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Q&A: Creative Economic Development and Rural Ingenuity [1]
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Date: 2025-06-27
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Maria Sykes is the cofounder and executive director of Epicenter, one of the only nonprofit organizations in the small town of Green River, Utah (population 881). About 50 miles from the closest towns of Moab and Price, the town sits along the Green River in the Utah desert.
For some, it’s a drive-through town – the last stop for gas along a lonely highway. For others, it’s a launching point into the desert wilderness or the river canyons that stretch out in every direction. For Sykes, it’s home. Sixteen years ago she moved to the area as an AmeriCorps volunteer with an architecture degree, and simply never left.
Epicenter is a do-it-all organization, bringing creative design work to every project, from affordable housing, to parks, to community events. Sykes and her colleagues invite artists from around the country to do projects for, and inspired by, the community of Green River through their artists in residence program. It’s a perfect example of rural ingenuity in action.
Sykes and I talked about bringing creative economic development to small towns and what keeps her living in Green River. Enjoy our conversation below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DY: Will you start just by telling me a little bit about the path that led you to where you are, working on rural community development today?
Maria Sykes: I grew up in rural spaces, mostly like medium-sized towns, but all of my extended family lived in rural places on farms, mostly in the South. And whenever we would visit those folks, I felt very much at home. I love cities, but rural was really special to me, especially seeing women living by themselves and off of the land. I ended up graduating from architecture school at Auburn University, which does have a focus on rural architecture and design, it was always in the back of my mind of like, do I want to live in those spaces? I want to work in those spaces. And when I graduated from Auburn, the great recession was just starting, so this typical notion of architecture, which I wasn’t really interested in anyway, wasn’t possible. No one was building. So I reached out to some of my colleagues and folks kept talking about AmeriCorps. I ended up coming out to Green River, Utah with a couple of colleagues from architecture school. They’re no longer here. I’m the crazy person who stuck around for 16 years. I originally came here as an AmeriCorps VISTA [volunteer] to help develop affordable housing. One summer turned into a year, which turned into 16. Originally it was working with the existing community center that was here. And then eventually it became “I think we need to develop our own nonprofit and our own programs and projects.” That happened in like 2014, when we became our own nonprofit.
DY: Tell me a little bit more about this nonprofit, the organization Epicenter, based in Green River where you live.
MS: Epicenter got started in 2009, kind of, like I said, as a program of another nonprofit and we became our own nonprofit in 2014. But the work that we do is unique in that we’re not just an arts organization and we’re not just a housing organization. We’re not just an economic development organization. We combine all of those things, which I think is so critical to the work that we do and a lot of rural places as well. You can’t be living in a small town [and be a nonprofit] only working in the arts, in my opinion. How are workers living and where are they living, what are their working conditions? Do they have good jobs? You have to engage with all of these things and work holistically if you’re going to make any sort of change or to truly understand the community.
Everyone on staff is an architect or a designer or a design researcher – anthropologists, writers, something like that. We’re all coming from a creative perspective to look at economic development and community development. I think that really makes us unique in the work that we do, in our approach and our projects. Because of that, we do all types of projects. So developing affordable housing, but we create and help with different community events. We designed and built the town’s neon welcome sign. That’s very iconic now.
Day to day, we’re showing up to the meetings, we’re going to the basketball games, we’re a part of the community and that’s really important to our process as well. We also have an ongoing artist residency called the Frontier Fellowship, which we’ve hosted over a hundred artists and collectives here to do different projects with us. Those projects vary from a community publication to something like the welcome sign, creating a new community event or just bringing new vitality to existing events, whatever that might be.
Epicenter’s 2025 Spring Summit opening dinner (Photo by Sandra Salvas)
DY: How do you balance creating for the community versus attracting tourists or outside visitors?
MS: If you create a place where people want to live, visitors are gonna want to visit. That goes for any place, it has to be this place that people love living in. I think that’s really important. I just keep going back to the welcome sign because it kind of illustrates the point in a lot of ways, but that was designed by people in the community. It’s the best project we’ve ever done. We could build a hundred houses and the welcome sign will still be the greatest thing we’ve ever done. It’s like a spot now where people stop and take photos. I’ve seen people traveling through and then go get a tattoo of it. It’s so bizarre how much it’s become a symbol for people that are road tripping, but also a point of pride in the community.
DY: How do you see the importance of art in all of these economic development spaces?
MS: I think artists and creative people are absolutely critical. In rural places, often it’s like, boom bust, boom bust. How do we actually break this cycle? I’m sure economists or someone who’s worked in economic development in the West have ideas about how to break that cycle. But how do you actually communicate that to people? How do you actually engage with the community and actually make change or engage the community in writing policies or something to change that. I think artists and designers are key to that, whether it’s “here’s how we’re going to visualize this information for you,” or “we’re going to ask these specific questions,” or “we’re going to hold these conversations” and I don’t know of an economic development person who can do that very well. I think artists and designers have to lead that process or it’s just going to keep hitting a wall and booming and busting.
DY: I see that happening in my community with our creative economic development in Mancos, Colorado as well. But it feels like a rare thing in many rural places. There’s just fewer resources and fewer people. Can you talk about why you appreciate living in a rural place as a creative person? What drew you there and what keeps you there?
MS: There’s a couple of things. If I were doing this sort of work in a city, there wouldn’t be an immediate response, good or bad. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve screwed up and I know it, right? You’re going into the grocery store and [someone says], “hey, that was really stupid and I don’t like that.” Okay, all right, I learned my lesson.
So I really appreciate that, even though it can be like a bit much. But that’s really important. Rural places have so many layers, it’s really complex. It also feels very approachable in terms of community and getting to know people. You start to understand who the families are and the dynamics. Maybe that exists in the city, but not anywhere I’ve ever lived.
It’s nice to be able to understand where people are coming from and how that layers and develops over time after being here for over a decade. There are also lots of willing partners, whether it’s the mayor, the principal of the high school – they’re the people who are never going to turn you away. We need creative energy, we need people to come into the school and talk about college, right? Willing partners are incredibly refreshing, which I think in bigger cities, there’s a lot of red tape or there’s 20 people trying to like work in the school and maybe you’re not going to be prioritized.
It’s the familiarity, which can also be exhausting as well. I’m never anonymous when I go anywhere, one grocery store, one post office, only a certain number of restaurants. And so even when you’re off the clock, you’re on the clock, which is good and bad.
Neon welcome sign by artist Lisa Ward (Photo by John Watson)
DY: Yeah, that kind of transitions well into my next question: What does collaboration look like for you? What do you see as the value of collaboration for rural development work?
MS: Yeah, I think collaboration is everything and it can’t be an afterthought. When I talk about going to the basketball games and showing up and being a substitute teacher, it’s filling in gaps, but also understanding the community. And so when you go to ask this parent, “Hey, do you want to participate in this project?” They know who you are. They know you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do. Building that sort of trust over years is really important. So that you’re able to engage those people that are in the community from the start of a project.
We also really value rural-to-rural collaborations. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel if the next town over has already dealt with this. How can we kind of take lessons they learned? And then also what information can we give back to them? So that exchange is really important to us. And same with rural-to-urban, but I think rural-to-rural is especially valuable. And then we also bring in a lot of outsiders, like I said, through our artists in residence program.
Our visiting artists come in and collaborate with the community on different projects, whether it’s an event, or a publication, or whatever it might be. It’s at the core of everything we do. It’s almost like a hard question to answer because collaboration is everything. We don’t do anything in a silo.
“Localized Gestures” by 2019 Frontier Fellow Calista Lyon (Photo by Calista Lyon)
DY: Yeah, definitely. Are there any upcoming projects that you’re particularly excited about right now?
MS: A lot of our projects are coming to a close, which is exciting. We just had our summit, we’re almost done with a city park that we’ve been working on. We are halfway through some of our current fellowships, which are really exciting.
I’ll just talk about one of them briefly, by the artist Teal Gardner. Green River is a post-uranium, post-boom and bust community, and has a lot of dilapidated buildings. A lot of people come to town and they photograph these old buildings that are just totally derelict, right? And they’re like, there’s cool old buildings. They talk about what was, what was the potential – that’s like, focus on the past. And yeah, those things are cool, but we also want new buildings. We want those buildings to be fixed up. And Teal’s project is specifically focusing on people’s front yards where they have given a lot of care and created something that’s really beautiful and outward facing. And so instead of focusing on this “ruin porn,” which seriously, google Green River and that’s most of what you see, instead can we focus on the people who do live here and the care that they give to the land that they own or rent?
[Gardner] is going to be documenting those yards and those people and learning their stories. And she’s a ceramic artist too. I think she’s going to be creating some ceramic trophies to potentially give out for like best shrubs, you know, most unique yard, or whatever it might be. I think that’ll be really fun. And on surface level, it probably seems like, “that’s like a cute project,” but I think it goes so much deeper than that. It’s talking about people’s perception of rural spaces, especially like why does this town look like crap when you drive through it? There’s so much, so much history and layers, and reasons why these spaces look like this. And so her project will address a lot of that. And that’s just one of like five projects that we have by our artists this year. So I’m pretty, I’m pretty stoked on that one.
We’re also getting our first five houses done on Canal Commons. So we’ve been working for years to develop affordable housing and we’ve done a lot of home repairs and we’ve built a couple of houses including a prototype for mobile home replacement. Using all that information we then approached the city about some land that’s actually right next to our building here. The city donated the land. I say donated, but actually we’re trading in-kind services – I think I finally paid our debt, through grant writing and volunteering for one million things. But anyway, we own the land now and we’re developing affordable housing on that. It’s 30, 40 years since there’s been new affordable housing built in Green River. So when that is finally completed, probably in November, that’ll be huge and really exciting. I think it gives a lot of people in town hope for the future because it used to be like, “my kid wants to move back to Green River, but there’s nowhere to live and I don’t want them to live with me.” And so we had a lot of – we have a lot of – continued out-migration.
DY: Yeah, I feel like that’s a constant issue in so many communities and that’s all really important. My last question for you is, I love your website URL, which is ruralandproud.org. That stood out to me and I’m just curious, what does it mean to you to be a proud rural resident?
MS: It means a lot of things, but I think it makes me go to this Ed[ward] Abbey quote that I talk about a lot, partly because one of our artists did some neon art with this quote, but it’s “instead of loneliness, I feel loveliness.” And it’s this sort of idea that a lot of people perceive rural places as places in deficit, they’re places that need resources, they’re places that need help. And there’s very little focus on the resources that do exist. Like knowing your neighbors, that social capital. Access to the land, hopefully. I could list so many things that rural places have and why we live in these places. and so I think let’s focus on the positive, how do we strengthen those assets while also addressing the challenges?
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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