Fairfield is a small city in the southeastern corner of the US state of Iowa, more than 100 miles from the state capital of Des Moines. Iowa is America’s number one producer of corn and devotes 90% of its land mass to agriculture. But Fairfield’s economy has gone in a different direction. The city of Fairfield, with its 9,000 people, offers an example of entrepreneurial growth taking place deep in the farm belt.
And “farm belt” is a fair description of Iowa. Agriculture contributes one-third of its US$160 billion economy and employs one out of every five Iowans. The major products are corn, soybeans, pork, and eggs. But in Fairfield, which has farms as well, there are six times more small businesses per 100 people than the average for US cities It has been dubbed “Silicorn Valley” by WIRED magazine, because it has a diversified economy of education, software development, telecom, financial services, manufacturing, and marketing, such as you would expect to find in a much larger place.
Origins
The Fairfield of today has a unique origin. The city was home to Parsons College nearly a century before that institution closed its doors in 1973. Two years earlier, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM), opened a university in California – but by 1973, he was looking for a new, permanent home and the search led him to purchase the Parsons campus. Maharishi International University (MIU) opened one year later and began attracting students from around the world. The university soon received accreditation to the PhD level and has thrived ever since.
In the 1980’s, practitioners of TM began migrating to Fairfield in large numbers to collectively practice meditation. During the 80’s and 90’s hundreds of new businesses were started, most of them serving markets outside Fairfield thanks to telecommunications. As that vital technology evolved, entrepreneurs formed ISPs that invested in DSL and fiber broadband, resulting in a 90% adoption rate today for high-speed service. The next generation of entrepreneurs is putting it to work, with the support of the entire community, to give Fairfield’s youth a rewarding future.
Equipping Students with Skills
A high school program called Portrait of a Graduate equips students for success in life. It gives them competencies in the soft skills that are so important to business — communication, leadership, workforce readiness, and critical thinking — while offering specific instruction and work-based learning in fields from business and welding to healthcare services.
Each course in the program provides MIU credit upon graduation from high school. That university offers undergraduate and graduate courses in business administration, media, regenerative agriculture, computer science, and other fields — a range of education rare in a community of this size.
Supporting Entrepreneurship
Business, government and educators have also collaborated in establishing the Fairfield CoLab. This incubator provides co-working space and financial and business development services from the community college, local banks and angel investors. The CoLab runs the kind of pitch events, tech meetups, and seminars an entrepreneur would expect to find in one of the country’s fable technology hubs.
The same collaboration has built an economic development business park. The focus of the city’s business attraction efforts, it also ensures that successful startups coming out of the CoLab have a ready-made location where they can grow.
Community and Cultural Amenities
Fairfield understands that competing with larger urban areas for attracting and retaining skilled workers is about the quality of life. As entrepreneurship grew, so have community amenities including new recreation centers, pools, a 16-mile hike-and-bike trail, a 35,000 square-foot theater and conference center, and diverse downtown shopping and dining. A less common amenity for an American city is the nonprofit childcare center that provides a safe and supportive space for nearly 200 children, so their parents can make a living or build a business. It was business-government-citizen collaboration that convinced a local hospital to donate land, won state government grants and raised private donations to build and staff the center.
Neighbors Helping Neighbors
The childcare center is emblematic of Fairfield’s top-down/bottom-up approach to development, with private and public sectors working hand in hand. Most significant civic amenities – from the Fairfield Arts and Convention Center to the Fairfield Loop Trail, both US$9 million projects – were initiated and led by citizens who worked on the projects for decades. They are potent examples of a simple and profound Fairfield principle: that neighbors help neighbors.
Today, Maharishi International University is more than an institution of higher learning. Its degree programs in arts, science, media, physics, agriculture and business are balanced by studies in meditation, wellness, consciousness and human potential. Its graduates emerge, not just with degrees, but with a strong sense of belonging to something greater than themselves and with the skills to manage life’s complexities in the context of community. Together, they achieve much that other places, bigger in size if not ambition, are still dreaming of.
Population: 15,663
Website: www.visitfairfieldiowa.com | growfairfield.com | www.miu.edu
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