Creating a future-ready rural community in eastern Oregon
By Kristie Perry
“One day we should live in Halfway.”
Debi Lorence and her husband, Walt, had been visiting Halfway, OR, for 28 years when the idea of relocating to this tiny community of 351 people popped into her head. It wasn’t just the spectacular scenery, outdoor recreation, and friendly people that kept them coming back. It was also the community’s understanding of what it means to draw sustenance—in all its forms—from the land.
Lorence, a hiker, cyclist, gardener, and educator, grew up in Washington County and spent her summers in the southern Willamette Valley, where her grandparents ran an organic farm and raised cows and horses. For decades, she and Walt lived in Hillsboro with their two daughters and managed a Christmas tree farm, an endeavor that brought them “wellness, peace, and happiness.”
Their dream of moving west to east became a reality in November 2020, when they purchased 17 acres in Halfway.
Leadership through service
In 2023, Lorence was one of 21 individuals to participate in the inaugural cohort of “Turn Up Your Voice” (TUYV), a collaboration between PSU’s Center for Women’s Leadership (CWL) and Coburg-based Rural Development Initiatives (RDI). TUYV is designed to help women and gender-expansive leaders from rural areas sharpen their skills in policy advocacy, coalition-building, and messaging.
Lorence was drawn to TUYV by the opportunity to learn from other women doing similar work. The experience allowed Lorence, who embodies a leadership-through-service ideal, to deepen and broaden her skillset at a time when her community needed a champion. “We were hurting,” she says – and that sense left her determined to advocate for Halfway in front of the Oregon Legislature during the cohort’s culminating trip to the Capitol.
Jumping right in
Halfway sits in an area of Baker County known as Pine Valley. The town gets almost 70 inches of snow annually, and avalanches sometimes cut
Halfway off from the rest of the State. Located high above Hells Canyon, the region’s dry summers make it especially susceptible to wildland fires.
The first thing Lorence asked herself when she got to Halfway was “how can I help?”
In a small town with many urgent and overlapping concerns—a sagging economy, a geography susceptible to climate-related disasters, and under-resourced schools and emergency services—it didn’t take long for Lorence to answer that question. She started by volunteering with Halfway’s fire department, then by joining forces with other property owners to reconstitute a local chapter of the Oregon Small Woodlands Association. When she offered to take on grant-writing assignments to help problem-solve for a number of community needs, she discovered that her new hometown was not only struggling to pay the bills, but also operating without a strategic plan. Citizens had been working hard to shore things up, but they were working in silos. They needed someone with the time and energy to coordinate efforts and help folks reimagine what Halfway could be in the 21st century. Lorence again stepped up.
“The integrity, and the love, and the family feel”
A willingness to roll up her sleeves had already helped Lorence forge an important connection with Maurizio Valerio, a senior field coordinator with Roseburg-based Ford Family Foundation. Since 1957, the Foundation has supported the people and places of rural Oregon through grants, scholarships, and community building.
With financial support from the Foundation, Lorence teamed up with Valerio to launch a community group whose first goal was to guide area stakeholders through a visioning process.
Organizers called themselves “Pine Valley 2050,” a name derived from a thought experiment: why would Gen Z and Gen Alpha—those born between 1995 and 2024—want to stay or return to Halfway after leaving for college or career opportunities?
A small committee composed of Halfway’s mayor, a local journalist, an architect, and a seventh-generation resident and mom of two gathered to kick things off. A representative from United Community Partners (UCP), a nonprofit that facilitates organizational assistance for citizen-led initiatives, also joined.
The chaos of the Covid pandemic years prompted many communities—both urban and rural—to engage in self-examination. What was different for rural communities, Lorence notes, was that they were absorbing an influx of people fleeing big cities during what some demographers dubbed “the Great Migration.”
In Halfway, “we weren’t sure if we had the infrastructure to handle what might come next,” Lorence explains. “Did we have the housing, did we have jobs? Was our school system ready? We weren’t even sure we could feed people.
“We needed to figure out how to move this area into the future while keeping the integrity, and the love, and the family feel. We wanted to support all the work that had been done for years, through the already established 20-plus non-profits, retain all of the existing businesses, prepare for the continual aging of our population, and become a welcoming community for the new young families moving in. We needed direction, purpose, and resiliency.”
Valerio provided important advice to Lorence and the Committee, encouraging them first to conduct a community needs-and-wants survey. Overwhelmingly, Halfway residents spoke up for Main Street revitalization efforts. They wanted storefronts repaired and sidewalks patched. They wanted streetlights turned on and flower baskets hung. They wanted empty buildings filled with thriving local businesses and community events like parades and live music. The feedback laid the groundwork for a comprehensive city planning process that resulted in the adoption of a five-year strategic plan in 2024.
From tragedy to action
As Lorence was getting ready to join TUYV, her heart was heavy. Just a few months earlier, Halfway had lost two community members within 13 hours in two separate and devastating vehicle accidents. An insufficient number of emergency vehicles and aging emergency equipment had compounded the challenges posed by too few emergency medical technicians (EMTs) serving a remote, mountainous area far from trauma centers. In an ambulance, for example, batteries power everything from defibrillators to power-lift gurneys. It takes time for those batteries to recharge, and the older the batteries, the more quickly they lose their juice.
The batteries in Halfway’s ambulance were depleted when the second call for help came in.
In rural Oregon, universal problems—like finding adequate funding for services, equipment, and personnel—can be tricky to solve. Elected officials from the State’s population centers don’t always grasp the complexities. Lorence experienced the weight of this when she relayed Halfway’s tragedy to a legislative committee in Salem. “They looked at me like deer in headlights,” she says. “They told me we should combine our fire and ambulance districts and go get tax dollars.”
For a city with an annual budget of less than $1.5 million, creating a tax district to replace equipment that costs $30,000 to more than $100,000 apiece is no small thing. Halfway was still coming out of Covid and in “survival mode,” Lorence says. “It seemed like [the Legislature] didn’t understand rural communities.”
But her TUYV peers did. And the experts who facilitated the cohort’s discussions were able to point Lorence to the government agencies, processes, and funding streams that could help.
Re-energized, Lorence began brainstorming ways for bigger cities to transfer their retiring equipment to rural communities. “What they consider old is new to us,” she says. Lorence also pitched in on efforts to create a charitable organization designed explicitly to underwrite EMT training for local residents who would then pay it forward by providing two years of emergency response services to Halfway.
Creating forward motion
Since its founding, Pine Valley 2050 has grown into a network of 30 volunteer-run non-profits. Lorence continues to assist many of them through her grant-writing efforts, thus far bringing in about $500,000 to the community.
Last year, a guest-teaching gig at Halfway’s Pine Eagle High School on mitigating fire risk morphed into an official position teaching environmental/forestry science. And now, Lorence is working on connecting the students she teaches to local career and non-profit Board service opportunities.
“In rural communities, everybody wears so many hats. Our non-profit Board members are older. I want to try to help by creating ways to pass the baton.”
Reflecting on the last four years and her experience with CWL, Lorence says one of the most valuable lessons she’s learned is the importance of being an active listener and recognizing that just because people are upset doesn’t mean they’re quite ready for change.
“I’ve always been super Type A,” she says. “I’m thinking ‘I’m gonna die tomorrow, so let’s get this thing done.’ I’m learning how to take a few steps back and instead gently create forward motion. Being able to explore this with other women experiencing the same dynamics and with the same kind of personality as me was really helpful.”
As CWL welcomes its next rural leadership cohort, Lorence remains a testament to what’s possible when learning, mutual support, experience, and a service mindset come together.