Leading Rural from the Inside Out
- Jul 21
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 24
How R5DC brings lived experience to national tables—and brings results back home.
By Beth Hautala
There are places in this work where the conversation moves beyond projects and programs, and into something more essential: who gets to be in the room when the story of rural America is being told. For Cheryal Lee Hills, Executive Director of Region Five Development Commission (R5DC), that question isn’t theoretical. It’s practical. It’s urgent. And it’s rooted in lived experience.
“Lived experience is important,” she says, “and we have to lean into those who have different lived experiences in order to fully appreciate the complexity and the nuance of how we’re surviving or prospering in this space.”
Hills is careful to name what she isn’t: she does not claim to speak for all rural communities. But she does speak from rural experience—decades of it—in fact. And this matters when national policy, funding systems, and public narratives are being shaped. Because if rural places do not lend their voices to the conversation, using their own language, their own stories, and their own perspective, someone else will do so on their behalf.
“If you don’t speak up, your voice is never heard,” Hills says. “If you don’t put time into helping folks understand different perspectives…someone else will write your story, someone else will tell your perspective, and it may not be reflective of the realities of your place and your people.”
This is the heart of R5DC’s national presence: not visibility for visibility’s sake, but advocacy for accuracy, so that no region, no community, and no group of people are unintentionally neglected.
Leadership you can’t “hand off”
When we talk about national influence, it’s easy to talk about networks, organizations, and seats at tables. But Hills brings the conversation back to something more human: relationships. And connection doesn’t transfer like a job description.
“You can’t really transfer relationships,” she says. “There is trust that has been built, and that’s not transferable, frankly. You can make introductions. You can open doors. But the real work of relationship—listening, consistency, humility—has to be built person by person, over time.”
For Hills, this is where the future of organizations like R5DC becomes both delicate and deeply intentional. She describes it as an “obligation of the old guard” to step back enough to allow new leaders to develop their own credibility, without hoarding relationships for power.
“It is an injustice to the vision and the mission of any organization, not to equip and enable the team,” she says.
Additionally, future success requires a willingness to allow learning to happen on every front—even when learning looks like imperfection.
When funders and state agencies call with flexible investments because they trust the work, that trust can feel fragile. But Hills believes good leadership builds a culture where people can own mistakes, name what went wrong, and repair what needs repairing, without ego and without fear. The goal isn’t preserving a legacy like a museum exhibit. The goal is to keep an organization relevant, responsive, and alive.
“The work should always be changing to be relevant to the people we serve,” says Hills.
A team of leaders, not a hierarchy of followers
In the same breath that she talks about partners and funders, Hills returns to the people inside the organization, the staff who carry the work every day. For her, relationship-driven leadership starts at home. “That humility, that relational piece, is not just our partners,” she said. “It comes down to the people who work with you to elevate and sustain the organization and those the organization serves.”
It’s not enough for an organization to produce outcomes. The question is: what kind of internal culture makes those outcomes possible? Who is being equipped? Who is being trusted? Who is being protected, advocated for, and set up to thrive?
Hills describes it a bit like tending a garden, nurturing people, watching them bloom, and then stepping out of the way so their accomplishments can stand on their own.
“Let that shine,” she says. “As their accomplishments and victories, not as the director’s accomplishments or victories.” In a small, dynamic team doing complex work, the aim is not simply competent staff, but leadership distributed across the organization.
“You have to have a team of leaders,” she says. “It changes everything.”
The difference between a meeting and a table where change happens
Hills attends national conversations not as an academic theorist, but as a practitioner, someone who understands that policy often looks tidy in theory and messy in practice.
She offers this contrast: A “meeting” is where you listen, nod, and absorb. A relational table is where you bring your full self, professionally, but honestly.
“Vulnerability matters,” she says. “You don’t need to sugarcoat things…If you can’t cry or celebrate with someone at your highest moments and lowest moments, then it’s not authentic.”
She sees a pattern in the field: organizations feel pressure to appear strong to funders, so they hide the messy parts—the learning, the uncertainty, the hard turns when a project goes sideways. But she believes honesty is what creates real trust.
“I want to show authentic self,” she says. “Because in the end, that is where conviction and belief are grounded. Authenticity is worth funding.”
When “spaghetti noodles” touch: shared risk, shared investment, shared outcomes
Hills describes these networks and relationships as “spaghetti noodles touching,” and it may be one of the most accurate metaphors for how systems change actually happens.
“The most meaningful intersections,” says Hills, “come when state agencies, philanthropy, and partners understand their role not as a separate lane, but as part of a shared approach: filling gaps, building capacity, and helping rural communities compete for resources that are often designed for urban places.”
Matching funds. Capacity building. Coalition development. Shared investment.
“You put your eggs in one basket, and it’s dangerous,” she says. “It’s deeply important to diversify.” And when you diversify the portfolio—bringing more players to the table—the work becomes more resilient. More equitable. More likely to serve communities that haven’t historically benefited from traditional economic development models.
“When that shared risk…creates resilience,” she says, “you have more people invested in the problem or the issue, and they’re all serving in different ways that change systems.”
These aren’t abstract ideals. They show up in practical outcomes.
Hills shared one example from renewable energy work: she learned that the Great Plains Institute had funding to convene regional development commissions around renewable energy. She asked them to bring Minnesota’s regional development organizations together to clarify roles and opportunities, and that coalition helped lead to a partnership with the Minnesota Department of Commerce. The result? Investment across the state so that regional development commissions could help communities build coalitions, write proposals, and implement projects.
That pathway—relationship, convening, partnership, investment—also helped make projects like Solar Schools possible, including what she described as the largest scattered-site solar project in Minnesota. And the impacts aren’t theoretical: she shared that one school site saves roughly $5,000 per month; money that can be redirected back into education, people, and programming.
This is what national learning and partnership look like when they return home: not a line on a résumé, but real savings, real infrastructure, and real benefit in local communities.
“Hunger” as a leadership trait
When asked what fuels her continual drive to “do better,” not perfection, but stewardship, Hills didn’t name strategy first. She named a trait.
“Hunger,” she says. “You can’t teach hunger to serve.” She described it as something deep: born from lived experience, hard knocks, responsibility, and a refusal to accept helplessness as a final answer. Her litmus-test question is blunt and clarifying:
“If your life or the life of your child depended upon you doing something, what would you do?”
That’s the kind of leadership she looks for from her team: not arrogance, not credentialism, not theory as a substitute for action, but desire, grit, service, and follow-through.
The “chameleon unicorn”
The Aspen Institute once called R5DC a “unicorn.” A rare organization with unusual capacity, reach, and relevance. Hills added a second metaphor: a chameleon. Because relevance requires adaptability: the ability to show up in different communities, cultures, and political climates without losing your grounding.
“You walk into an Indigenous community, you had better understand your role and how you will serve differently than you do in a non-Indigenous community,” Hills says. Context, knowledge, and deep respect are necessary, regardless of whom you work with, and this feels especially true in rural America. The chameleon isn’t about assimilation. It’s about listening. It’s about humility. It’s about reading a room without losing your values.
And the unicorn part?
“It’s rare for organizations to want to show up and do the hard, authentic work,” she says. “Especially when it requires stepping into discomfort, resisting echo chambers, and building relationships across difference.”
A closing word to rural leaders everywhere
As the conversation ended, Hills reflected on the advice she would offer to other rural leaders stepping into national spaces. Her response was both simple and profound:
Listen first. Don’t be afraid to speak. Ask questions, even if they sound foolish. Be humble and brave.
“No one can take away your lived experience,” she concluded. “You are an expert in your own experiences. So, bring those to the table.”
This, perhaps, is the invitation at the center of R5DC’s national work: rural places belong at the table, not as a footnote, not as a case study, not as a stereotype, but as experts in their own reality.
And when rural leaders speak with courage and clarity, something powerful happens; policy gets smarter, partnerships get stronger, and people and places thrive.
