When Mary Bub and her husband closed their bookstore/art gallery and moved to a small farm in Elkhorn, Wisc., she planned to ease into retirement. That didn’t happen.

Instead, a few personal development workshops quickly grew into the Wisconsin Rural Women’s Initiative, a nonprofit that brings together rural farm women in “Gathering Circles” to talk about problems such as isolation and physical abuse. For some, it is the first time they’ve left their farms in 20 years.

Bub founded the organization a decade ago, when she was 54. “The women are phenomenal and needy and isolated and I love them,” she says. “It’s been 11 years now and I’m not burned out yet.”

Bub spoke with Encore.org about her experience.

Encore.org: Your plan was to retire, move to a small farm and slow down. Instead you launched a nonprofit, something you’d never done before. What happened?

Mary Bub: The plan was to do some artwork, some consulting and a few wellness workshops, and that semi-retirement was really nice for a couple of months. But I was sitting on the front porch of that farmhouse and remembered something that had happened a few years earlier. My older sister, who was living in a very remote part of North Central Wisconsin, was visiting, and she said, ‘I know you travel around, and you talk and give presentations, but what do you do?’

I took her to a personal development workshop I was leading. She told me nobody was doing anything like this near where she lived. She talked about the remoteness, and how difficult it would be for women she knew to get to workshops like these or to pay from them. Church programs offering religious services and counseling were available, but there wasn’t anything to teach women about stress management, self-esteem and so on. I had never really thought about these difficulties.

Here I was looking out rural Wisconsin from my front porch, and her words came back to me. I thought, maybe it’s time someone did something for women in rural areas like my sister. I got a good friend to help, and doors just opened. We didn’t know how to start a nonprofit, but we started talking to people we knew and networking and within a year we had our 501©3 status.

Encore.org: What sort of steps did you take in the beginning?

Bub: We developed a process of going to an area and finding leaders within the area. The leaders could be social workers, church leaders, parish nurses, someone from the farm bureau. We would meet with them to ask them about local needs. From there we would ask them to invite 20 women to come to a gathering circle. Based on assessments from that meeting, we’d work to develop programming for them. What we discovered in meeting with the women was that there were needs far greater than we had anticipated.

Encore.org: What have you learned about the specific needs of rural women, women living on the farms of Wisconsin?

Bub: We’ve learned that rural residents tend to be poorer, the farm crisis has had a huge impact, and suicide rates and domestic violence and abuse are higher. We do free farm women weekends and for some of the women, it’s the first time they’ve been off the farm – save for going to the grocery or feed stores or their children’s school – in 20 years.

In one of our farm women’s weekends, seven out of 14 women had either been in situations of domestic violence and had left those situations, or were still there and had not reported it. We heard that over and over. We heard from women who have been raped in the barn. Rural life is a very different culture.

Encore.org: How do you handle what must sometimes feel like thorny psychological issues? Like when someone reveals abuse or domestic violence?

Bub: The process we’ve developed is called “Gathering Circles.” There’s a strong sense of confidentiality and our volunteer facilitators are all trained with that approach. The women feel comfortable and safe telling their stories. There’s no judgment. We do an intense piece of our training with a psychologist who tells them how to handle these kinds of situations.

I also can provide the women with a lot of resources and follow-up, and ultimately help them build their own sustainable networks. Through the Farm Center, we’ve also managed to get free counseling vouchers for people. We let them know they can call us at any time, and if we think that someone is in immediate danger we can help them and take them to the authorities.

The other issue we’ve uncovered is health care. Many farm women either have no health insurance or poor health insurance. We have two hospital facilities here in Wisconsin that provide free health screenings once a year for our farm women’s weekend. We’ve also just started an elder program to reach out to socially isolated older women.”

Encore.org: How did you build the program?

Bub: The first year we started networking and making contacts and finding local leaders. The second year there was a terrible tornado right before Christmas in northwestern Wisconsin, and I wanted to help in some way, though I had no idea what I could possibly do. So I contacted a woman who was doing small town and rural outreach, and who had done a lot of work in disaster situations. She put me in touch with some people in the area who connected us to local leaders.

We explained who we were and what we do, and asked if there was anything we could do to help them. They asked for a day for women – to give them a break. We did a whole day of events. We had 10 gathering circles women ranging from the age 18 to 85. And at the end of it, they said, ‘You can’t leave now!’ People were so happy to be able to see and connect with their neighbors. They were all in the same situation and it meant something to be able to together share their predicaments. So we followed that up by training 11 local women as facilitators to continue the gathering circle process.

Encore.org: What are your biggest challenges in your work?

Bub: What stresses me the most are the funding and marketing issues. Sometimes I wonder if we should merge with a larger group that could take us over and deal with the funding, or I have a pity party and wonder if we should just quit. But then I’ll get a letter from one of the women or I’ll get a response to an article from our newsletter, and then I’m right back into it. The women are phenomenal and needy and isolated and I love them. It’s been 11 years now and I’m not burned out yet.