For Janna and Randy, the visit became a relocation. They bought a 700-square foot cabin on an acre of land near Hill City for $42,000 – a price that seemed incredibly low compared to Southern California real estate prices. And for awhile Janna was happy to “hang out in my house in the woods, and unwind from the California pace.” But when the euphoria of inspiration and impulse began to wear off, the couple realized that their employment opportunities in the Hills were not what they had hoped.

Sioux Falls natives, Janna and Randy had met and married in the 1980s. She was an Augustana graduate with a degree in Social Work and Sociology; he was a carpenter. In Sioux Falls winter weather often affected his ability to get work, so they decided to move to California. He became a master craftsman, doing high-end woodwork for expensive homes in coastal communities like Laguna Beach and the Newport Coast.  Janna went looking for work. The job she found challenged her intellect, provided an outlet for her creativity and eventually offered her a path to the untethered world of New Pioneers. But it started as a simple typing position.

Registered with a temporary employment agency, Janna was sent one day to the offices of a Laguna Beach-based film production company that needed someone to type a script. MacGillivray Freeman Films had pioneered the development of spectacular IMAX films like TO FLY, which debuted with the opening of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1976. By 1987, it was involved in a variety of exciting projects.

Over the next seven years, Janna’s work with MacGillivray Freeman expanded from typist to producer’s assistant to researcher to premiere planner. She worked on dramatic films about the nature of time, sailing and the wind, the performance limits of the human body, the cultures of Indonesia, life on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, and the wonders of the world ocean.. It was exotic work. She collaborated with smart, creative people from all over the world.  “Essentially, I got paid to learn,” she adds, “it doesn’t get better than that.”   Nevertheless, she and Randy never imagined that they would live the rest of their lives in California.

“We always knew we were coming back,” she says. But there was no plan, just a dream. When they moved to Hill City, she said goodbye to her colleagues in California. Randy imagined that he would be able to do the same kind of carpentry in the Black Hills that he had been doing in Southern California, but as it turned out, there was no market for his high-end work.

Initially, the lack of work was tempered by the excitement of being home. “We have a big family” Janna says, “and we had lots of visitors, including friends and relatives from Sioux Falls and Minneapolis.” Janna set up a little desk in the cabin and Randy had a work bench. But after a 3-month hiatus and a couple of job interviews, Janna made a call to California.

“I asked my old boss if there was anything I could do from South Dakota,” she says. Soon she was researching, working with scriptwriters and collaborating remotely from her little cabin in the Hills. Three or four times a year she flew to Southern California for meetings, production work, or – best of all – film premieres. Eventually Janna used her Social Work skills to help the company establish a non-profit foundation for which she is now Director of Development and Programming.  As her work expanded, Janna even employed a local writer, Kristin Donnan-Standard, as a researcher and collaborator. Kristin, who spent part of her childhood in the Black Hills, had worked in television in L.A. and New York.  She understood the world of scripts and production.

Meanwhile, Randy began designing custom frames for artwork, experimenting with his own concept that blended woodworking with leather. They began selling the frames at art shows around the region and discovered a strong market for Randy’s designs. In 1997 Janna and Randy opened Warrior’s Work, a Main Street art gallery in Hill City.

With a business in town Janna and Randy became more socially connected and increasingly involved in economic development and the arts. Some long-time members of the community didn’t know what to make of Janna and the work she does on IMAX films. “People make the assumption that she is not like them,” says Kristin, “because what she does is not in their realm of experience. They think she has some magic skill and all these connections with famous people.” Janna laughs, reminding us her work is on educational documentaries and the film premieres are most often in museums!

Together Janna and Kristin have worked with others to promote the arts and make Hill City a destination for visitors to the Black Hills. They have asserted that the community’s future lies in attracting the kind of people that writer Richard Florida calls “cultural creatives.” Some of these efforts, including a new sign ordinance, sparked friction in the community between newcomers and long-time residents. But other projects, such as the commissioning of a sculpture of a buffalo – THE PATRIARCH – for the entrance to downtown have fostered cooperation.

“People came together,” Janna says, “to raise the money for that sculpture, arts people and business people, long-time residents and new.”

These efforts to position Hill City as a cultural center have begun to pay dividends. Business investment in the community is rising. Last year, the NEW YORK TIMES featured Hill City as a good place to retire to. For prospective retirees, cultural creatives and others, THE PATRIARCH symbolizes the confluence of the past, present and future of the community. It represents the natural history of the region, and it reflects the promise of creative minds like Janna Emmel, Randy Berger and Kristin Donnan-Standard.

The number of Americans who telecommute occasionally rose 39 percent over the last two years according to a study released this week. Rising fuel prices in 2008, improving technologies for communications and growing concerns for work-life balance among the newest generation of employees no doubt contributed to this dramatic increase. Today, an estimated 17.2 million Americans work from home or some other remote location at least one day a month.

Data in WorldatWork’s TELEWORK TRENDLINES 2009 report also suggests, however, that the New Pioneers trend of working full time from a remote location may be stalling out. According to the report, the number of  people who telecommute on contract, are self-employed or are business owners has remained essentially flat for four years, increasing from 16.2 to 16.6 million. In 2006, 77 percent of the nation’s 28.7 million employed telecommuters worked out of the office at least one day a week. In 2008, that percentage fell to 72 percent. Meanwhile, those who telecommuted “almost every day” fell from 51 percent of all telecommuters to 40 percent. The absolute number of these full-time remote workers dropped from 14.7 million in 2006 to 13.5 million in 2008.

If the number of hardcore telecommuters is on the wane, other changes suggest that telecommuting is becoming a more serious and less social activity, at least within the context of the local community. When asked where they telecommuted from, respondents offered answers that were somewhat different from two years ago. The number of those who worked from home (as opposed to an airplane, hotel, car etc.) rose from 76 percent to 87 percent. Working from a customer or client’s place of business also rose from 28 percent to 41 percent. More people also acknowledged telecommuting while on vacation (up from 18 percent to 23 percent).

One of the most interesting patterns seems to be a decline in telecommuting from what some sociologists and planners call “third places” like cafes, libraries and parks. The percentage of telecommuters who worked from cafes or restaurants fell from 31 percent to 23 percent. Working in libraries declined from 16 percent to 10 percent. Meanwhile, beaming in from a park or some other outdoor location dropped from 19 percent to 14 percent. For those who champion third places as important sites for the development of social capital in communities, this may be a disappointing trend.

The profile of changes taking place in telecommuting also has some interesting gender characteristics. Without question, and despite employer exhortations to the contrary, some parents, and especially women, have chosen telecommuting as a way to be closer to the needs of their children. Two years ago, WorldatWork reported that employed telecommuters were nearly equally divided between men and women, with men accounting for 53 percent of the total and women 47 percent. In 2008, however, the percentage of women dropped to 39 percent while the percentage of men rose to 61 percent. Does this shift suggest that women, who may have tried telecommuting to achieve a better work-home balance, are less interested in this option?

Other changes in the profile of telecommuters suggest that telecommuting is an option increasingly available to people without a college education. Since 2006, the number of telecommuters with a high school degree or less has risen from 18 to 23 percent.  However, the number of telecommuters in the moderate income bracket (under $75,000 a year) has declined from 46 to 42 percent since 2006.

Finally, given the timing of the survey in the weeks immediately following the election and in the middle of the growing economic crisis, the responses seem to have captured a shift in attitudes. With retirement portfolios shrinking and growing fears of layoffs, many people preferred job security and income to the quality of life improvements offered by telecommuting. While more than half of all the respondents said they were “interested” or “very interested” in telecommuting, 61 percent said they would not be willing to take a cut in pay in exchange for the ability to telecommute two days per week.

Overall, the TELEWORK TRENDLINES 2009  report suggests that more workers and their supervisors are becoming accustomed to the idea of occasional telecommuting. Althought it seems likely that this growth will eventually lead more people to become full-time remote workers, this change is taking place slowly right now. It remains to be seen whether the current economic crisis will accelerate or slow the trend in the near future.

TELEWORK TRENDLINES 2009 was published by the Telework Advisory Group of WorldatWork, a 53-year old association of human resource professionals. The survey, conducted in November and early December, included more than 1,000 adults from throughout the United States. For a copy of the report, visit http://www.workingfromanywhere.org/index.html