Rural areas of the world share many common problems, such as a lack of diverse educational and economic development opportunities. This paper argues that only when rural areas develop strong partnerships among organizations with diverse strengths, and these organizations bring some measure of power to these partnerships, will these rural areas be able to compete with urban areas. The author describes the Rural Community College Initiative (RCCI) at New Mexico State University at Carlsbad, funded by the Ford Foundation. RCCI expired in June 2002, but the RCCI team incubated Community Vision in order to continue the work of RCCI. The Community Vision Board has determined that its value to the community is as a facilitator for grassroots democracy to identify quality of life issues in a process they call The Visioning Virus. The Vision project offers leadership from a supporting position, thus allowing community groups to create their own community development programs. Groups of people working on goals set during the Visioning process are the primary measure of Community Vision success. During the initial Visioning process, there were over 1,000 community goals adopted. More than 2,000 citizens voted on the goals, and the top 30 were selected for research and/or implementation by a team of volunteers. Charts delineating goal statements, number of votes per statement, and state of progress per goal are appended. (Author/NB)