DEVELOPING COLLABORATION IN RURAL POLICY: LESSONS FROM A STATE RURAL DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL

nership Office and the National Rural Development Council in
Washington, DC. The majority of funding is provided by a consor-
tium of seventeen federal agencies, with the U.S. Department of Ag-
riculture in the lead.

The Idaho Rural Development Council (IRDC) is one of the oldest.
It was conceived with the passage of the 1990 farm bill and held its
initial meeting in April, 1991. It is the only SRDC that originated in-
dependently from the national initiative, operating for eighteen
months without budget or staff, because we saw the need to link
rural development efforts (Gardner et al.) The IRDC took shape in
two strategic planning retreats held at the Council of Governors’ Pol-
icy Advisors Rural Policy Academy. The IRDC mission is:

. . . to strengthen communities and improve the quality of life for
rural Idahoans by providing a framework for cooperation, collab-
oration, and partnership-building to use the available resources
of the private sector with those of the federal, state, local, and
tribal governments.

The word “available” means the IRDC recognizes the continued
presence of budget constraints in the rural policy environment. . .
providing a framework for cooperation, collaboration, and part-
nership-building” is the role that the IRDC plays. Thus, it is a whole-
sale entity whose customers are its members. It serves by acting as
an information clearing house, a referral agent, a neutral meeting
place and a mechanism to germinate new collaborations. The IRDC
does not deliver services or grants directly to rural Idahoans, but
works through its member organizations.

Lessons in Collaboration

Because collaboration for many of us is a relatively new problem-
solving approach, I would like to spend the rest of this paper de-
scribing some of the lessons that members of the Idaho Rural Devel-
opment Council have been learning about collaboration. There are
dozens of community-based organizations around the country learn-
ing similar lessons. Many of these lessons were described by mem-
bers of the IRDC Board of Directors at a recent retreat. (Chynoweth
provides a good guide for practitioners seeking to lead collabora-
tions).

Lesson 1. Not All Share the Same Paradigm of Community
Development

We found early on that members came to rural development from
several different perspectives: public and private sectors; different
levels of government; providers and consumers of services. We dis-
covered five different types of member orientation to rural develop-
ment—economic development, natural resource management,

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