Involuntary Staying and the Rural Problematique: Learning to Leave but only able to Stay

The Prentice Institute successfully secured funding for a project on involuntary staying with Finnish partners at the University of Helsinki through the SSHRC Destination Horizon funding stream. While much attention has been paid to rural population retention and attraction, little focus has been placed on understanding why individuals stay in small towns and villages, and rural regions, even if they want to move on. In response, this project engages with on-the-ground, lived experiences of “involuntary staying” and immobility in order to understand and map how rurality intersects with other systemic, socio-economic inequities that impact mobility, such as the exploitation of temporary migrants, the impacts of Intimate Partner Violence, and the increase in homelessness and housing insecurity. Understanding how and why rural populations stay in place is necessary for building healthy and sustainable communities in which residents chose to stay rather than staying because they cannot leave. The goal of this project was to facilitate conversations and build partnerships around the broad theme of involuntary staying and the systemic nature of various inequities that impact whether an individual stays in place or moves on. The budget was used to explore potential partnerships and collaborations between Canada and Finland on the topic.