Brenda Jaton (Wagner City Council member) and Mayor, Tammy Thorton, attended the 2024 South Dakota State University (SDSU) Energize Conference held May 22nd and 23rd in Hot Springs. This was the first time that anyone from Wagner had attended the event. There were approximately 140 people registered for the conference representing communities from all across South Dakota. Previous energize conferences have been hosted in DeSmet, Lemmon, Milbank, Fort Pierre and Wessington Springs.

The Energize conference is about and for rural communities and is held annually in a community with less than 5,000 people. Each conference has a keynote speaker and sessions that feature South Dakota rural community and business success stories. The energize conference is a great source of networking and meeting with resource partners that serve South Dakota communities and businesses. The SDSU Energize conference’s goal is to make rural communities stronger.

All of the Wagner City Council members were invited to go to the conference, but Brenda and Tammy were the only two who were available to attend. This was Mayor Thorton’s first time hearing about the event, but upon learning about it heard that the conference had a lot of good information that could potentially help small towns grow and ideas on how to get there. One area that Mayor Thorton was hoping to get ideas about was what other towns were doing when it came to housing shortages in their communities. Mayor Thorton really enjoyed networking and meeting people that were willing to share their ideas, their ups and downs of the process, where to find help if needed and the personal stories shared by the presenters.

Brenda and Tammy split up for the different sessions in order to attend as many different session topics as possible. Tammy attended the sessions of “Attracting and Retaining Residents”, “Being a Welcoming Community for New Residents”, “Making the Jump – Wisconsin to South Dakota” and “Bring Our Kids Home!”.

In the first session, Brenda attended ‘Creating a Foundation for Building Community” with speaker, Mayor Mary Williams of Wall. This presentation spoke a lot on what Wall did due to their need for more housing for the city. Wall found a developer that brought in governor homes. The governor’s homes that were brought in sold right away. Within the last year 21 more governor’s homes were brought in and at the time of the presentation there were over 40 lots available for people to build homes on. In that year, Wall was also able to expand their airport. Young people began to move into Wall, many of them recent vocational college graduates. With an influx of recent vocational graduates moving into Wall, the City of Wall responded by building industrial condos. The vocational condos were made for young entrepreneurs who were looking to start up their own businesses in the area.

The second session that Brenda attended was the “Building Community Through Fundraising to Put life Back into Hyde County” with speakers Beth Simonson and Carrie Stephenson of Highmore. The ladies talked about how they were a part of the Highmore Pool Fundraising Committee. Some of the ideas that they had done to raise money for a new pool were very similar to those that Wagner has been doing. The Highmore Pool Fundraising Committee was able to raise $1,000,000 in two years. One idea that they presented was combining with other non-profits when they held events. For example, the pool fundraising committee held Chase the Ace at a senior meals fundraiser. The pool committee raised $90,000 and senior meals raised $15,000. Even though some of the ideas that had worked for Highmore were ideas that the Wagner Pool Fundraising has been doing, Brenda still felt that she came out of that session with some more and different ways to approach their fundraising efforts.

The third session that Brenda attended was “World Fest! Adjacent Community Collaboration!” with speakers, Matt Fridell of Custer and Terry Slagel of Hot Springs. The two towns of Custer and Hot Springs teamed up to form an Arts Council (similar to Wagner’s Unity Jam) and formed the Burn the Beetle Festival. It began a week after Christmas with community members piling their Christmas trees. The Christmas trees would then be arranged to build a beetle. Upon the chosen night of the festival, community members would buy torches and follow the beetle through town until they came to the place where they would burn the beetle. This eventually turned into a big event with pub crawls, bands, etc. Now twice a year, in the fall Custer puts on a week’s worth of entertainment and music and in the spring Hot Springs does the same. It is a way to bring bigger named bands, artists, entertainment to the area and split the costs between the two towns.

The fourth and final session that Brenda attended was “Wrangling Volunteers West River!” with speakers from a group that was similar to the Red Hat ladies. What the speakers of this session emphasized was that small towns needed to work together instead of in “silos” (or just within their own group). By working together and cross-coordinating with other groups there is a wider range of volunteers that can be called upon for working at different fundraising or volunteer needed events. This would also help better organize volunteers.

The event closed with a panel titled “Voices of the Next Generation: Young Entrepreneurs”. There were five members of the panel all under 21 years of age that had chosen to start and operate their own business. Two of the panelists were from near Wagner. Aaron Sundquist with AccurAerial Solutions of Gregory and Reese Powers with Made & Company of Avon.

As the SDSU Energize Conference is looking for its next host city in 2025, Brenda had said that she would like to see Wagner be a site for this conference whether it be in 2025 or a future conference. Every year the conference alternates its location west river to east river. 2025 will be an east river location year.

Thank you Brenda and Tammy for sharing your experiences from the 2024 SDSU Energize Conference and we hope to see some of the interesting ideas that you learned of be utilized in our own community.