What attracts young people to rural communities?

GREEN LAKE — Rural community leaders have pondered the issue of “brain drain” for decades, but researchers at UW-Madison are turning the tables. Instead of concentrating on finding why young adults leave rural communities for the cities, they want to identify attributes of places that are gaining and retaining them, said Randy Stoecker, professor of community and environmental sociology at UW-Madison.

Stoecker and research assistant Amanda Jane Hoffman reported out preliminary findings of a two-year study of “gainer and maintainer” rural communities during the Wisconsin Rural Summit April 19-20 in Green Lake.