Organizers prepare for 2026 Radically Rural summit

As hundreds travel from all over the country to the city of Keene this fall for an annual summit addressing rural issues, two questions will come to the forefront: how to learn from the past and how to move into the future. "Reckoning and Reorienting" is the theme of this year's Radically Rural summit Oct. 6-8. Over the course of those three days, about 500 participants are expected to gather at various locations in downtown Keene for panels, workshops and group discussions on all aspects of rural life, from the arts and education to clean energy and more. "We, as rural practitioners and people who love our rural places, need to give ourselves a moment of pause," says Julianna Dodson, executive director of the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship, explaining this year's theme, which she says will give participants a chance to take stock of common issues facing rural communities. "While we're trying to address housing and childcare, and energy needs, and substance use and mental health, and data centers and more, we are potentially not having the opportunity to slow down and say, 'What are the shared roots of all these things?'" That question is at the heart of the entire summit, dating back to its beginnings in 2018. Radically Rural started as a partnership between the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship and The Keene Sentinel newspaper with an aim to give space for rural community members from across the country to bounce ideas off each other on how to sustain and bolster their communities. "Most of us doing work, especially in rural places, barely have the capacity and time to do things once, much less duplicate our efforts," says Dodson. "We could actually go so much deeper and wider if we learned from each other and shared what was possible to share." Each year, participants choose to attend tracks from a list that includes All in for Health, Arts and Culture, Community Journalism, Education, Energy, Entrepreneurship, Land and Community, and Main Street. Each track comes with several subsessions that offer workshops, field trips, panel discussions and more. When the summit began eight years ago, the tracks were clearly delineated, but over the years, track leaders have collaborated more closely to bridge gaps, mirroring the ways many local community organizations collaborate on issues. This year the summit will focus on this collaboration heavily, with most of the subsessions pulling in participants from multiple tracks. Another change this year is in the structure of the summit itself, as it leans into the "reckoning and reorienting" theme. The first day of the summit on Tuesday, Oct. 6, will be focused on reckoning, with discussions examining rural challenges such as addressing harms in a community and institutional approaches to problem solving. This day will also include an opening keynote called "What Connects Us," in which participants will listen to three stories dealing with themes and metaphors of connectedness. The second day of the summit will be more track-specific, with each of the eight tracks engaging in several subsessions. On the third day, the summit will round off with a focus on reorienting, including discussions about how to think about community wealth, how to build trust in rural communities and more. "Folks feel like this is a critical point in time where attention is needed to some of the deepest roots of our problems and possibilities," Dodson says, adding that these three days will give participants a chance to learn from each other and recognize the value of their work. "The whole summit is going to be a pretty incredible combination of introspection and action." Tracks and sessions Like last year, this year's summit offers eight distinct tracks. Many track subsessions will intersect over the course of the three days. The All in for Health track, for example, deals with issues of rural healthcare through four sessions, including one shared with the Energy and Land and Community tracks. Another will cover healthcare hubs – non-traditional "third spaces" for providing care. A third session, "When Communities Speak, What Happens Next?" will include a talk on how several rural radio stations have responded to the needs of the public. Both of those subsessions will include the Community Journalism track. The final session will involve a group discussion on ways to promote health and wellbeing in local communities through mindfulness tactics. The Community Journalism track, meanwhile, will have four subsessions that include an interactive workshop during which participants will discuss various forms of community engagement. Another subsession involves a Q&A with two journalists on issues specifically facing rural newsrooms. The Energy and Land and Community tracks return this year with some of the most robust offerings of the summit. Together, the tracks will have three subsessions that include one on foodscapes, which will bring in the Main Street track and include a trip to a local co-op as participants discuss topics like green infrastructure and food scarcity. Later in the day, a subsession on local food systems will pull in the All in for Health track and feature a talk from conservationists about bioregional diets and regional food systems. Finally, participants can see a small-scale biochar kiln in action and learn how this charcoal-like material can improve soil health, increase water-holding capacity and lock carbon into the soil for the long term. "All of the sessions are going to have this fluid dance between reckoning and reorienting, a bit of both," Dodson says, adding that they will deal with questions like "what is the world we live in now and the systems that we have now, and how can we imagine what they could be in the future?" For information on all track sessions and to register for the summit, visit radicallyrural.org.