Category: Blog

by Whitney Oachs, Researcher On March 11, 2021, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law. This bipartisan legislation was designed to enable Americans to respond to and recover from the impacts of COVID-19. Under the American Rescue Plan, the Economic Development Administration was allocated $3 billion in supplemental funding to assist communities nationwide ...

By Whitney Oachs, Research intern If you listened to our latest episode on our The Center of Everywhere podcast, you know that my classmates and I at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs completed a capstone thesis this spring on local government outreach among rural immigrant and refugee communities. In the study, we ...

by Marnie Werner, VP, Research & Operations The Census Bureau released the first round of data from the 2020 Census last week, and it was a nail-biter. These are the basic numbers, the new 2020 population of each state, which is used to determine how many seats each state will get in the U.S. House ...

  By Marnie Werner, VP Research I’ve been talking a lot about child care in the last month, and in those presentations, I’ve been telling people how the two biggest barriers to attracting workers in rural areas is a lack of child care and a lack of housing. This week, instead of child care, I ...

By Whitney Oachs, Research intern In 2018, CRPD reported that across Minnesota, the “opioid crisis” is much more than just opioids. At the time, statistics indicated that Minnesota isn’t facing an opioid crisis so much as an addiction crisis, and the drug of choice—for many—is meth. Though this report was published almost three years ago, ...

By Marnie Werner, Vice President, Research & Operations A lack of reliable child care was the single biggest problem for employees in America before the pandemic. Now, as parents head back to work, they will be looking for child care, whether it’s with their old provider or a new one, and that will drive up ...

By Whitney Oachs, CRPD research intern Last summer the Center for Rural Policy reported a “sea change in engagement” after racial justice protests were held in rural communities across the state following the death of George Floyd. Though more attention has been paid to these protests in urban environments, towns as small as Grand Marais ...

By Marnie Werner, VP, Research & Operations Ready for a silver lining? So much of what we hear about the pandemic is doom and gloom, but as a new report we released last month on workforce and job vacancies showed, rural Minnesota is sitting at the crossroads of two important trends that have created a ...

January, 2021 By Kelly Asche, Research Associate Last week the Center released a new report on the state of rural Minnesota’s workforce. In 2019, we assembled a four-part series on rural Minnesota’s worker shortage, it’s impact on economic growth in Greater Minnesota, and what rural communities are doing about the problem. Now, almost a year into the ...