Professionals find jobs back in rural hometowns

LEBANON, Va. — Software engineer Keith Brown was conducting a meeting by teleconference at home when he had to call an abrupt halt. Dido, one of his family's two dogs, had just brought in a dead opossum.

Welcome to the professional life in this slice of rural southwest Virginia.

Like many before him, the 42-year-old Brown left this region of rolling hills and verdant valleys after high school because he saw no future outside farming and mining.

"I only left because there were no opportunities," he said.

Now he is one of a growing number bringing their professions back to small-town America thanks to Web-based recruitment campaigns by rural regions beckoning with quality of life.

In isolated southwest Virginia, the program is called Return to Roots. Funded by the Virginia Tobacco Commission and private grants, it lists job openings on its Web site that include positions in information technology, engineering, education and health care.

Similar Web-based efforts have been launched by states such as Vermont and South Dakota. An Iowa site calls the state "more livable than 88 percent of the U.S.," while Vermont promises "vibrant small towns and cities and growing opportunities in high technology and other information-based sectors."

Kansas has a program aimed at professionals in bioscience that it plans to expand to a statewide initiative for all types of jobs, said state Commerce Department spokesman Caleb Asher.

More than 500 job-seekers have moved to South Dakota for a variety of jobs since it launched Dakota Roots in October 2006, said Dawn Dovre, a state Labor Department spokeswoman.

Under southwest Virginia's program, some 30,000 postcards promoting the Web site have been mailed to high-school and college graduates from the area.

Rural areas have gained appeal among companies looking for a less expensive way to do business without sending jobs overseas. Northrop Grumman's Lebanon, Va., office, for instance, is a call center and backup data center for Virginia's state government.

"A call center in northern Virginia would have been unaffordable," said Doug McVicar, a Northrop Grumman vice president.

Brown and his wife, Julia, also a software engineer, are among few direct placements the Return to Roots program claims.

For the Browns, the target was rural Russell County. CGI Group's new quarters, where the two work, sits opposite Northrop Grumman, forming a mini-technology corridor amid the farm fields.

Glade Spring native Jeremy Honaker found his own way home. After moving to northern Virginia and taking a job at Northrop Grumman headquarters, he transferred to its Lebanon center as a recruiter.

Honaker prefers to find job candidates through the Return to Roots Web site, he said, because "I know that person understands they're looking for a job in rural Virginia."

Keith Brown grew up about an hour's drive north in Bluefield, where his parents still live. Brown stayed close by for college at Emory & Henry College. But when he finished, it never dawned on him to go home.

"It was just expected. You had to leave," he said. "You couldn't get anything hardly above minimum wage or that would hardly be 40 hours a week."

In 2005, the latest year for which U.S. Census Bureau estimates were available, the median household income for Russell County was $29,865, compared with $54,207 for the state. The county's population was about 29,000, down from more than 30,300 counted in the 2000 census.

The Browns were about to leave Cincinnati after 13 years anyway for a move with Lockheed Martin to upstate New York, but they considered the new possibility when they learned of the Return to Roots project.

"Once we understood the vision, we chose to come here," Keith Brown said.

Honaker is grateful to be free of Washington, D.C.-area traffic. He drives twice as far to work now but gets there in half the time. "I bought a motorcycle and commute across Clinch Mountain after work," he said. "It's actually a stress reliever."

Julia Brown is a little troubled by a lack of ethnic diversity because their daughter, Wendy, is from China.

But for the most part, the family has felt welcome in Virginia.