Kansas State Young Democrats brought together activists, students and state representatives on Saturday for Beyond the Fields, a bipartisan town hall on rural issues affecting Kansas, such as agriculture, healthcare and education.
Hosted by Young Dems, Melissa Sabin organized the event. Sabin said in-person events like Beyond the Fields helps people make informed decisions directly with their representatives.
“You can never really take away the human element of really being able to see people in what they stand for and hear straight from them where it can’t be misconstrued by filters, whether that’s media or someone else writing their perspective on what the issues we addressed were,” Sabin said. “… We need to bring these issues to the people and meet them where they’re at.”
Samantha Suchanek, president of Young Dems, said K-State was the perfect campus to host the panel because of its close ties to agriculture around Kansas.
“K State is in a really unique position as a college, being the first land grant university,” Suchanek said. “It’s one of the bigger universities in Kansas on the western side, so we have a lot of students who are here with an ag focus and who are coming from rural families, and showing that you can be from a rural area and still care about the Democratic Party, and electing Democratic leaders, is super important.”
However, Suchanek said bipartisanship at panel events is important to Young Dems, as they want to represent every student.
“We really try our best to focus on civic engagement more than just pushing democratic policies, because at the end of the day getting K-Staters and voters educated and letting them come to their own conclusions is more important than pushing our own agendas out.”
Will Westmoreland, founder of The Back Forty, an activist group for rural America, was a key panelist. Raised on his grandparents’ farm, Westmoreland suffered a childhood accident that left him with limited use of his left arm and familiarized him with the challenges faced by rural families.
Westmoreland brought perspective from “lived experience” to the panel, according to The Back Forty.
Another participant was Cindy Holscher, Democratic candidate for Kansas Governor and representative of Kansas District 8.
Panel moderator Pete Adams of the Kansas Black Farmers Association said Holscher “is committed to fighting for fully funded public schools, access to affordable healthcare, domestic violence reform and common-sense policies that keep Kansas moving forward.”
Christy Davis, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate and ‘97 K-State alumna, was also on the panel. Davis served as a White House appointee for USDA Rural Development under the Biden administration, and she said her experience shaped her will to tackle issues, specifically concerning healthcare and education.
“With education, this has become federalized, because they’ve eliminated funding through the U.S. Department of Education and its affected our schools’ ability to provide services,” Davis said. “There’s also gonna be impact with the proposed constitutional amendment related to the Supreme Court justices because they’re holding a line on school funding, which is a constitutional right to Kansas.”
Davis said Kansas healthcare suffers from similar causes.
“Because of the reliance, in particular, on Medicaid, so many of our rural hospitals, nursing homes, half of their revenue comes from Medicaid, so when you make those cuts, it threatens their ability to survive.”
Davis also owns a number of small businesses in many counties around Kansas, one of which is a laundromat she co-owns with her husband, which won a preservation award. As she has experience working in small towns throughout Kansas, she said events like Beyond the Fields give rural communities a voice that is often overshadowed by big-city issues in American politics.
“I’ve done a lot of advocacy work through the years and what I’ve learned is that, you know, there’s some people who have a say because they have lobbies,” Davis said. “These communities, there’s no lobbyists for me in Kansas. There’s no lobbyist for rural America, right? And so no one is really speaking for them. It’s really important to hear what they have to say … to listen at the community level.”
Mark Schreiber, state representative for the 60th district, brought a republican voice to the panel. He said he was excited to bring bipartisan views to the event hosted by Young Dems, and hoped it would foster productive conversation.
“Before I was a state representative, I lobbied at the State House for Westar Energy for 15 years, so I’ve been around the capital almost 25 years now,” Schreiber said. “In that time, I think the best policy has come about when both parties get together and have good conversations about it, rather than each side coming up with their own ideas and trying to get those ideas passed.”
Rural healthcare was also a concern Schreiber wanted to discuss with the panel.
“How to provide good healthcare in the rural areas that they’re losing some population, and the amount of healthcare that’s available to them is starting to get further and further away from them, in my opinion,” he said. “And so, trying to stabilize that in the state is as a large rural healthcare grant that’s been given to them, so it’ll be interesting to see how that process works, and it’s just getting started.”
Students like Mia Reyes, graduate in agriculture, attended the event because of academic and personal interest.
“Oftentimes, I think big ag takes the conversation away from all these small and medium-sized producers,” Reyes said. “Specifically, I know, with my experience with agritourism operators, they’re usually small and medium-sized farms [that] don’t make a lot in income. And then they also have other jobs outside, just being farmers and ranchers, so I think it’s really important that there’s events like this to make sure that we’re keeping them in the conversation and not letting big ag, big corporate interest, take over those conversations and make decisions for them.”
