The Rural Broadband Farm Forum seeks to revive a development model once known as Rural Radio Farm Forum.  In the early 1940's, when many farm families in Canada and the United States struggled to survive the waning years of the Great Depression and Radio was seen as a relatively new and intriguing technology, a number of organizations began experimenting with gathering smalls groups of five or six rural neighbors with similar interests and backgrounds, facing similar challenges, to discuss matters of common concern.  Topics might have been grain prices, or water access, or children's health, or railroad transport costs, but a unifying concept of these many projects was that a lot of under-recognized information, wisdom, and practicality, exists within small groups of concerned rural neighbors, when a mechanism is put into place to permit this wisdom, and practicality, to be shared.

We plan to adapt the Rural Radio Farm Forum model to rural Vermont, and to send workers into the field to organize thousands of small-group meetings to discuss, and show, how Broadband can help find jobs, improve schools, start businesses, access federal and state assistance, and enhance rural life.