Podcast: Center of Everywhere Podcast

Season 1 Ep. 22: State Demographer Susan Brower and the release of the Census

On this episode, Kelly Asche got an opportunity to chat with the Minnesota State Demographer Susan Brower where we discussed our surprise that Minnesota kept all eight of it’s congressional districts, how our high self-reporting rate likely helps the accuracy of our data, and our concerns of the U.S. Census Bureau’s plan to add noise ...

Season 1 Ep. 21: Mid-legislative session review with Scott McMahon

Back in January, President and CEO of the Center for Rural Policy and Development, Julie Tesch, had a conversation with Scott McMahon, the Executive Director of the Greater MN Partnership on the upcoming legislative session. In this episode, Julie brought Scott back on for a mid-legislative session review. So far, this session has lived up ...

Season 1 Ep. 19: Homelessness in rural MN, with Rhonda Otteson

On this week’s episode, Julie talks with Rhonda Otteson, Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless, about homelessness in rural Minnesota. It’s easy to overlook since homelessness doesn’t always look the way we think it should. Rhonda and Julie discuss the many hidden factors that put people at risk for homelessness, why the housing situation in Greater ...

Season 1 Ep. 18: Rural grocery stores and the rise of the dollar store

In a previous episode, we discussed the importance of rural grocery stores. Kathy Draeger, the statewide Director of the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships at the University of Minnesota,  discussed their discussed their recently published report outlining results from a survey they sent to rural grocery stores  across Minnesota. For this episode, we brought her back ...
Center of Everywhere podcast

Season 1 Ep. 17: Vaccine rollout in Greater Minnesota

For the last ten months, Minnesotans have been waiting along with the rest of the world for a vaccine to protect us from COVID-19. Now that we have one, though, officials face the next big issue: how to get those shots out to the public. For this topic, we’ve invited back Sue Grafstrom, a CRPD ...

Season 1 Ep 16: Pandemic’s impact on the rural workforce

Last week we released our report exploring how the pandemic has impacted jobs and the workforce in Rural Minnesota. And on this episode, we get to dive in a bit deeper into this topic with a couple of our Workforce Development Boards and a labor analyst with the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development ...