Rooted in Resilience: A World Rural Development Day Awareness Campaign
A Panel, Postal Codes and Who Gets to Define a Place
On July 6th, I joined a panel for World Rural Development Day, a webinar called Rooted in Resilience: How Rural Development Drives Poverty Eradication, Climate Action, and Shared Prosperity, moderated by Obie Agusiegbe of the Sustainable Community Aid Network.
The other panelists were Helen Majemite of the Women for Social and Rural Development Initiative, Shirlyn Minoja Kunaratnam of Brandon University and Community Futures Westman, and Grace Kisetu of Ihema Homes and Nature. Four different sectors, four different countries of focus, all of us staring at slightly different versions of the same Zoom grid, and somehow every answer kept landing in the same place.
Before getting into the questions, I opened by talking about ECHOFORM and the idea it is built on, that young people’s lived experience is not just personal story, it is civic knowledge.
I talked a bit about my own path too, growing up in Nigeria, arriving in Canada as an international student right before the pandemic, living in Camrose during university, and eventually building a life in Edmonton.
Moving through that many places teaches you fast how much place actually matters, how much access matters, how much young people are constantly weighing where they can build a life versus where they are just getting by.
From there, the panel moved into its first real question: whether storytelling can shift how people see rural communities, from places people leave to places people build. My answer kept coming back to one idea: storytelling changes who gets to define a place. Rural communities get talked about mostly through what they lack, and that framing erases what is actually there, the knowledge, the mutual aid, the entrepreneurship, the land-based practices. When people tell their own stories instead of having them summarized by someone else, you get a much more accurate map of what is working and what is not.
Building on that, the second question asked what a thriving rural community looks like for young people today.
My answer was that thriving means having a real choice.
Not everyone needs to stay, not everyone needs to leave, but everyone deserves both options to be genuinely on the table.
That takes real investment: education and skills pathways, housing, broadband, mental health support, economic opportunity that is not limited to one or two industries, and actual belonging for newcomer, equity-seeking, disabled, and low-income youth specifically.
I said something on the panel I still stand behind fully: opportunity should not depend on your postal code.
That question naturally set up the third, which pushed toward policy: how rural youth get meaningfully engaged in shaping decisions on climate and economic opportunity.
My answer was simple.
Stop treating youth engagement as consultation after the fact and start treating it as shared decision-making from the start, meaning youth are in the room co-creating, designing and budgeting, not just brought in to react to a finished plan.
Pay people for their time. Use engagement methods that meet people where they are, storytelling, art, workshops, not only formal town halls. And take local knowledge seriously as a form of expertise, because rural youth understand their own climate risks, transportation gaps, and isolation in ways no outside report fully captures.
By the end, one line from the panel prep kept echoing for me and I think it is the truest summary of the whole hour: rural communities are not behind, they are under-resourced, under-listened to and underestimated.
Treat young people’s lived experience as civic knowledge instead of anecdote, and you start to see what rural communities actually are, places of innovation, belonging, climate leadership, and real opportunity. I logged off still thinking about it, which is, I think, the best a webinar can do <3
Written by An̄urika (Rika) Onyenso (she/her), Founder, ECHOFORM