After Hurricanes, Recessions and a Pandemic, How Did NC’s Small Towns Fare?
November 10, 2026
- Author
- Emily Drew
Exploring how 23 North Carolina small towns have addressed public policy challenges and opportunities over the last 20 years, field research will begin with the Town of Davidson.
A first-of-its-kind partnership between Davidson College and UNC’s School of Government will explore how 23 North Carolina small towns have addressed public policy challenges and opportunities over the last 20 years.
“Small Towns, Big Ideas Revisited” is also the first major public policy research initiative launched by the Allison S. and Thomas C. Franco Program on Public Policy and Research of the D.G. and Harriet Wall Martin Institute for Public Good.
Over the next year, the Davidson-UNC team will gather data and conduct interviews with civic leaders in government, the private sector and non-profits, to better understand public policy decisions in those 23 towns and share lessons learned throughout North Carolina and beyond.
The 2008 report featured case studies including 23 small towns across North Carolina that focused on opportunities, challenges, and particular policies helping these towns survive and thrive in challenging economic times.
A Serendipitous Start
Prof. Ken Menkhaus—Davidson’s lead on the partnership—called the collaboration “serendipitous.”
It sparked last summer, when he and a team of student researchers were mapping nonprofits in rural Western North Carolina as part of his community-engaged learning class “Philanthropy and the Nonprofit sector”—research made possible by a gift from the Cannon Family Charitable Trust.
Menkhaus had just been appointed the Allison S. and Thomas C. Franco Director of Public Policy and Research at the Martin Institute: “As we were doing the deep dive on issues and needs in rural North Carolina,” he said, “it became apparent that there were lots of opportunities for the Franco Program to make a contribution.”
One study caught his eye immediately: a 2008 UNC report called “Small Towns, Big Ideas.” The report featured case studies including 23 small towns across North Carolina that focused on opportunities, challenges, and particular policies helping these towns survive and thrive in challenging economic times.
“Within 15 minutes of reading it, I had the aha moment: this is the perfect time to revisit this study 20 years later,” he said.
He reached out to the architect of that 2008 study, Anita Brown-Graham, the founder and director of the ncIMPACT Initiative and the Gladys Hall Coates Distinguished Professor of Public Law and Government at the UNC School of Government.
Brown-Graham said Menkhaus called at the perfect moment, when she had already been considering a reboot.
“I was intrigued by Ken’s vision for the study,” she said. “It wasn’t just ‘let’s revisit;’ it was, let’s think together about which innovations had staying power over 20 years, and let’s examine the enormous challenges, whether Covid-19, the 2008 recession, or a natural disaster, these towns have confronted since the original study.”
For Brown-Graham, the partnership has another layer of personal significance because of the Martin Institute.
“D.G. Martin was an influential thinker on the wellbeing of communities across our state,” she said, “How cool is it to be able to carry forward his legacy of thoughtfulness in partnership with an institution named for him that sits on a campus he so loved? I suspect he’s looking down on this project with his trademarked gleam in his eyes.”
Davidson Ties
Menkhaus said the partnership was go-for-launch when Davidson alums John McArthur ’77 and Margaret Herman ’79 stepped in with a generous gift to the Franco Program.
“It was another serendipitous moment in all this,” Menkhaus said. “John himself has a long career in economic development in rural North Carolina, especially in his role with the Golden LEAF Foundation.”
The moment was also serendipitous for Brown-Graham, who worked with McArthur on the recovery from the devastation Hurricane Floyd inflicted on eastern North Carolina in 1999.
“John has long demonstrated his commitment to ensuring all places in our state, irrespective of size, have an opportunity to thrive,” she said.
McArthur and Herman seek to cultivate the next generation of policy leaders.
“I hope this program will provide students with the opportunity to do rigorous, actionable policy work on real world problems,” John said. “It can be a unique educational experience for them, as well as provide valuable policy recommendations for challenged communities in North Carolina.”
Thanks to McArthur and Herman’s support, the “Small Towns” research team will include nine student research assistants: two UNC School of Government graduate students and seven Davidson College students.
Led by Brown-Graham and Menkhaus, the group will conduct field research in all 23 towns over the next year, starting with the Town of Davidson.
“It’s low-hanging fruit for me,” Menkhaus grinned.
For each town, the team will consider three different lines of inquiry.
First, the team will go back to the 2008 study, consider those policy innovations and ask how the town has done in the ensuing 20 years.
Second, Menkhaus explained, “we’re asking a set of questions on issues common to all of these small towns so that we can engage in comparative public policy analysis.”
And third, the researchers will gather stories of opportunities and challenges specific to each town.
“In some cases, it might be the closure of a big paper factory or a hurricane,” he said, “and we will privilege those stories as well.”
Brown-Graham stressed the individual stories as key to the report.
“Many of the stories will feature bumps in the road,” she said. “Even for those, our work needs to be affirming. Small-town work is hard work. What we say needs to make clear there are no magic wands and faltering does not mean failure.”
She and Menkhaus both hope they can uncover more about the infrastructure and support necessary for policy innovations to flourish. They also hope their findings will inform state government, foundations and corporations about how to invest more strategically in the future of these small towns.
Brown-Graham and Menkhaus are planning a book-length study, like the 2008 report, that’s free and available online for anyone to access.
“We are principally motivated by the goal of generating useful lessons for all town leadership across North Carolina and, really for that matter, rural America,” Menkhaus said.
Both are eager for the work to get underway.
“I’m avidly curious to examine what is happening in each of the towns today,” Brown-Graham said.
‘An Insane Opportunity’
“One of the pleasures in all of this,” Menkhaus said, “is the chance to mentor students who are so genuinely excited to learn how to do this kind of research,” possibly even conducting field interviews themselves, a method Menkhaus calls “an art form.”
Musa Camera ’29 and Prof. Ken Menkhaus
Research Assistant Musa Camera ’29 said he knew he had to get involved with the “Small Towns” project as soon as it was announced.
“I used to live in a small town in rural North Carolina—Archer Lodge—and then this past summer I worked in state government and got to learn a lot about the economic policy for rural North Carolina,” he said. “It’s right up my alley.”
Another research assistant, Caroline Cates ’30, grew up in Roxboro, North Carolina, and said she wants to take lessons learned back to her hometown: “Seeing how policy is enacted and seeing the real-life effects that policy documents have on real people—I think it’s going to be really interesting.”
For Research Assistant Liam Anderson ’27, it’s about a passion for public policy work.
“I’ve been waiting four years for something like this to come about at Davidson,” he said. “The chance to get real quantitative experience, real experience talking to policy leaders and getting hands-on research experience and producing policy products—I mean, it’s an insane opportunity as an undergraduate at a liberal arts college, and to be able to contribute to something like this is a real honor.”
