“Working people in our communities are finally hearing a story that belongs to us!” said Siobhan Ring, development director with Firelands Workers Building Community Power, describing the successful launch of the Rural Narrative Hub, which over the past year has reached 4. 7 million people across seven states. And they’re just getting started!
Rural America has become a news desert in recent years, with the collapse of local newspapers and the Trump administration’s decision to cut off funding to PBS television and NPR radio stations. These stations are often a lifeline for rural and Native communities, where small broadcasters play a vital role in sharing community concerns.
As many of these local broadcasters close, many rural Americans now only receive news from partisan broadcast outlets owned by Fox News, CBS, or Sinclair Broadcasting, or from algorithm-driven, billionaire-owned social media platforms like X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram.
“Today, a mill worker in Washington and a retired veteran in Wisconsin are exposed to the same underlying narrative – stories peddled by extractive billionaire owners and corporations that pit working class people against each other while picking our pockets and trashing the land,” says Ring.
None of this is news to Firelands, who had a plan: build on the winning strategy they developed in 2024 to defeat a billionaire-funded effort to roll back the state’s capital gains tax, which would have stripped away $2.2 billion in funding from schools, climate defense and health care to line the pockets of the ultra-rich.
Firelands was successful in this messaging campaign, which combined bilingual messaging on billboards with digital, radio and mailers to reach rural people where they live. That November, 64 percent of Washington’s voters rejected the capital gains rollback, which had been funded by a far-right megadonor, Brian Heywood.
“This millionaire wanted to steal billions of dollars from our kids’ schools and childcare, cut thousands of climate and care jobs, especially in rural areas,” said Stina Janssen from Firelands. “We said ‘Hell, No!’”
Together, across these seven states, they rolled out billboards, digital and print ads in community and supermarket newspapers, direct mail, and yard signs, just as they had done in Timber Country. Together, they reached 4.7 million rural Americans – that’s ninety percent of their target audience, and one in ten of all rural Americans – through more than 14. 7 million exposures.
The result is a growing national ecosystem of organizations across rural America which are capable of shaping public conversation, elevating rural voices, and building long-term power in rural communities across the country.
Highlights included Iowa, where Citizens for Community Improvement took on corporate polluters with a saturation campaign to reach target audiences in counties that would be impacted by a proposed CO2 pipeline. After radio and digital ads, yard signs and running ads in every community newspaper, they were able to block Summit Carbon Solutions from building the pipeline through eight counties.