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 ...

  Across the state, an army of younger senior citizens use their own private vehicles to serve as volunteer drivers, providing an essential service to the elderly and disabled in rural communities where public transit can be sporadic or non-existent. According to the transit providers who coordinate these rides to grocery stores, clinics, and other ...

EXCERPT: “When Chuck Tryon took over as president of Owatonna-based Bushel Boy Farms in early October 2020, the U.S. was still a couple months away from an approved Covid-19 vaccine. In late November, Minnesota would go on to experience its worst peak of Covid cases. Like virtually every business at the time, Bushel Boy faced a great ...

EXCERPT: “Many legal-aid programs don’t work in rural areas because they are designed to serve large cities, a new research study says. The result is that low-income rural residents aren’t getting equal access to justice, according to a new paper published in the paper in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law Policy.  Researchers Michele Statz, Robert ...

    Monday, March 29th: Childcare – A Complex Crisis Our first Interconnected Conversation focused on the childcare crisis in Minnesota. Panelists discussed the similarities and differences in childcare between urban and rural Minnesota, what potential business models may be a part of the solution and how the childcare crisis relates to other parts of ...

EXCERPT: “More than $10 million in grants are available to fund infrastructure and other enhancements for Greater Minnesota’s regional parks and trails, including $750,000 to make them more inviting and accessible to underserved communities and people with mobility or other challenges. Two Douglas County parks would be eligible to apply for the funding – Lake ...

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, ...

EXCERPT: “When the economy takes a turn for the worse, there is a plan in place. Being proactive and not reactive is the motto for Region 9 Development Commission. ‘How are things going right now and what do we see in the future,’ Region 9 Development Commission Executive Director Nicole Griensewic said. Especially with their ...

EXCERPT: “Nearly 75% of Minnesotans rely on groundwater for their water supply, but that supply can become strained as population grows, land-use changes, and climate change affects precipitation and groundwater use and recharge. These factors mean that many in the state could find groundwater in increasingly short supply in the coming decades— an issue some ...

This episode is a discussion with Marnie Werner who just published a new research report looking into rural child care. In this interview we speak about the current lack of availability of child care slots , the challenges center based care face in rural Minnesota, and some of the community-level solutions that has Marnie excited. ...