Anthony Flaccavento
Rural Urban Bridge Initiative
Director
Anthony Flaccavento is a farmer and rural development consultant from Abingdon, Virginia and the author of Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real World Experience for Transformative Change (University Press of Kentucky, 2016). Anthony was the Democratic candidate for Congress in Virginia’s 9th District in 2018. He co-founded the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative, or RUBI in 2021. A national organization, RUBI works to help progressives, liberals and Democrats understand the underlying causes of the rural-urban divide and take steps to overcome it through education, media work, policy change and local community action. He lives and farms with his wife, Laurel.