Remote Work and Rural Rejuvination

When you unlock jobs from locations, you enable people to live where they love, which hugely helps our communities. Grow Remote started when community developers, mostly from rural areas, got together to dig deeper on what we felt was a lot of hype around remote work.

3 years later, turns out it wasn’t hype! We found that distributed employment was there, it’s just that the world of remote work was worlds away from the worlds of our communities. Core to our community is empowering others, and so overnight, we grew into 80 local communities. The goal was to make remote work (employment) visible and accessible locally.

Rural Rejuvenation chapters usually have one of 3 goals:

  1. Get local people employed
  2. Stop the trend of de-population and attract remote workers to live locally
  3. Solve for isolation of local remote workers

Our Dingle Chapter Lead, Deirdre is the manager of a creative hub in Dingle and came up with an idea of Town Tasters. It’s centred around opening up our communties and giving access to the things that matter when employment location doesn’t.

It has since worked well in Dingle, Valentia Island, and now Portugal. Our globalisation lead for Grow Remote took to a rural town outside Lisbon, bringing remote workers to come and experience what it would be like to live and work in regional Portugal:

If you’d like to run your own Town Taster, sign up here: http://changex.org/ie/growremote