By Kelly Asche  Every year the Center publishes the “State of Rural” report – a brief overview of the demographic and economic trends from a rural perspective. This year’s report will be published in December 2021. Over the next few months, we will be writing about some of the trends in the report here on our blog allowing ...

EXCERPT: “Rural Americans are dying of covid at more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts — a divide that health experts say is likely to widen as access to medical care shrinks for a population that tends to be older, sicker, heavier, poorer and less vaccinated. While the initial surge of covid-19 deaths skipped ...

By Julie Tesch, CEO and President Greetings from the Center for Rural Policy & Development (CRPD)!  We took a hiatus from posting on the blog over the summer to take a much-deserved rest.  We covered a lot of ground the last half of 2020 and the first half of 2021 so it was an opportune time ...

EXCERPT: “Mergers and acquisitions improved patient care outcomes for rural hospitals, a new study published in JAMA Network Open suggests. For the case-control study, researchers affiliated with IBM Watson Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, analyzed data from 172 merged hospitals and 266 comparison hospitals that remained independent from 2009 to 2016. The researchers sought ...

EXCERPT: “The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) is now accepting applications for the Minnesota Main Street COVID Relief Grant program. A total of $64,200,000 is available in grants for Minnesotan owned and operated businesses that can demonstrate financial hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses that are majority-owned by military veterans, women, and Black, Indigenous, ...

EXCERPT: “Despite decades of federal and state investments in farm programs and rural economic development, most of rural America is still losing population while urban America is gaining. There are exceptions, of course. Montana attracted so many new people that the state gained a second congressional seat. And oil rich Williams County, North Dakota, was ...

EXCERPT: “The Trump era saw Republicans tighten their grip on voters in Greater Minnesota while DFLers made huge gains in the Twin Cities and metro area suburbs. Now, eight months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Minnesota’s geographic divide remains stark. An Aug. 28-31 MinnPost poll of 1,945 Minnesota voters found that rural and urban voters in Minnesota split sharply on everything from ...

EXCERPT: “Today, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) has launched the latest round of Child Care Economic Development Grants. These grants authorize $5 million over the next two fiscal years for grants to local communities to increase quality child care providers to support economic development across Minnesota. A total of $2.5 million will ...

EXCERPT: “Nationally, one in six people, about 17.6 percent, face food insecurity, said Geri Henchy, Director of Nutrition Policy and Early Childhood Programs with the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) in Washington, D. C. Henchy said food insufficiency, which measures how many people do not have access to enough food, affected one in 10 Americans this ...

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 ...