Tag: demographics

  Reed Anfinson, owner of the Swift County Monitor and Grant County Herald newspapers and a CRPD board member, joins us this week to talk about the fact that the new governor of Minnesota is from Greater Minnesota, something that hasn’t happened in 30 years. Gov. Walz’s job now, says Reed, will be to balance ...

Ask business owners in Minnesota what their biggest challenge is today and most will tell you: “finding help.” Economic growth coupled with an aging workforce heading toward retirement and fewer young people to replace them is putting significant pressure on Greater Minnesota’s employers, making hiring significantly more challenging. Over the next several months, the Center for ...

  Diana Anderson, president of the Southwest Initiative Foundation in Hutchinson, joins us this week to talk about a new initiative on their part to build opportunities for youth in the region, particularly for the 11,000 children who live in poverty there. 

  This week CRPD’s research associate Kelly Asche joins us again to talk about the workforce shortage and how it can turn out to be a positive story. Employers are starting to look at what were previously considered hard-to-employ groups, like people with criminal backgrounds and people with disabilities. There is also the work going ...

EXCERPT: “Open enrollment has increased across Greater Minnesota over the last decade, according to research by the Center for Rural Policy and Development. The percentage of students choosing to open enroll in rural Minnesota districts increased from 9 percent in 2006-2007 to 15 percent in 2016-2017. For non-metro districts that are regional centers, open enrollment increased ...

  Kelly Asche, research associate at the Center, has just completed an article that gets to the heart of the question of why it’s so hard to get housing built in rural Minnesota. While rural communities recruit workers to alleviate the workforce shortage, they find they don’t have the appropriate housing for workers they would ...

  In the third and final installment of our talk with the Center’s Kelly Asche on the State of Rural Minnesota, we cover the economic picture. Most of Greater MN weathered the Great Recession well thanks to agriculture, which also bolstered the state as a whole. On the other hand, there’s the rise of job vacancies, ...

With population growth expected to slow and workforce already short in many parts of Minnesota, population and population projections are worth paying attention to. The Center’s research associate Kelly Asche, author of this year’s State of Rural Minnesota report, breaks down the population change patterns across the state in this week’s RuralMN Radio. ...

On RuralMN Radio this week, the Center’s research associate Kelly Asche talks about our new report on the State of Rural Minnesota. In this first part, Kelly talks about just how we’re defining rural. There’s more to it than you might think.