BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The Lost Treasures Cluster was comprised of 1 3 communities organized in 10 teams throughout seven highly rural and sparsely populated counties, five in Nebraska and two in Colorado. This is high plains country, with rolling hills and river valleys on the Nebraska side and flat, broad vistas in Colorado. Approximately 90% of the land in both states is categorized as farmland by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Wheat and com are common crops, and pastures with native grasses are attractive to livestock raisers. A Colorado farm family is proposing to develop several hog production facilities in two of the counties: Wray County in Colorado and Dundy in Nebraska. Some nontraditional crops for the area include potatoes, grown in Wray County by the same family.
All five counties in Nebraska lost population between 1990 and 1995. One, Hitchcock County, lost 9% of its residents during that five-year period. The two Colorado counties, by contrast, grew during the same period, both in the range of 3%. Loss of population, especially due to out-migration of young people when they graduate from high school, was cited in the Lost Treasures proposal as a major reason to become involved in MIRA. Typically, 85% of youth leave and do not return. Unemployment is low, and jobs are scarce. The proposal expressed hope that through MIRA opportunities for technology-related careers might become clearer so that more young people could stay or return after further education.
Towns involved in the Cluster are small, ranging from as small as 150 to as large as 2000, located, at the most, about 90 miles apart. Workshop and meeting schedules were made more complicated, however, by the fact that the Cluster area bridges two time zones and an hour was either gained or lost as travelers crossed from Mountain Time into Central or vice versa. Nebraska teams were from Imperial, Grant, Wauneta/Palisade, Benkelman/Haigler/Max (Dundy County Team), Stratton, Trenton and Madrid/Elsie (Wheatland School District); Colorado teams were from Holyoke and Wray.
This Cluster was youth-dominated, with about 80% high school students making up the typical participant group at workshops. That feature posed both opportunities and challenges, as some of the young people originally had difficulty keeping up with workshop planning
and organizing tasks and as school and community activities got in the way of workshop attendance. Of the 10 teams originally in the Cluster, only four met attendance requirements and qualified for project grants. At one point, when it became clear that few teams would qualify, the Cluster told the W.K. Kellogg Foundation that it was dropping out, but then cooler heads prevailed.
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