How do you keep a kid on the farm?

The truck’s name was Little George. It was brilliant orange, the only colour available when, decades before online shopping, Wanda McConnell went to town to pick up paint.

The truck takes up the foreground of a grainy photo, taken in the summer of 1973 around the time of the Hamiota parade. In it, Little George is hooked to a hay rack adorned with an old outhouse taken from the community’s old McConnell school building grounds and painted during the slow crawl of the parade route. Four teenagers pose in front of the little structure while another sits in the truck’s bed. They’re all wearing government-issued yellow hard hats.

“I think wearing them made us feel important,” McConnell said.

Why it matters: Concerns over rural depopulation have lingered for decades.

The kids, all between Grades 11 and 12, were a work crew. They’d been hired by the provincial government to do farm beautification and maintenance tasks in their community for the summer. It involved a lot of painting.

Plenty of barns, fences and community centres in rural Manitoba got a facelift that summer, based on interviews with McConnell and other former Rural STEP program participants.

STEP, or the Student Temporary Employment Program, was the rural youth work program launched by the Schreyer NDP government in the mid-70s in an effort to bridge the employment gap for young people in rural Manitoba.

It consisted of teams of teenagers led by college student supervisors. Those teams did odd jobs that had been chosen by their local agriculture office. It also paid minimum wage, often a better lot than what a teen could do babysitting or working the family farm.