J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee, speaking to reporters at the Capitol, has become one of President Trump's most outspoken critics.

Republican Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, who made headlines this week for their eviscerating denunciations of President Trump, may be retiring from Congress – but their exits won’t actually come for another 14 months, an eternity in politics. Which raises the question: How might these lawmakers translate their stated opposition to the president into concrete actions over the course of the next year?

Both men, along with Arizona Sen. John McCain – another GOP heavyweight and prominent Trump critic – have made it plain that they intend to act on their concerns in the time they have left in the Senate. Senators Corker and McCain are chairmen of two powerful committees, Foreign Relations and Armed Services, and as such are in a strong position of oversight – able to call hearings that can make a president’s life miserable (think “Benghazi”), issue subpoenas, and stall nominees.

McCain, who has been diagnosed with cancer, has particular power because he shepherds must-pass military spending legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act, which is nearing completion.

It would be a mistake to think of these three as a cabal, attempting to corral their colleagues or planning to kneecap the president at every opportunity. Corker told reporters he’s not trying to “herd” others. Senator Flake says he has no “vindictive” plan to block Mr. Trump’s agenda – an idea that’s just “dumb,” agrees McCain. They say they will work with the president on areas where they agree.

But on the areas where they think the president is wrong ­– or endangering the nation, as all three have suggested – they can command a bright spotlight and act as a tangible check on his power.

“Those chairmen are in a feisty mood toward the White House. They may not choose to do much, but they can do a lot,” says Christopher Kojm, a former Hill committee staffer and now professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington.

In practical terms, it may be similar to having the opposition party in control of parts of Congress, at least to some degree. And history has shown that when the opposition comes from the president's own party, it can be particularly powerful. The hearings that Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright, another Foreign Relations chair, held on the Vietnam War, for example, were seen as instrumental in turning opinion against the war – and against President Lyndon Johnson.

McCain has been flexing his chairmanship muscles already, threatening subpoenas and holding up Pentagon nominees to pry more information about military strategy and activity from the administration. He said Thursday he would lift some of those holds because the administration finally briefed members this week on four US troops who were killed in an ambush in Niger.

Likewise, Corker is planning a schedule of vigorous hearings on everything from the authorization to use military force, to the Iran nuclear deal, to international agreements that the president is bashing but which Corker sees as beneficial to the United States. He names trade as one of those areas.

“The committee’s going to be very active,” Corker told reporters on Wednesday. “It’s going to be a very robust period of time beginning Monday night at 5 o’clock.”

Authorization for Use of Military Force

That’s when Foreign Relations committee members – including Flake – will question Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis at a hearing about war powers and congressional authorization to use military force. It’s a subject of renewed interest given the administration’s investigation into what happened in Niger, the growth of ISIS and its affiliates in Africa, and grave concerns about North Korea.

The hearing holds the potential for sparks, despite the fact that Corker is strongly supportive of both Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Mattis. He has made clear he views them as guardrails against a president whose stability and competence he questions.

The immediate subject of the hearing is whether Congress should pass a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) to fight terrorism, given that the last two such authorizations date back to 2001 and 2002, on the heels of the 9/11 attacks.

The Trump administration believes they are still valid, as did President Obama, and they are still being used as legal justification for military operations around the globe. Some members of Congress side with the administration, but others say that, as the fight against terrorism has evolved over the past fifteen years, it’s time for Congress to take back its constitutional authority and publicly debate and revise the authorizations.

North Korea is also sure to come up at Monday’s hearing, as members in both parties worry the president may be boxing the US into a military confrontation while prematurely closing the door on diplomacy. Related are questions of war powers, since the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, while the president is commander in chief.

“I hear widespread concern about the president short-circuiting diplomatic efforts between the United States and North Korea, and having no clear plan for an off-ramp,” says Sen. Chris Coons (D) of Delaware who is a member of Corker’s committee. “If the president wants a military confrontation with North Korea, he is capable of moving us into a position where that becomes unavoidable unless Congress acts.”

Democrats like Senator Coons share Corker’s concerns about Trump, and Corker can expect to find backing from them, as well as from some Republicans like Flake – who is working with fellow committee member Tim Kaine (D) of Virginia on a new AUMF authorization.

The devil's in the details

But agreeing on the details of an AUMF, which would need to take shape as legislation, will be easier said than done. And other Republicans may not want to appear as crossing their president.

“Once you move into the realm of legislation, then you start to come up against the problem of the rest of your party and to what extent do other Republicans want to challenge their president,” says Paul Saunders, a former State Department advisor, speaking generally about Trump critics trying to move bills that the president opposes. Mr. Saunders, who is the executive director of the Center for the National Interest, notes that other Republican senators aren’t publicly embracing the warnings that Corker, Flake, and McCain are sounding about Trump.

Indeed, most GOP lawmakers have been largely dismissive, framing the criticism as “simply some personality clashes,” as Sen. James Risch (R) of Idaho put it in an interview. Senator Risch has been mentioned as Corker’s possible successor as Foreign Relations chair when Corker retires.

Rod Nickel/Reuters

Federal Emergency Management Agency worker Marilyn Torres hugs Greyson Wittwer, 3, as his mom Lacci Wittwer and FEMA worker John Conti look on in Kirbyville, Texas, on Sept. 25, 2017.

As Sue Marticek travels around Texas, she tells people she is from the town “that had the rollercoaster in the water” after superstorm Sandy roared through five years ago Sunday.

She is in southeast Texas now because there are still hundreds of people in her native Ocean County in New Jersey who haven’t been able to return home. The iconic rollercoaster was replaced this year, but recovery from the storm is still not complete.

The problems, which range from contractor fraud to fights over insurance claims, she says, stem from mistakes homeowners made in the confusing, emotionally charged months right after the storm. And with hurricane Harvey – which hit Texas and Louisiana in late August – estimated to have caused three times the damage Sandy did, she wants Texans to avoid those problems.

“New Jersey wants Texas’s recovery to be better than ours,” Marticek says. “For the people who are not getting home [in New Jersey] we have to share [our] lessons, because we shouldn’t have them, and their heartache, go in vain.”

And those lessons are not just needed in Texas. A spate of natural disasters this fall has left tens of thousands of Americans in need of disaster relief, from northern California, where wildfires destroyed at least 8,400 homes and buildings, to Florida, where hurricane Irma caused roughly $100 billion in damages, to Puerto Rico, where 75 percent of the island still did not have electricity more than a month after hurricane Maria swept through.

To help survivors avoid financial disaster and get the emotional help they need, a growing number of nonprofits are stepping in to provide help – particularly in the first months after a disaster as government financial assistance is still being organized. Some, like Marticek’s Compass 82, have sprung up out of firsthand experience in how long it can take for a community to recover from a disaster.

“Coordination among nonprofit organizations around immediate relief has improved quite a bit over the last decade or so,” says Bob Ottenhoff, president and chief executive officer of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy (CDP). “There’s a more formal recognition from government about the roles the nonprofit community plays.”

Short and spunky, with messy blonde hair, Marticek’s no-frills demeanor and Jersey accent stands out in a room full of Texas drawls. She has 17 years of experience in disaster recovery, dating back to 9/11.

“While I understand you can’t blink your eyes and get everyone back home in 30 days, it shouldn’t be 10 years,” she says in an interview. “I think we can do a better job in this country.”

'I hope she comes again'

Monica Cantrell’s family lost everything to hurricane Betsy when she was a child. She and her husband lost everything as a young married couple to hurricane Alicia. Harvey, she writes in an email, “has been the worst thing that I ever experienced.”

Previous storms “just removed everything. You did not physically have to hold it in your hand and feel the personal loss,” she adds. “The emotional experience of having to look at wet keepsakes and try to restore them has been very difficult for my family and friends.”

Ms. Cantrell – a city commissioner in Hitchcock, Texas, and executive director of the school district’s Education Foundation – was in the town’s First Baptist Church this month to hear Marticek’s advice.

“I’m not here to tell you what to do,” Marticek told the crowd of about 50 people. “I’m here to put my heart on my sleeve and share with you the experiences and the hard lessons-learned that my community has gone through, and are still going through.”

The message resonated with Cantrell.

“I knew that she understood what our community as a whole was experiencing, as well as the individual emotional impact this was having on both those that were flooded and the others trying to offer support,” she says. “She has been to Hitchcock twice. I hope she comes again.”

Wayne Parry/AP/File

A car that was propelled into a home near the ocean in Toms River,N.J. during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. On Oct. 23, 2017, New Jersey added another $75 million to its program to buy and demolish homes in flood-prone areas. Survivors of Sandy have been helping Texans hit by hurricane Harvey in hopes that Texas's recovery will go faster than New Jersey's.

Nonprofits: indispensible, but stretched too thin?

Compass 82 – named after Marticek’s hometown exit on the New Jersey Turnpike – is an example of the growing importance of nonprofit groups in disaster recovery.

“Over the last decades they’ve built up the skill set in disaster relief and disaster recovery, so I would say they’re indispensable,” says Mr. Ottenhoff. “They’re quicker, more agile. There’s less paperwork, less bureaucracy.”

Federal agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA), on the other hand, are often limited by regulations and bureaucracy, particularly in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

FEMA needs to be officially invited into a state, for example. Once there, agents rely on the state to give them direction, and there’s a limit to how long it can stay. The most the agency can provide through its Individual Assistance Grant is $33,300, and it’s still working on 2016 disasters.

But agencies are increasingly cognizant of their limitations. In its post-disaster “Sequence of Delivery,” for example, FEMA identifies voluntary organizations as being key at the very beginning and very end of the disaster recovery process.

Communities in New Jersey suffered from a “lack of clarity” in the months after Sandy, Marticek says, with people not knowing where aid would be coming from. Her group is in Texas to ensure that doesn’t happen here.

But Ottenhoff is concerned that Americans may be becoming too reliant on nonprofits for disaster recovery.

“They almost all rely on voluntary contributions from the American public to provide these services, so it’s a fragile way of doing our long-term recovery work in this country,” he says.

When you account for the fact that about 80 percent of donations come in the days immediately after a disaster, according to the CDP’s research, and the recent spate of natural disasters around the country, it’s easy for a nonprofit to become overstretched.

“A lot of organizations have jumped in to help without having sufficient resources. Sometimes they’ll jump in to help not knowing if the contributions they’ll receive will fill the gap,” Ottenhoff adds.

Money, paperwork, and emotions

Tedious bureaucratic minutiae dominates the early stages of disaster recovery. But it is in those first few months – when emotions are still raw, money is slow to arrive, and mounds of legal documents have to be navigated – that mistakes can snowball into more serious issues.

Marticek talks about not only the post-traumatic stress disorder that disasters can cause, but also what she calls “disaster fog.”

“The most severe change besides losing a loved one just happened to you,” she tells the audience in Hitchcock. “It’s not that you’re weak ... or stupid, or anything else.”

Disaster survivors can be easy to exploit, she warns. A desperation to make their homes habitable again can lead to deals with shady contractors (fraud payments in New Jersey related to Sandy reconstruction topped $5 million this year); not properly documenting the damage in their home can mean lower payouts on insurance claims; rebuilding with money they don’t have can lead to ruined credit ratings.

And there is often a personal toll. Ocean County, among other Sandy-impacted communities, has seen an increase in depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide since the storm.

To avoid these cascading problems, Marticek and her team try to guide individuals through the first stages of recovery by keeping things as simple as possible. One example involves using a one-page cartoon with bullet points to describe filing a flood insurance claim.

“Even though I am having a difficult time recording and itemizing everything, my friends and family have lost so much more that I cannot complain,” says Cantrell. “I see the day-to-day struggle of trying to keep two or three small children content in a hotel room. It breaks my heart for these young parents that are trying to work, rebuild their house, and raise their children.”

This is why Marticek says the first few months after a disaster should be focused on one overarching goal: getting every resident back in their homes.

Restoring the normalcy that comes with being home can not only help head off some of the potential financial and behavioral health issues, but could also prevent long term economic woes for communities.

Taxable property in Seaside Heights, home of the flooded rollercoaster, is still worth $200 million less than it was before Sandy. The neighboring town of Toms River approved a property tax increase this year, the first year the town didn’t receive Sandy-related financial aid.

“Now everybody in Toms River is being impacted by Sandy,” she says. “That’s why everybody, even if you didn’t get hit, you have to be part of the solution to get your community back.”

Last month, Mu Sochua became an empty nester. Advice columns suggest that parents look for distractions. But she already has too many.

Ms. Sochua is vice president of her country’s opposition, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), and the country’s most prominent female politician. And the party has been in disarray since Sept. 3, when its president Kem Sokha was arrested on treason charges. Half its lawmakers have scattered abroad amid an ongoing crackdown, leaving Sochua one of the most visible members. She’s spent decades navigating the often hostile road of being a female opposition politician, but always relied on family for support. Now, a year after her husband’s death, and with all of her daughters and many colleagues abroad, she’s in especially uncharted terrain.

“If I was following my feelings, I could just use my US passport and leave,” she said over lunch in Phnom Penh, two days after her last daughter left. “Because it’s so painful, so lonely.”

A week later, she did flee – after a tip-off that she would be arrested, she says. Her departure was the latest of many in months of escalating repression under longtime Prime Minister Hun Sen, which has taken down independent media outlets, at least two nongovernmental organizations, and seemingly also the CNRP, which he threatened to dissolve. Analysts say the moves are meant to secure the ruling Cambodian People’s Party’s (CPP) hold on power ahead of elections next year, after the opposition nearly won in 2013. Now, with little left to lose, Sochua has become one of the loudest voices calling for sanctions against the government.

For Sochua, adversity is not new. She’s endured losing both parents to the Khmer Rouge regime, and decades of public hostility – not only as part of the besieged opposition, but as one of few women in Cambodian politics. She had to re-learn the national language, Khmer, after years of studying abroad, and is arguably better known in Washington, D.C. than in far-flung provinces of her country. But the crackdown presents unprecedented pressures – and opportunities – for a woman feted abroad, but historically sidelined by her own party.

“It seems like my colleagues finally realize, ‘She’s there, and she’s going to make decisions,’ ” she told the Monitor, soon before her flight from the country. She had just led a delegation of party officials to protest Mr. Sokha’s detention – a marked change from calmer eras, she says, when politicians tried to limit her to women’s and children’s issues. “In the past, she was there, but she was [treated] like the social worker there,” she says. 

An unlikely path

Sochua grew up in what was then a tranquil capital, the daughter of prosperous Sino-Khmer parents. In the early '70s, the teenager departed for school in France, then California, earning degrees in psychology and social work. Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge swept into power and initiated its genocidal attempt to create an agrarian-socialist state, killing roughly 1.8 million people. Sochua lost touch with her parents and threw herself into organizing Cambodian refugees arriving in San Francisco. She was in many ways an unlikely leader: still in her early twenties, still learning English, still grieving for her parents. “I had no idea where I was going, what I was doing,” she says.

Don Cohon, a community psychologist who supervised Sochua during her fieldwork, recalls refugees whose trauma from the Khmer Rouge era was so severe that they “essentially stopped visually registering things.” Sochua was a tireless organizer who would “work with families well into the night” and who “nobody can really boss,” he remembers.

As Cambodia embraced the trappings of democracy in the early 1990s, Sochua returned home, working in refugee camps and NGOs to fight human trafficking and domestic violence. But she frames her foray into politics as almost an accident: winning her first seat in the legislature in 1998, then becoming the first woman to head the Ministry of Women’s and Veterans’ Affairs, and leading efforts to add more women to government – though they still made up just 20 percent of lawmakers in 2013.

She enjoyed the policy work, but didn’t have much interest in power plays. “I knew that I had nothing to do with the heart of politics,” she says. But her human-rights focus won recognition in the West, earning her a Nobel Peace prize nomination in 2005, and a Global Leadership award from the Washington, D.C. NGO Vital Voices.

The female factor

That appreciation hasn’t always followed her home. Sochua’s self-described disinterest in gamesmanship may have cost her career points. She lacks the fiery rhetoric and tactical eye that have helped Hun Sen maintain his grip on power for 32 years, for example. Dr. Cohon, for one, never expected his skilled fieldworker would have an interest in politics. “Sometimes I’m just surprised that she did that,” he says.

But part of why she struggles to be taken seriously, Sochua and other observers say, is her gender – a familiar challenge for female politicians worldwide. While the opposition pitches itself as a natural home for the oppressed, the CNRP’s senior ranks remain a Cambodian old-boys club. Sochua’s promotion to vice president in March marks the highest office for any female politician in modern Cambodia.

At protests, other members say, “Mu Sochua, you walk first, because they won’t hit women,” she recounted. If Sochua cried, they told her to dry her eyes. Sometimes, gender is a more explicit factor: In 2009, for example, Hun Sen referred to Sochua as “strong legs,” a Khmer euphemism for a prostitute. She sued him for defamation, but Hun Sen immediately countersued and won, drawing attention to a court system whose civil justice system ranks last in the world, according to the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index.

Like all women in power, Sochua has to constantly police her feelings, says Chak Sopheap, executive director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. “In the exact same situation, a woman will be called pushy, while a man would be referred to as having [been] strong,” she says. “Men are referred to as per their actions; women as per their emotions.”

Son Chhay, a senior CNRP lawmaker, calls Sochua “very pushy” and “very brave” but worries that she acts “more like an activist than a politician.”

“We are hoping that she learns to become a real politician,” he says, someone who does “not allow emotion to overcome your speech or your decisions.”

Thida Khus, who worked with Sochua in her advocacy days and now heads the women's rights NGO Silaka, also argues that gender has shaped Sochua’s treatment within the CNRP. “When they need something to be done, she is on the front lines, like right now,” Ms. Khus says. “And when things settle down … she does not get the recognition.” 

With Hun Sen warning that the Supreme Court would soon dissolve the CNRP, Sochua’s overseas audience may present the best hope for the party’s survival. But even if that push is successful, it’s not clear what the victory would mean for her at home. 

“Is her party ready for her to be the leader?” Khus asks. “That’s my question.”

In this pretty town on the Elbe River, where Martin Luther is said to have nailed his 95 Theses to the Castle Church doors on Oct. 31, 1517, a certain Luther mania has swept through as the world marks the 500th anniversary of the start of the Reformation.

The historic churches and buildings where Luther preached, married, and baptized his own children have been painstakingly renovated. The jubilee year has brimmed with art installations, history exhibits, books, talks, and concerts.

Some of the marketing gimmicks surely would not have pleased the austere monk: a Che Guevara-style T-shirt bearing Luther’s face and emblazoned with the words “Viva la Reformation.” Then there are the Luther figurines, Luther chocolate cake mix with cherries, and rubber duckies wearing his habit.

But a visit here is about more than the man and the creed that spread from Germany and split Christendom. It is also a lesson in what drives German thinking about politics, German values about freedom, work, and education, and even German traditions, including the simple love of singing together. “That comes from Martin Luther, to sing every day,” says Hanna Kasparick, director of the Protestant Preacher Seminary in Wittenberg, as she passes a room where pastors-in-training are singing hymns.

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Tourists gather around the Castle Church doors in Wittenberg, Germany where Martin Luther is said to have nailed his 95 theses 500 years ago. It is only one display of Luther mania sweeping Germany this year.

Downstairs, the adjacent Castle Church is filling with tourists coming to listen to a midday organ concert. As music fills the nave,  volunteer Jean Godsall-Myers, an American who is here for seven months with her husband, Steven, steers the international crowd to the pews.

Connie Goodfellow, who is leading fellow American Lutherans on a tour called “In the Footsteps of Martin Luther” with the educational travel company Ed-Ventures, says her group is paying homage to the man. “They want to understand more about him. If it weren’t for Martin Luther, we would not have the opportunity to worship the way we do,” she says.

Others are here out of historic curiosity – and aren’t exactly fans, especially of Luther’s anti-Jewish rants that were celebrated many centuries later by Adolf Hitler. Outside the City and Parish Church of St. Mary, where Luther preached, an anti-Semitic relief still hangs as testament to that age-old intolerance. Standing underneath it, Bernd Bohse, on a day trip from Berlin, says the more he learns about Martin Luther the more he is unimpressed. “As a role model, I think it’s Martin Luther King who is the good one,” he says.

Gerhard Wegner, a pastor and director of the Social Sciences Institute of the Evangelical Church in Germany, says their pavilion at the Reformation Exhibition, which wrapped up in Wittenberg in September, was very popular. It was about vocation, an ideal inspired by Luther and other reformers of the 16th century who believed it wasn’t only clergy who performed God’s work. “They believed everybody has a calling and therefore has a certain job in society to do,” says Pastor Wegner. That is reflected in the German language: Berufung [vocation] and Beruf [job] are the same. Traces of that thinking can also be seen in the work-study apprenticeship program that has helped keep youth unemployment the lowest in Europe.

It also shapes the German work ethic. “The very tough value of working hard and working efficiently and working all day and night, this goes back to the Reformation,” Wegner says. “Luther said that everybody has to work, and if somebody doesn’t like to work, he is not my neighbor. If someone doesn’t want to work, there is no reason to give him money. This is still influencing Germany.” That view was prominently in display during Europe's debt crisis, as Germans struggled morally to bail out Greece, which they believed had simply spent more than it worked for. Yet Luther also believed fervently in the social responsibility of the state, a philosophy manifested in the welfare states of Europe.

Luther also shaped views on universal education – fueling his drive to translate the Bible into German – and on excessive luxury. That explains some of the popularity of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. Germans love that she does her own grocery shopping. At a recent children’s press conference, she spoke of the cardigan as her favorite clothing item. "I grow my own potatoes, but haven't harvested this year's crop yet," she told the youngsters.

Wittenberg’s mayor, Torsten Zugehör, says the city has spent between 70 million and 80 million euros on the preservation of historic buildings and 20 million euros more on various special exhibitions. 

While it could help sustain the current spike in tourism it is somewhat ironic in a place with little religious fervor. Wittenberg was part of former East Germany, where atheism was the state’s official policy. And twinned with an increasingly secular modern era, only about 15 percent of residents are active Christians in Wittenberg, says Dr. Kasparick. Still, she says somewhat hopefully, about the same number of people have joined their choirs or church life even if they aren't formally part of a religious institution. She says many parents say they were raised without religion, so it's "too late" for them, but they want their children to know Christianity.

Mayor Zugehör has even loftier goals. “The spirit of the Reformation must continue,” he says. “It is not only for Protestantism, but also for the process of change we are facing, from climate change to democracy. I think worldwide there is a need for reformation.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Kate Stillman, a third-generation farmer, sells her locally raised meat and her brother’s and father’s produce in Brookline, Mass.

Kate Stillman starts her day at 4 a.m. Four days a week, the third-generation farmer loads up a truck the size of a small U-Haul and drives 75 miles from Hardwick, Mass., to farmers markets across the Boston area. The truck is so weighed down by her cuts of locally raised meat and produce grown by her father and brother that the bumper barely clears the curb. If there is room in the cab, one of her two young boys will ride along with her.

She’s used to not sleeping much.

“When you have animals – like when you have small children – it’s the same thing. You never really sleep soundly. You are constantly trying to listen for if there is a problem,” says Ms. Stillman, who sells grass-fed beef, lamb, pastured poultry, and pork from animals she raises on a farm that she bought in her early 20s. She’s also a single mother. Midnight is the earliest she turns in.

With her right arm thrust deep inside a glass-topped freezer as she rummages for a customer’s order at the Brookline Farmers Market, Stillman recounts the time she forgot to pick up her 5-year-old son from day care. Two days before Thanksgiving, she was in the middle of processing hundreds of turkeys when she glanced at the clock. It was 8:30 p.m. A call to her stepmother eased her worries – he was with her, brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed. She feels fortunate to have a large, supportive family.

“When I work the farmers market, I wish this was my only job and I could go home at night and cook and eat with my kids and take a normal vacation,” says Stillman. “But that’s OK. I wouldn’t trade it. I think this is the best lifestyle for me, and my kids think it is kind of magical that they are growing up on the farm. They put up with the schedule and the work.”

Hard work has always defined farming. And many say it’s only going to get harder as farms are squeezed by rising land and labor prices, falling commodity prices, and an aging demographic – the average US farmer is 58 years old. Analysts warn of a potential farm crisis not unlike the one seen during the Great Depression.

But small-scale farming, which takes place on 90 percent of the farms in the United States, continues to thrive. These farms are figuring out the formula of diversifying their income streams through farmers markets, agritourism, and cottage industry products, resisting the call to “get big or get out.” And in some areas of the country, it is a rising number of women like Stillman who are taking the wheel of the tractor.

Nearly 1 million women work on US farms, and nearly 290,000 head up farm operations, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Across New England and the Pacific Northwest, the 2012 Census of Agriculture showed a higher concentration of women farmers than did other regions. In addition, across 16 states the number of female principal operators had increased since 2007.

Some women are coming to farming midlife as a second career. Others are young visionaries equipped with degrees in environmental science and a passion for reimagining the food system. Still others grew up on a family farm but fled – vowing to never lift another shovel of manure – only to have a change of heart. Armed with high-speed internet connections, they are marketing rural life with networking potlucks, farm stays in Airstream trailers, and nostalgia-inducing Instagram streams.

“It’s the size of the farms; they are more manageable,” says Helen Brody, coauthor of “New Hampshire Women Farmers: Pioneers of the Local Food Movement,” as to why the growth is concentrated in the New England and the Pacific Northwest. “I think [women find] it more comfortable to have small farms.... Women are natural nurturers – and that’s why they were such good marketers at farmers markets: They like the idea of being able to provide healthy, good food for their families and talk about it.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

(R. to l.) Manager Amy Hulbert, Emily Winskowicz, and Ashley Deschenes are part of Three Sisters Garden Project, a community-supported organic farm.

More than the ‘farm wife’

While women have been working on American farms since Colonial times, they’ve often been depicted as the “farm wife,” the silent partner to the “farmer” who was credited with tending to the fields and the livestock.

Before 2002, the USDA tracked the gender and age of only principal farmers – who are predominantly men. As a result, the contribution of women and other minority groups on US farms went underreported.

“Women have been living on farms for centuries in this country and they have been very involved in the farms, but ... their roles have been downplayed,” says Carolyn Sachs, a professor of rural sociology at Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences and author of “The Rise of Women Farmers and Sustainable Agriculture.”

“And it’s not just by others,” she adds. “Women will minimize their own involvement also because the man is the farmer and they don’t want to take away from his status.”

Denise O’Brien didn’t grow up on a farm, but she ended up marrying Larry Harris, a man who did. They were young and idealistic in the 1970s, inspired by activism around Earth Day, the Vietnam War, and the women’s movement. With his parents’ blessing, they started organic farming in the ’70s. They’ve been operating Rolling Acres Farm near Atlantic, Iowa, ever since.

When the farm crisis hit Iowa in the ’80s, Ms. O’Brien and her husband joined the community meetings where farmers were sharing ideas about how to survive.

“Women would come up to me in meetings and say, ‘You call yourself a farmer?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, I do.’... And they’d say, ‘Well, I’m a farmer’s wife.’ And so I’d say, ‘What do you do?’ And they’d list all the chores and I’d say, ‘Well, that sounds like a farmer to me.’ ”

In 1993, she became president of the National Family Farm Coalition. That same year, she read a study finding that women owned close to 50 percent of the farmland in Iowa.

“Basically women were not identified with farming and agriculture, only as farmers’ wives, yet they were a critical economic piece of the family farm,” says O’Brien. So she started calling them together for informal meetings, eventually getting funding from the USDA.

By 1997, she had founded the Women, Food and Agriculture Network. Today, WFAN claims more than 10,000 women in its network representing all 50 states and parts of Canada.

Despite strong networks and USDA funding for beginning farmers, women continue to face sexism when it comes to being accepted as an agricultural peer.

Stillman, who comes from a farming family and who secured her first loan to buy her farm with her ex-husband before she was 30, still fumes when she remembers trying to get a loan from her local bank to build a slaughterhouse. It was necessary for her survival: The large industrial processing plant she used kept losing her meat.

“[The application] wasn’t coming together ... and it kept dragging on, and my banker said to me, ‘Why don’t you just go home and bake some cookies or something?’ I was so livid,” recalls Stillman. “My brother who is a farmer has never been through that.”

In the end, she got the loan and built the slaughterhouse.

“All of us [women farmers] have a million horror stories of people talking to us like we are dummies, especially about equipment,” says Elizabeth Green, a Boston-area farmer in her mid-30s who built Three Sisters Garden Project from the roots up. “There is just a lack of understanding that a woman could run a big business and be excellent at it.”

Three Sisters is a vegetable farm in Ipswich, Mass., run as a nonprofit that leases its land from an order of Roman Catholic nuns. Now in its third year, it supplies 130 farm shares to the surrounding area, and offers educational programs and training for new farmers.

Ms. Green chose all the equipment, erected the greenhouse, added a walk-in cooler, and put in a well.

She learned how to drive a tractor from a woman farmer in Belmont, Mass. But she says there are still some farms in New England that won’t let women on tractors.

“A lot of us in my generation are looking for meaningful work that connects to our values, and sometimes the long-haul, big-picture advocacy work that I was doing was hard because you don’t see results for a long, long, time,” says Green, who now oversees three farms for The Trustees of Reservations. “But with [farming], I can put in a day’s work and I can literally see ... the fruits of my labor, which is an incredible feeling.”

Women farmers have a tendency to reach out to other women farmers, researchers like Professor Sachs have noted.

“When I started [farming], it was easy to quickly feel isolated ... but from the get-go, it was the other women farmers and women I met ... who were amazing sources of support,” says Lisa Kivirist, who runs an ecofarm and bed-and-breakfast operation in Wisconsin’s dairyland with her husband. She’s also the author of “Soil Sisters: A Toolkit for Women Farmers.” “As I moved along in my learning, it has always been a passion of mine to continue that connection and really grow that collaborative spirit we have.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Ashley Deschenes, with Three Sisters Garden Project, works on bok choy this fall in Ipswich, Mass.

Workshops in Wisconsin

One of those ways is through a series of workshops and farm tours she helped develop: “Soil Sisters: A Celebration of Wisconsin Farms & Rural Life.” For the past five years, more than 20 women farmers have collaborated to open their farms with down-home activities such as cheesemaking, fermentation, and workshops on how to start a business out of one’s kitchen.

On an unusually chilly August morning, attendees of the “In Her Boots” workshop perch on hay bales inside the hoop house at Kriss Marion’s Circle M Farm in Blanchardville, Wis., as a few orange barn cats circle and rub up against their ankles.

Etienne White describes her first Soil Sisters weekend two years ago as “three days of sheer inspiration.” In addition to a wealth of information, she took away an unexpected bonus: a pair of old barn boots that Ms. Marion was getting ready to toss. This year Ms. White, now a fledgling farmer, offered to help with “In Her Boots” – literally wearing Marion’s boots.

Marion, who runs Circle M Farm with her family, addresses the crowd like a tent revival preacher. Her converted Airstream trailer, which sleeps four and is parked on the side lawn, has been a surprise success. The first guests were from France, she says, and it was fully booked almost immediately.

“We thought, what are people doing out here in Blanchardville? Why are they here? Well, it turns out they’re here because of us,” says Marion as the women nod and take notes. “Don’t underestimate the importance of just a small green space that you’re taking care of,” she says. “People want to get in touch with that.”

Marketing farm life may just be the secret sauce that helps small-scale farms survive. Stillman cites a couple of her favorite women farmers on Instagram, such as Floret Flower (with 469,000 followers).

“My father is so great at driving a tractor, but you are never going to find him [Instagramming],” says Stillman. “These women are the faces of the farms, and they are totally blowing the top off of what farming is and I’m in awe.... They have completely changed the boundaries of their farms.”

Staff writer Gretel Kauffman contributed to this report from Blanchardville, Wis.

AP Photo

Surrounded by students and elected officials, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner signs an education funding reform bill at Ebinger Elementary School Aug. 31 in Chicago.The law brings sweeping changes to the way the state funds schools.

One of America’s favorite pastimes is trying to reinvent its publicly funded schools. This is because reformers, including government, are often pragmatic and humble enough to admit when their ideas or their top-down approach have failed. With the United States intensely focused on fixing K-12 schools since the 1980s, the mea culpas keep rolling in.

The latest comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private giver in education philanthropy. Last week, Bill Gates all but admitted the difficulty of improving schools after 17 years of effort.

The foundation is now “evolving” its education strategy. A new $1.7 billion investment will be directed primarily at building “networks” between schools. Groups of schools will be funded with “the flexibility to propose the set of approaches they want.”

The new emphasis on locally driven solutions is born of experience and experimentation.

“If there is one thing I have learned,” Mr. Gates said, “it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others [in] the field.”

He added that it is easy to “fool yourself” about what works. Solutions will only endure if “they are aligned with the unique needs of each student and the district’s broader strategy for change.”

Other big-money philanthropists with a focus on K-12 schools have learned the hard way that they need to better respect local conditions and the desires of local stakeholders, especially disadvantaged families.

A $100 million donation by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan to reform schools in Newark, N.J., has achieved mixed results after seven years. Much of that effort relied on outside consultants. On Oct. 23, however, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced that it was teaming up with the Ford Foundation to work with education groups that specialize in local collaboration. “This approach emphasizes the needs and interests of students over institutions...,” read a press release about the new grant.

At the federal level, too, experimentation in reform continues apace. A recent study of the $7 billion federal School Improvement Grants program, which began in 2009, found it had little effect on student outcomes.

Each community must drive its own education agenda, and also hold local officials accountable. Outside money and advice may be needed and welcomed. But parents and educators should be treated as partners, not clients. The impetus to educate children lies within each school district. The trick is how to tap into it, honoring the integrity of each community in how it wants to reinvent its schools.