Category: Blog

November 2024 By: Kelly Asche, Senior Researcher After the release of our report exploring the declines in nursing facility beds, we received a question wondering if there was any relationship between facilities that closed and the type of license (nonprofit vs. for-profit) they were under. So let’s explore that question. Between 2005 and 2024, there ...

November 2024 By Kelly Asche, Senior Researcher Our new report, “The declining capacity of nursing facilities care in rural Minnesota,” documents the shrinking number of nursing facility beds across rural Minnesota. In the report we raise concerns about the vulnerability of rural facilities and the frequency at which they close. In this post, I want ...

By: Kelly Asche A new report by the Center for Rural Policy will be published in early November focused on trends in nursing home facility beds. As many of you may have heard or experienced, nursing homes across Minnesota have been either closing or reducing the number of beds they have available, lately due to ...

By: Kelly Asche, Senior Researcher Every January, the Center for Rural Policy and Development releases the “State of Rural,” a report that reviews the important demographic and economic  trends in Greater Minnesota. We usually have to wait until December—that is when the U.S. Census Bureau releases the newest batch of data for the American Community ...

By: Kelly Asche, Senior Research Every January, the Center for Rural Policy and Development releases the “State of Rural,” a report that provides the trends of important demographic and economic measures. We usually have to wait until December—that is when the U.S. Census Bureau releases the newest batch of data for the American Community Survey, ...

Connecting kids to mental health services faster By Marnie Werner, Vice President of Research Even before we started work on our latest report, “Youth Mental Health: Where parents can find help now,” we were hearing stories of kids (and adults, too) brought to the emergency room of the local rural hospital because parents (or family ...

By Marnie Werner, Vice President of Research & Operations In a report we released last February, we talked about an important tool in the work on suicide prevention, 988. The suicide prevention phone number changed in 2022 from its former ten-digit 800 number to the easy-to-remember three digits. As part of our discussion on suicide ...

The USDA – ERS has released the new Rural-Urban Continuum Codes for each county. Kelly Asche, Senior Research April 2024 People love classifications—the ability to split things into separate, distinct groups makes them easier to measure, providing some clarity when creating policy. Although we agree that most classifications aren’t perfect, we also don’t give enough ...

The recent Census of Agriculture shows that ag in rural Minnesota isn’t monolithic. Kelly Asche, Senior Researcher April 2024 A topic that is frequently discussed among rural residents, particularly in agricultural areas, is how much farming has changed over the last 50 years. The technology being used, the crops that now dominate the landscape, and ...