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the host.
traditional biography.
Mike Rusch has called Bentonville, Arkansas home since 1986. He graduated from Bentonville High School and from the University of Arkansas with a degree in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. He is currently an M.A. candidate in Applied Anthropology at the University of North Texas.
Mike is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. He began his career at Walmart's Information Systems Division before moving on to Hershey Foods, The Walt Disney Company, and Nickelodeon/Viacom.
In 2010, Mike joined the startup team at Pure Charity, an organization developing fundraising, technology, and strategy solutions for nonprofits working on some of the world's most difficult problems. He serves as one of Pure Charity's Managing Directors today. To date, Pure Charity has helped more than 1,250 nonprofits raise over $350 million.
Mike is the host of the underview, a podcast exploring land, people, movement, and belonging in the unsettled Arkansas Ozarks. His graduate work in applied anthropology runs alongside it.
Mike currently serves on the Board of Directors for several nonprofits, including Equity Impact Fund, 99 Balloons, Laundry Love, Mercy House Global, Our Beautiful Family, and New Beginnings Northwest Arkansas. He also served as a founding board member of Canopy Northwest Arkansas, which brought refugee resettlement services to a region that had none.
Mike is active in the Northwest Arkansas cycling community. As an avid gravel cyclist he has ridden Unbound Gravel XL, MidSouth, Big Sugar Classic, Rule of Three, Telluride Gravel, and Birdeye Gravel Fest. He has finished an Ironman triathlon, numerous marathons, and long-distance rides including the Arkansas Traverse and Arkansas Graveler. He attempted the Leadville MTB 100 and came apart at mile 79. That story is not over.
He was part of the first graduating class of Northwest Arkansas Community College's Bicycle Assembly & Repair Technician certification program, and helped start Bentonville Ride Club as a place to deepen local community around the thrill of riding here. Through the club he has helped organize the Arkansas Traverse (documentary) and rides across Missouri and into Oklahoma.
Mike married the most incredible woman in the world, Corrie, and together they have four children.
relational biography.
The name I was given is Michael Charles Rusch.
I was born near what is colonially known as Denver, Colorado, on the homelands of the Arapaho, Ute, Cheyenne, and Lakota peoples, nations that remain connected to the land today. My roots stretch across the Atlantic; I am a fourth-generation descendant of immigrants from Germany, England, and Norway, huddled masses who passed through Ellis Island. I am the son of Gregg and Kathy Rusch, a husband to Corrie, and a father to John Michael, William, Conley, and Sosi whose name carries the beauty and strength of her Ethiopian heritage.
Today, I live in Bentonville, Arkansas, on the ancestral lands of the Osage, Quapaw, and Caddo peoples, who were removed from this place, a land shaped by movement, memory, and resilience.
Once known to the Osage as Nì Ŏkašį́, Bentonville sits within the Springfield Plateau, a part of the Ozark Mountains, where time and water have carved rolling hills and deep hollers from layers of limestone and chert.
I make my home near Black Apple Creek, its original name unknown to me, just above the cool rise of Park Springs, where water begins its slow journey. It flows into Town Branch, then gathers with Shewmaker Creek, joins McKisic Creek, and merges into Little Sugar Creek. From there, it continues through the wide embrace of the Grand River Watershed.
These colonially named waters travel north into Missouri, then southwest into present-day Oklahoma, the federally assigned home of the Cherokee Nation, a people who were forcibly removed along the Trail of Tears. That northern removal route passes within half a mile of my home.
Eventually, these waters join the Neosho River, merge into the Arkansas River, then the Mississippi, and finally reach the Gulf of Mexico.
This is a landscape of convergence, where water carries not just life, but memory, flowing through stories of removal, resistance, and the ongoing search for belonging.
Bentonville, like much of this region, also holds the stories of enslaved people, men, women, and children whose labor built early communities, yet whose names too often remain unknown. Their presence shaped this land as deeply as the creeks and stones beneath our feet. The echoes of their lives persist in the soil, in the structures they built, and in the generations that followed. To acknowledge this truth is to begin to tell the whole story of this place and to commit to the ongoing work of justice and remembrance.
Once, this region was a tapestry of oak-hickory forests, wide savannas, and tallgrass prairies where Bison once traveled. Beneath its rocky, unyielding soil lie remnants of ancient seabeds, cherty limestone, and dolomite that form a foundation both steadfast and unforgiving to a gravel bicycle.
This place, my home, is a convergence of plains and plateaus, clear creeks, cedar glades, rolling hills, rocky outcrops, and hollowed stones. It reflects the deep, unseen movements of water beneath our feet, a terrain that breathes, porous and alive, shaped by forces past and present.
Here, I am simply a community member seeking to cultivate spaces of belonging, dialogue, and shared understanding. I am grateful to stand in its story, to learn from those who have shaped it, and to share in the work of tending what is and what is to come.