Photo: Benya Kraus, SMIF president and CEO, speaking at the 2025 Rural Voice event in Owatonna.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Op/Ed
September 21, 2026
For the past five years, Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) has partnered with Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) to co-host the Rural Voice series, a town hall style event highlighting an issue important to rural communities. Facilitated by MPR’s Kerri Miller, a roving mic travels the room to hear from people in the community. The conversation is recorded and later aired on MPR to a statewide audience. The goals are twofold: to bring neighbors together to learn and share ideas, and to elevate rural voices so people across Minnesota can better understand how rural communities are experiencing and solving shared challenges.
This September, there will be two town hall conversations in southern Minnesota.
One is titled “Who Owns Main Street?,” taking place in Albert Lea on Monday, September 28. The second is “Data Centers: Fact, Fiction and the Future,” taking place the following evening on Tuesday, September 29 in Faribault.
While these topics may seem unrelated, both raise important questions about local ownership, community influence and who gets to shape a community’s future.
While the first conversation has Main Street in the title, it will explore local ownership more broadly, featuring not only main street revitalization stories but also innovative models like Green Acres, the new farmer-owned oat mill launching for production this fall in Albert Lea. Examples like these explore both the successes, as well as the market challenges of keeping businesses, farmland, healthcare facilities and small businesses locally owned. If you have an example to share, or pain points you’ve experienced, we hope you will consider attending! The town hall conversation is shaped directly by the people who attend.
The second town hall addresses what is certainly a hot topic in the region: data centers. SMIF convened a series of Data Center 101 forums last winter across the region, recognizing both the growing interest in these projects and the need for accessible, fact-based information. Across southern Minnesota, people are asking important questions about economic impacts, energy use, water resources, local control and how these developments fit into a community’s long-term vision.
These are significant questions, and it is understandable that people hold strong opinions about the answers.
Our role is not to advocate for a particular outcome in either town hall, but to help communities access information, ask questions and build the trust needed to navigate decisions that will shape their future.
That is why conversations like Rural Voice matter.
In many ways, that is the common thread connecting both of this year’s Rural Voice conversations. Whether we are talking about who owns Main Street or the future of data centers, we are ultimately talking about community ownership and agency. We are exploring how communities shape their own future and what it means to have a meaningful voice in decisions that affect local economies, resources and quality of life.
We do not expect everyone who attends to leave with the same opinion. In fact, agreement is not the goal. The goal is to strengthen the civic muscle that allows communities to address difficult issues constructively. Community resilience depends not only on strong businesses and infrastructure, but also on trust: trust between neighbors, trust in local institutions and trust that people can come together in good faith even when they disagree.
Southern Minnesota has a long tradition of neighbors solving problems together. The Rural Voice series builds on that tradition. By gathering in the same room, listening to one another and wrestling with important issues, we strengthen not only our understanding of a topic, but also the relationships that will help our communities navigate whatever comes next. We hope you’ll join the conversation.
Register at www.ruralvoice.org
As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can reach me at benyak@smifoundation.org or 507-455-3215.
Benya Kraus, president and CEO of Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation
