Chris Estes highlights how asset-based strategies can drive regional cooperation and elevate the role of rural communities in rural-urban partnerships
We ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
Chris Estes:Minneapolis Saint Paul needs a healthy rural Minnesota. It is going to be better off. And rural Minnesota needs a healthy Minneapolis Saint Paul. For a long time, we sort of got by by everybody in the suburbs doing pretty well. And we kind of ignored the decline of our cities, and we've ignored the decline of rural.
Chris Estes:But now it's really evident why real success both in terms of how people view the economy and democracy itself is really interconnected. The way people have thought about rural generally was always sort of about the value of what can be extracted from rural, what can be grown there. And it takes a lot to overcome that and say, these places have value in and of themselves. And we want these folks to be successful because we're all gonna be better off if that happens.
Ellen Wolter:That's Chris Estes, co executive director of Aspen Institute's Community Strategies Group. He's talking about the need to develop healthy and vibrant communities, whether they are rural or urban, and the benefits this has for all of us. And this may require that we value rural and urban areas in different ways, including appreciating and protecting the assets of those communities rather than focusing on their weaknesses. Chris notes that for so long, communities felt like they had to highlight their weaknesses to get philanthropy or government to pay attention, that focusing on the strengths became less important. And yet a community begins to thrive when its strengths become the focus.
Ellen Wolter:Chris joined me for a conversation to talk about the need to focus on sustainable community development, the importance of working regionally, and why building rural urban connections can help a community thrive.
Music (Jim Griswold):When they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started, just to travel along, singing a song, side by side.
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter from the University of Minnesota Extension. Welcome to the Side by Side podcast. So, Chris, you are co executive director of the Aspen Institute's Community Strategies Group, which focuses on rural development. So can you tell me a little bit about your work in rural communities and and what you focus on?
Chris Estes:Sure. Aspen CSG has been a program at the institute under different names for this is actually our fortieth year. And we were really founded on, I think, some principles to sort of understand what was happening in rural communities across the country, facilitate peer learning amongst community development practitioners who who may have felt isolated or disconnected from what was happening both in their in their regions and other regions, and then try to design and facilitate learning capture amongst that peer learning and with other ways to really bring that learning to systems change efforts at the governmental and philanthropic levels. And that work has morphed and expanded, but it's really been centered around what we would shorthand as doing development differently, which is oriented around an asset based community led local wealth creation orientation that is centered around improving community well-being from a regional perspective. So not getting beyond just the how do we get jobs and what's our employment level to, like, how are we actually proving the lives in a transformational way with a kind of sustainable approach to local wealth creation rather than a kind of boom and bust cycle.
Ellen Wolter:And one of the things that I've really connected with as I travel the state and and work with different communities is how much people love their communities, to love their communities and are really trying to figure out the best ways to support their communities. So that assets based approach is such an important piece of the work, and it's almost like helping people to articulate and strategize around those those things that they love about their community. And and you mentioned this too, but your team really focuses on equitable, sustainable, and holistic approaches to strengthening rural communities. So can you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which you incorporate some of those values into their into your work, and specifically on the holistic? Because this podcast is, of course, about exploring the connections of rural and urban.
Ellen Wolter:But what are the ways in which you bring those values into your work?
Chris Estes:Sure. So I'll start with in every presentation I give to whatever audience, I will always have some content, particularly before getting into our Thrive Rural framework and some of our, like, core resources, is understanding the interdependence and interconnectedness of rural and nonrural places in our regions and states, both local regions and and larger than state region, that we have often think about rural in sort of two ways that are generally unhelpful. One is the kind of noble farmer, Mayberry, idyllic, kind of way. We often think about rural when people show pictures of barns without people, so, like, crops, animals, or we think about rural as a sort of opioid rust belt, people who aren't working, been left behind, not a lot of assets or value there. And both of those are wrong, but the reality is part of both of those that there are challenges in rural and and real assets.
Chris Estes:But most importantly, we need to always be thinking of rural in this context of how it is interconnected and interdependent across different metro sizes. You know, Minneapolis Saint Paul needs a healthy rural Minnesota. It is going to be better off, and rural Minnesota needs a healthy Minneapolis Saint Paul. For a long time, we sort of got by by everybody in the suburbs was doing pretty well, and we kind of ignored the decline of our cities, and we've ignored the decline of rural. But now it's really evident why real success, both in terms of how people view the economy and democracy itself, is really interconnected.
Chris Estes:We've missed some of the appreciation of how urban and rural in particular need each other and benefit from each other. So that's, I think, a really important part of that holistic element. And then, again, the way people have thought about and talked about rural generally in whatever aspect they were working on was always sort of about the value of what can be extracted from rural, what can be grown there, made there, and then shipped off. And so it was very much an employment, business development, jobs kind of thing and, you know, not so much about well-being. So that's part of that holistic thing that world places need to be healthy places for people to live.
Chris Estes:And, we envision that somewhat in that idealistic stereotype where everybody seemed happy and healthy, but we don't really think about it in today's context of most of the work in rural is small and mid sized businesses. There's certainly agriculture is important, there's a lot of spin offs from agriculture and ag serving businesses. But the value of rural isn't that it's a cheap place to relocate a plant to that's gonna provide some manufacturing jobs until the tax credits run out, and then that plant's gonna move on to another cheap place. That's sort of a deficit framework. People in rural have ideas about business and how we do developing an ecosystem for entrepreneurship or the people that are there, not just how do we get smart people from the city to move to some of these rural places to start businesses.
Chris Estes:How do we think about developing and utilizing the natural resources in a region, whether it's a lake or a river or a mountain, but actually build the wealth locally rather than just being an attractive place for private capital to come and extract wealth, and we get tourism service sector jobs out of the deal. So it's it's that centering the value of places and people and thinking intensively about all that goes into that.
Ellen Wolter:Chris, one of the things that I've noticed in my conversations with people, but also in the literature reviews we've done and research we've done, is that this idea of rural urban interdependence has not really caught on in terms of the narrative of rural and even urban development or as part of our dominant narratives. You know, we talk about rural and urban as binaries as opposed to being connected, and I'm curious if you have insights as to why that might be and and what holds us back from thinking more regionally and and building our work in our communities to be more intentionally connected?
Chris Estes:My my thought is that so much of economic research in our country is macroeconomic. Economic. So it totally skips based development generally. When you think macro wise, the only places that really resonate are these large concentrations of employment and economic activity. And that that's sort of, like, what happens in big cities across The US are things that move the needle nationally.
Chris Estes:That we have this sort of macro view of the country, and we miss thinking about the importance because if you go, well, there aren't enough people there to make a difference, or if unemployment goes up and down in rural, that's, like, barely moves the needle nationally. So it gets lost when you take that large perspective, and that dominates a lot of economic and even political thinking about interventions and everything like that. So I think that's part of why it's really hard for people to get there. You really have to have a different orientation to what we mean by why place based development matters. And I think even saying that, even within that, I think when you say place based development, most economic and economic development people are thinking about former industrial cities and, like, how do we bring vibrancy back to them?
Chris Estes:So, like, a Scranton, Pennsylvania or even, like, Detroit and Cleveland, for example, or Pittsburgh, and not so much place based development in places like Saint Cloud or Red Wing, places that have real assets and value, have had some history of stuff. But what is it like to do place based development there? Also, because it really has to be community and regionally led, and people are used to sort of dictating from above. You know, we do this. This happens.
Chris Estes:We improve, you know, these overall employment outcomes. So a lot of it, I think, is that we have a lack of people who lived, worked, or have experience with rural places, I should say. A lot of people have suburban to urban kind of histories and experience, and they just don't have a frame of reference to understand how it's different. And I think it takes a recognition of that comes up in different conversations. So if you have a conversation about climate change, the solutions and the impacts of climate change are disproportionately gonna impact rural regions because that's where the space is to do carbon capture or alternative energy or where droughts and floods and natural disasters are gonna be most poignantly impacted.
Chris Estes:So that that gets people to start thinking a little bit more about rural, but it sort of goes down the rabbit hole of a particular kind of discussion topic. I think what people have missed also is that if you're only thinking about rural from the value it produces, it's just like a natural resources discussion. And and I really think that's the DNA of our country and other countries. Like, people came to places, saw what they could take out of it, and that was the value. And it takes a lot to overcome that and say, these places have value in and of themselves, and there's a lot of importance to that being a thriving place.
Chris Estes:And we want these folks to be successful because we're all gonna be better off if that happens. And I I do think there was a mentality for a long time, and it's still present, that people will just go, well, all the innovation happens in these cluster cities, and folks who aren't in those should just move. And that's been said to me in in sort of challenging our work on rural, and and I know it penetrates a lot of macroeconomic thought and way people look at it. And so it's very easy for people to just not have to engage with it and understand it unless you really do some deep thinking about the interconnectedness and why it's so valuable to all of us.
Ellen Wolter:I think that there are so many folks who don't know what it's like to be in a rural space, and it's hard to understand how we're connected if you don't experience those places.
Chris Estes:Well, we're only experiencing them now through, like, outdoor recreation activity. So, again, it's a service economy approach. I wanna go snowmobiling or cross country skiing in the winter or mountain biking in the summer or go to the lake. We imagine, you know, every Hallmark movie has this thriving small town, which everybody appreciates and loves, and we don't translate that really into reality about what does it take for these communities to be to have what they need and be supportive and thriving and why that's so valuable for the people there. And they're actually stewarding a bunch of these natural resources, we should value that.
Chris Estes:It's important that people are there. We don't want an empty space and everybody can't move to a city and we do need to produce stuff in rural. But we also are better off if those people are producing their own businesses and having their own innovation and are getting invested in. I mean, for me, what's funny is I grew up rural without really understanding that I grew up rural because my parents were teachers and but I lived next to agriculture, cows, and corn my entire childhood. But so I understood it, but it wasn't like, oh, you're rural.
Chris Estes:Like, it was just that's what I knew. And and I think when I got into this work, was, like, trying to explain to people what's different about rural, and you realize folks, other than maybe seeing it on TV or in movies, they really haven't been to experience communities and all that they have to offer.
Ellen Wolter:I know you travel the country, and you connect with people all all over the country in rural spaces. What are some of the models or innovations that you have seen in the ways that folks are working regionally that have been really effective, you know, working across rural and urban and suburban spaces that really seems to be working well or could be a model for other communities to think about?
Chris Estes:So there's a couple different kinds of regionalism that are important, but most they're all sort of under this idea that we are stronger together. So, typically, communities often see each other and their neighbors competition. It's more of a crabs in the bucket thing. Like, if if we're trying to do something or improve our quality of life or develop our economy stronger, like, if it goes to you, I lose kind of thing. Like and particularly if you're talking about rural regions where nobody's a particularly large metro area, all these small communities across some region, and regions are bigger West Of The Mississippi generally than they are East Of The Mississippi.
Chris Estes:I'm broadly stereotyping, but, you know, regions in the Western US and plain state are bigger than they are, say, in New England or the Southeast. But seeing, like, all the assets and strengths that we have in our region and what if we all thought of those as together how we're doing stuff? That become it changes both the equation of what people can produce and work on and find value in, but it also reduces that people working against each other. And the other kinds of regions that are in rural are this what you were describing is sort of rural adjacent. So you might have a metropolitan area, a micropolitan area, and then rural, and it's always changing.
Chris Estes:I know for a lot of my work in North Carolina when I started, places that were rural are now largely suburban enclaves because people moved there for the quality of life and it built up, and then suddenly it had strip centers and bigger schools. And so that that part is always fluid. And it's not like we are all in these boxes and we stay in these boxes about what we look like, But that becomes important because of the whole resource, open space, quality of life, workforce, commuting, affordability. And a lot of what has been missing, I think, until recently is people did not appreciate that rural wasn't gonna always be cheap and that people needed to think about protecting their communities. So the innovation that I've been seeing is particularly people that have outdoor recreation economies growing, and they're sort of looking at that as like, this is the thing we can do.
Chris Estes:We have resources. This could be economic growth. But then suddenly having to go, we've gotta think differently about our housing and land use, and how are we gonna create a community land trust to put new housing in so that we know it's permanently affordable so that folks who live here are gonna be able to stay here, that the kids of folks growing up can can buy a house here and and still earn some equity, but we're creating a a community affordability asset rather than just a house as an individual asset. And the same thing in businesses. Creating more shared ownership models is a way to ensure that that wealth and that business stays in the community long term rather than a single business owner who at some point is more likely than not gonna sell to outside capital to kinda cash out of their business if their kids don't wanna keep running it.
Chris Estes:And that's everything from, like, restaurant, the retail operations, the small scale manufacturing. You're not gonna always have a new supply or new businesses being created, So you really have to appreciate and protect what you have. And I think where rural communities are be coming together and doing some really comprehensive, inclusive planning about what kind of we wanna be, what do we wanna have, what do we wanna protect, is really important rather than just being grateful for whatever we get. And sort of letting a small number of people make big decisions for everybody in the region because they know best and we don't complain or don't rock the boat or we won't get anything. And that's sort of like a codependent model rather than focusing on our assets and strengths.
Chris Estes:And particularly thinking about the the last piece I'll mention is thinking about how to create education and workforce and business development ecosystems that are really focused on the people who are there, not just attracting outsiders. That can still be a you know, attracting outsiders can still be part of your development, but where people are really thinking about their own folks is, I think, having a lot more long term success. Because then people are also more excited about participating and engaging in the work because they see it's for them, not just for someone else. Most of their work and benefit and value is really for other people, not for their for themselves or for their own community and region.
Ellen Wolter:So one of the, I know one of the pieces of work that you do is wealth build building, which you're talking about in You've mentioned this a few times in our conversations so far, but this idea of the need for protecting regions and communities and ensuring that there's local ownership and control as part of that wealth building. Can you share just a couple of examples or, you know, specific models that have worked well for communities that are interested in figuring out this protection piece? Because it's it's tricky. Right? It's hard as as people come in and want to build things.
Ellen Wolter:You know, I'm thinking about what we're seeing a lot right now in Minnesota is, you know, these data centers. Like, hey. You know, we wanna come out and we have a data center we need to build. It will, you know, bring money. It will bring jobs, but then it it doesn't bring that local control and ownership necessarily.
Ellen Wolter:Right? So as part of those negotiations or conversations, how can communities support that, that effort so that regions are protected and it's not this kind of boom and bust economy?
Chris Estes:So part of it starts with the recognition of so the value of WealthWorks, I think, is a as a tool for folks. It it gives you a set of capitals analyzed in your communities that is asset. So it's starting with what you you might say we have a lot of this and we have less of this, but you're you're generally focusing on what you have versus what's wrong with us or what's missing, which is a lot of where people typically start. We don't have x. How do we get from here?
Chris Estes:We don't have any you start immediately from a deficit framework where you don't have any power. You don't have any agency. So starting with capitals and capital analysis and then thinking about, well, for a lot of folks who who particularly engaged in WealthWorks, it was a lot of food network and food system related stuff. We can we have people growing stuff. How do we get that to the school system as a way to support local farmers or food banks?
Chris Estes:Or if we have I'll use Chicago as an example. The Chicago Food Network is really based on small farms in Wisconsin, and by developing linkages with the farmers in the rural regions around the city, they were able to develop food networks that provide value to the city, but also strengthen these rural regions that might not have thought of themselves as being Chicago connected. So starting with what we have is a way to orient when opportunities like, say, a data a data center come up. People can weigh that against what they have and what they wanna develop. It doesn't mean you say automatically no, but, like, what's this gonna cost us in terms of our grid and our water in particular?
Chris Estes:And then what is it actually gonna produce? And the way I think about this is that initially everybody wanted these things because it somehow had this idea that it was new economy, new jobs, no one wants to say no. And particularly people who are more conservative bent were like, don't get in the way of arguing about water and and stuff. And now I hear almost everybody on all sides of the spectrum saying, these things aren't that great for us, and these things need to be built somewhere else. And now what I hear in the tech world is that what people are looking at is producing their own energy for these things.
Chris Estes:So from, like, small scale nuclear and other stuff. And but it's an interesting discussion because they don't really benefit we're like, if it was gonna be a way where we're suddenly all getting better and faster broadband, people might go, okay. That's a different kind of trade off. But if we're only, like, getting night watchman jobs and a couple of tech repairmen, what are we really what are we paying for? Because a lot of people I know when these first started happening in North Carolina, they gave up tax revenue to get these things.
Chris Estes:But was and they couldn't pay for their water system or low upgrade. So then deficit thinking can be a real trap. The converse of this, the challenge, I think, for rural is the rural identity is generally fairly low density. And so when place start growing, it can be really difficult for people to go, this is we seem to be attracting folks for our quality of life or whatever natural assets are nearby or that we're adjacent to an employment area. And instead of saying, and have any because that's not our character, we need to think about what's gonna be the best for us ten, fifteen years from now.
Chris Estes:And we might have to have our city core become four three or four stories instead of just two stories, and that if more people are living downtown, more of our restaurants and other stuff are gonna thrive because what happens, these places, is they tend to push development out and it sprawls, and then traffic gets really bad. And then everyone complains about it, but no one's really it's much harder to fix fifteen, twenty years later than it is when you do it on the front side and say, what do we really want for our community? And acknowledging what changes are coming that we not we can all wish it away, but people are still coming. And I do have talked to a lot of places in this, and they're really struggling with that notion. I think the The United as a whole struggles with density in its planning, people not wanting to sort of face chain.
Chris Estes:And I think it's the biggest challenge to a lot of places kind of losing out and not becoming as as strong and successful as they could.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. Yeah. Thinking about what assets we need to preserve down the road. Yeah.
Chris Estes:Like, asset to be healthy, walkable, connected, safe. I can get to amenities. I enjoy being there. It's quiet. You know?
Chris Estes:The more traffic that's generated, all that other stuff begins to and more congestion, people are like, I can't get anywhere. I spend all day in my car. So, like, understanding what the thing is that really is the asset is is and quality of life and well-being is sometimes hard. We kinda knee jerk to like, oh, build it further away. Take that stuff somewhere else.
Chris Estes:And that real
Music (Jim Griswold):Yeah.
Chris Estes:Might be losing the core of what our community what we want in our communities.
Ellen Wolter:Chris, tell me a little bit about the Thrive Rule framework. I I highlighted some of my my favorites or kind of things I wanted to ask you about, but why don't you tell me a little bit overall about about the framework and how you use it?
Chris Estes:Sure. So the framework, if you think about what I talked about with Wealth Works, that was the first attempt to sort of take the assets framework and put it into kind of a community capitals way, asset building community led. And then the framework really builds on that to say, what if we want every rural place and and we include native tribal in our definitions or thoughts about rural, we don't have a definition we use where, I like to say, we're rural agnostic, and that everyone's welcome to be a part of our network and connections, but we focus on rural because if you don't, it gets left out. But where each and every person belongs, lives with dignity, and thrives. And so you start with that ultimate outcome, and we spent several years working with practitioners and advisory groups and communities of practice, really trying to synthesize the stuff that we had been learning, particularly our previous director, Janet Topolski, ran the program for twenty nine years, over the life of all of this work.
Chris Estes:And that led and the idea was to initially create a systems level framework of, like, how do we get at systems level change in rural? So when we started with the framework and the and the building blocks became the things that people said, this has to be true to get to the ultimate outcome. And but we realized that we still wanted to have a local level theory of change because there needed to be a set of of building blocks, which are essentially recommendations in a way, for what people could do within their region. And we worked with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute to then do research about each of the building blocks ideas to sort of show how this concept is actually played out from a research perspective. And so the way we think about the framework is it's organizing a way of thinking and doing, and behind each of the building blocks is the research and best practices and case studies and examples to help you think about it.
Chris Estes:It's a way for people to think about their work, analyze maybe what's missing, but also it's a way to bring a lot of different streams and sectors of work in rural that we were talking about earlier together. So it's not just about business or job creation, like people working on children and families issues or education improvement or health and safety could all see their work show up in the framework. So it's the idea is to try to bring those sectors together for more holistic work. But I'll stop there if you wanna go into anything you think.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. Well, in particular, I was looking at the the system living level building blocks and things like regional analysis and action and real data for analysis and change, you know, real capital access and flow, which we've largely talked about, I think, that one already. I'd love to dig in a little bit on data, rural data, because I think there's such a lack of it. Right. Because I do think there's a real lack of information and data around regional work, rural urban interdependence, but then just lack of rural data in general.
Chris Estes:And that's and that's really why that's there. So there are the building blocks came to us, I think, both out of what people said is working and is missing. So you think about it as a both end. So particularly at the systems level, you know, the capital, what's missing is durable, regular investments in rural. We get very episodic capital investment, particularly from state funding, which almost always is, you know, we're gonna spread it around to a few counties each year or federal funding comes in and then it goes out.
Chris Estes:Even private philanthropy is notorious for sort of episodic investment. So part of that is to emphasize why that's so important. Same thing with rural data. Like, the ability to understand what's happening in rural regions beyond county level data is really important because counties again can be huge and you can really miss where it can you average out in some ways where it doesn't look like things are so bad, but you've got pockets of places that are really struggling and some places that are doing okay because of their maybe that's the micropolitan growing place and the other places are being left behind. And that takes attention, again, to the value of saying it's important for us to have datasets so we can understand what's happening, where things are moving and changing, and it's designed particularly to push the federal government to allow for the creation of systems and doing the work as well as being able to integrate data across issue areas.
Chris Estes:So if you've got, like, EPA data on, like, air quality and water quality, that's important to be able to ingest with, like, other health outcome data that may be over in the US Department of Rural Health and just like employment data that might be over in, like, EDA and Commerce versus, like, Department of Education on, like, workforce development and education outcomes. But it's sort of like, why do we need to know? Isn't isn't county level data enough? You know? Why should we take this extra effort?
Chris Estes:And it goes back to our early sort of idea of the narrative and valuing what what's happening in these places and their importance for their success. And then the regional analysis is, again, we're pushing the field a little bit there to say you've gotta think regionally. We get everybody in their community, elected officials. They're elected to be my town's the most important thing. But it just like, you drive around rural Minnesota and you seek these small places of a thousand people or so, and, like, they've they've gotta think reach.
Chris Estes:What happens in that town is important. It doesn't devalue that. But thinking like a region that we could be in this together and what and how do we combine what we each are doing and what assets we have. Like, everybody may not be able to have their own art center, but if somebody does, that can still be really valuable for the region, for the quality of life of a space. I do think, and there's a little sidebar, that sometimes high school athletics serves as a divider in some of these things.
Chris Estes:Like, people create more of a us them identity. And because high school athletics are so important and for, like, entertainment and identity that somehow it's rather than saying, like, we're all in the same place and we're all struggling and, like, we need to be working together and see ourselves as one and not just like that we're the enemy or that the county next door is the enemy. And I think there's a lot of that has just been due to lack of investment and a lack of valuing the places, and so people feel desperate and not invested in. I think all of those things are really about why we haven't if you think about data, like, why we haven't been able to get enough resources is both people not fully understanding, but also not understanding the benefits. I think part of the problem with rural is that we spent decades feeling like we had to tell you how bad it was in order for you to pay attention.
Chris Estes:And I don't think that's generally a helpful framework for governments or philanthropy because it sort of says, well, this is like an ocean of need out here, and I don't see any strengths. And why should we go I get that it's bad, but maybe you guys should all just go somewhere else because what are we gonna build off of? Instead of saying, like, here's what we're doing and here's where what we're having that's successful along with here's some of our challenges and why why why investment here is gonna have an impact. And the final thing I'll say is that one of the key challenges for rural is the measures of success are almost always taken from urban centric, and they're volume based. So like a lot of what the federal government does is they wanna be able to say what's the biggest bang for the buck, which generally means, like, how many dollars were invested, how much could you leverage from other places, and how many people were served.
Chris Estes:So if you're in a volume measure, rural always loses. There's just fewer people. But if you switch the measure to percentage change, you would immediately be able to say, like, we if we move the needle 35 or 40% on some outcome in a rural region, that's a huge success measure. And the fact that that might be a thousand people is irrelevant to the kind of you've had transformational impact in a place. And so I think we get caught sometimes in that efficiency framework, which really devalues less populated regions.
Chris Estes:And and that has been part of our challenge where data and investment of capital get caught up in.
Ellen Wolter:Chris, it's been a pleasure to talk with you and to learn from you and about your work, and we look forward to to staying in touch on the work that we're doing.
Chris Estes:Thank you so much for having me, and very much appreciate the time and looking forward to more conversations together.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Wolter. Special thanks to Jan Jekula, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits.
Music (Jim Griswold):You
Ellen Wolter:can find episodes of side by side wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Walter, and this is side by side.
