On March 28th, Brook Taylor, founder of Rural Gone Urban and the Rural Gone Urban Foundation will keynote the 2025 Women in Agriculture Conference in Rock Island, Illinois.
“I really want to focus on the real, real of life that no one, no one’s life is perfect,” says Taylor “We are all given hardships, and none of us are going to live a life without pivots, and we can still choose every day to show up as our as our true self.”
Based in Oklahoma, Taylor uses her experience working in strategic advertising with brands nationally and internationally to help bring high-level corporate strategies to small-town, rural-type businesses.
“I found working with national and international businesses and now smaller, smaller, medium-sized brands, it’s that the work is ultimately the same,” shares Taylor. “It’s just so empowering to see that when we can apply those to brands they really have a larger impact in their communities.”
Following her second diagnosis of cancer in 2022, Taylor launched the Rural Gone Urban Foundation, shining the spotlight on women in the “trenches of some difficult times in their life”. Taylor explains they do this through a three-giving program.
“One is a scholarship for gritty and hard-working students. We never ask about someone’s GPA, because we know that maybe they’re working a few jobs to help their family out, and maybe turning that paper in isn’t the highest priority because they have a lot on their plate. They’re feeding cattle. They’re mucking stalls. They’re taking care of younger siblings,” says Taylor. “We also have a giving program for small-town entrepreneurs, and so we have marketing grants specifically for rural women business owners.”
The third pillar is through the Rural Gone Urban Foundation called the Love Bomb Grant Initiative.
“Those are grants for women who are in the trenches with cancer, and for lack of a better explanation, they are to be selfish- they’re to focus on themselves and to create memories for their families when all they can think about is survival,” says Taylor. “We know that those [grants] are creating a lasting impact with their families because whether it’s a last trip that they take, whether it’s printing the photos from their phone, whether it’s creating just some memories with their family for a whole day or a whole week or a minute, they’re thinking about who they are outside of a scary diagnosis.”
Scholarship applications for the Rural Gone Urban Foundation will be available on March 11 and will be open for one week for students across the United States. More information can be found on the Rural Gone Urban website.
