’s also got some school boards that are extremely harmful to kids and we can’t keep negating that harm in rural spaces. These boards have very high turnover. They’ve got candidates that are out of control and potentially breaking the law in some parts of this county and there’s been no big pushback, so why would they stop? For us as an organization dedicated to public education, we saw those school boards as a really big red flag that we had to get in and stay.” 

Rural Communities Rely on Public Schools

We then talked about how vouchers, by and large, aren’t for the rural communities. With the exception of home schooling, there just aren’t any options to public schools. She agreed saying,

“Most rural spaces are so disconnected from that capital that pretends it’s not a part of us, that they have no idea.”

“We will go into a lot of rural spaces and show them the math on their local school district losses [caused by vouchers] and they are floored.” Nicky then told me that in one of the workshops at the Summit, she shows a slide on how much the five largest school districts in Pinal County were losing to the voucher scheme. She said she guaranteed the attendees would be shocked. She wasn’t being hyperbolic, the amount was almost $15.7 million. “The second point,” she said, “is that in rural spaces we don’t have choices. It’s never going to be an ideal market for large, shiny for-profit education. These are tiny towns, with high child poverty rates and too few kids there to justify a for-profit model, so public education will always be the option for rural communities.

Rural Communities Are Impacted by Decisions at the Local Level

We agreed progress can be slow, but Nicky remained optimistic.

“There are ways to win here, in the margins, and take those victories on and push forward.”

“They don’t have to stay red forever. They don’t have to stay dangerous or radical. They can be moved inch by inch and that happens in local races. School board races, bonds and overrides, city council races, that’s where it happens for these rural communities. That’s where the decisions are made, and it’s where nobody is looking. Nobody is watching our school boards descend into chaos.”

The Time to Engage and Organize is Now

Walking down the hall between sessions, I ran into Kirsten Engle, who recently announced her second bid for Congress in CD6 after losing in 2020 by one of the closest margins in the U.S. I asked what she thought of the Summit and she said  “It’s been great. There’s a lot of people here and everyone wants to talk about how we can engage more rural voters and what the issues are. This is exactly what we should be doing at this time of year. Talk to people, listen to them, engage with them, and show that we are out to advocate for them.” 

I next asked Kari Hull, the SOS AZ Community Action Team Coordinator for Rural Southern Arizona what she saw as the goal for the Summit. She said, “The goal is for all like-minded people, to unite, come together, and do the work to get out the vote. As organizations, we have to demonstrate that too.” She believes putting on this event to “serve the people that will be doing the grass-roots, boots-on-the-ground work for the next election cycle is the way to do that.”

We Need People We Want to Vote For

Change was something Catherine Yell, from the ADLCC looks forward to. When I asked her what she is hoping for out of the Summit, she said she “wants energy around LD 16 and engagement for their targeted districts. A lot of work needs to be done outside of Maricopa County, especially in LD 16 and 17, and she is loving the energy in southern AZ right now.” She also acknowledged that organizing in rural districts is hard, but the work is important. “Even if the district is non-competitive, we still want people to have someone to vote for”, she said. 

This third Rural Action Summit (the first two were virtual coming out of COVID), was full of positive energy and hope. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes delivered additional gravitas as the special keynote speaker. Born and raised on a tree farm in Prescott and attending public school there, she understands the issues facing our rural communities and is proud to support rural engagement. She also understands the danger of an unaccountable universal school voucher program stating in an interview in May that,

“There are no controls on this program. “There’s no accountability, and they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money. That needs to be looked at. I’m the state’s top law enforcement officer, and I think it’s my responsibility to do that.”

Together, We Can Get it Done

The real story of the Summit in my mind though, was the positive energy of the attendees, and the strong collaborative connection between the participating organizations. As Nicky Indicavitch stated, “we’re not just training activists, but also organizations. We cannot continue to work in silos.”

“It’s detrimental to our effort and harmful for organizations not to come to the table and work together in a big way consistently in a swing state like Arizona.” 

Three more Summits are already scheduled with one on the Navajo Nation on July 22nd, Sierra Vista on August 26th and Yuma on November 4th. If you want to know how to make a difference in 2024, I highly encourage you to attend one of these events. And, whenever you might feel hopeless, just remember Margaret Mead’s words: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”