Cornelia Butler Flora

Cornelia (Neal) Butler Flora was born in 1943 in Santa Monica, California to May and Carroll Butler. She died surrounded by her family in Quinter, Kansas on April 30, 2025 from pneumonia, a product of years of struggle against dementia. Growing up in the Mojave desert in California, Neal gained an early love of nature and animals. She loved camping with Girl Scouts and with her parents and sister, Gena, all around the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. During her undergraduate years at UCLA, Bakersfield College, and UC Berkeley (B.A. in Sociology, 1965), she spent her summers as a pack-outfit cook near Mammoth Lakes, CA. Neal remained an excellent cook until dementia took her appetite away. She loved to recite to dinner guests where each local ingredient was obtained and which farmer raised the unfortunate animal on the menu. In retirement from her position as director of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development and the Sociology Department at Iowa State University, she enjoyed the wildlife that wandered past her back window or came to be fed at the front door of the home she shared with Jan Flora, her husband of nearly 58 years in Ames, Iowa. Neal's love of the outdoors and experience with rural life in the desert and the mountains was intimately connected with her adult calling. Her professional focus (whether engaged in teaching, research or activism) was in regenerative agriculture and rural community change. Tennis was the only intermural sport open to high school girls, so Neal became an accomplished tennis player. She played at UCLA and later in life played mother-daughter tournaments with Gabriela, passing on a love of tennis to the entire family. Neal became a feminist at an early age. In second grade, she was outraged because boys started Cub Scouts a year before girls could start Brownies. Neal felt strongly that girls should have equal opportunities. That conviction was central to her personal life and academic teaching, research and activism. In Manhattan, KS, she and other parents organized a communal day care center in which both fathers and mothers were caretakers. During her Ford Foundation work, she strengthened women's programs in many countries of South and Central America and the Caribbean and built women components into all program areas of the Ford Foundation. Neal met Jan, a fellow student in the Development Sociology graduate program at Cornell University. They married on August 22, 1967, in Quinter, KS. Their two children, Gabriela and Natasha, became world travelers at an early age. Gabriela was born in Cali, Colombia, following Cornelia's Ph.D. graduation. The couple, who were staunch opponents of the Vietnam War (Cornelia's opposition began at Berkeley during the free speech movement), chose to give birth in Colombia, where they had done their dissertation research, in case they had a boy, allowing their first child to opt for Colombian citizenship and not be subject to the U.S. military draft. Three weeks after Gabriela's birth, the Floras rushed back from Colombia to teach classes as part of their first professional positions in the Sociology Department at Kansas State University (KSU) in January 1971. The summer before her home birth, Natasha traveled in her mother's tummy with the other three Floras on a month-long vacation to see the remains of indigenous civilizations in Mexico. That was the first of many international trips that included all four family members and later on the granddaughters and son-in-law, Matt. Throughout her adult life, Neal traveled to some 60 countries, mostly for business and research – with family whenever possible. Neal also prioritized family events around the country and in Canada. From 1978 to 1980, Neal and Jan shared a job with the Ford Foundation in Bogota, Colombia as Program Officers for Agricultural and Rural Development for Spanish-speaking South America. Natasha and Gabriela attended a Colombian school, where they were the only native English speakers. Their bilingualism has served them well in adult life. The Floras returned to KSU for several years following the stint with the Ford Foundation. Neal became the coordinator of an annual international conference held at KSU for five years on Farming Systems Research, which required extensive international travel. In 1989, she was recruited as head of the Sociology Department at Virginia Tech. In 1994, she became head of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development at Iowa State University (ISU) and a member of the Sociology Department. She retired from ISU in 2013, and remained active in her professional societies, in research, and in mentoring students almost up to her death. Her involvement in community, state, and national causes and in Democratic politics continued throughout her retirement. Neal was best known professionally for her elaboration and dissemination of the Community Capitals Framework, an approach that was adopted by people working in many fields to understand the interacting components of how social change takes place. Her prolific writing was published in hundreds of articles, books, and book chapters. Her research was usually done in collaboration with others, particularly students; she established life-long relationships with many of them. After retirement, Neal continued teaching. In six different years, Neal and Jan taught an eight-week course on the community capitals at the University of Cordoba, Spain to European, Latin American, and African graduate students. Neal has touched the lives of so many through her teaching, mentorship, community building, dinner parties, writings, (grand)mothering, and collaborative work. She will be deeply missed, and her legacy carries on. Cornelia is survived by her loving husband of nearly 58 years, Jan Flora; daughters Gabriela Flora of Denver, CO, and Natasha Flora (Matt Shoom-Kirsch) of Toronto, Canada; granddaughters Bailey and Sydney Flora-Kirsch and Lily Hazel Flora-Walsh; sister Gena Caldwell; sisters-in-law, Rose Flora and Julie Michael; nieces and nephews Amber Johnson (Stephen), Troy Flora (Annette), Trent Flora, and Trina Hand (J.D.) and their beautiful families. She was preceded in death by her parents, May and Carroll Butler; parents-in-law, Billie and Leonard Flora; and brothers-in-law Vaughn Flora, Greg Lee, and Gary Caldwell. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to American Friends Service Committee (https://afsc.org/donate) or KHOI Community Radio (https://khoifm.org/ using this link, then click "Become a Donor", then click the "Other" button). (Please mark donations in memory of Cornelia Flora).