Rural Economies 📍

Shots – Health News : NPR

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To Ease Rural Isolation, Volunteers Connect The Generations : Shots – Health News : NPR

According to a recent poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Bogema is one of about 2.5 million rural residents (about 7% of the total rural population) who say they have no friends or family nearby to rely on. An additional 14 million (about 39%) say they only have a few people. Like Bogema, many feel isolated.

McGregor, Minn., is one of 18 communities in north-eastern part of the state that is participating in a program that addresses loneliness and social isolation by connecting the young with the old.

People in rural areas report "feeling lonely or left out," says Carrie Henning-Smith, the deputy director of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center and one of the authors of a recent study on rural isolation, despite the fact that rural communities often have stronger social networks than urban ones. She notes that many communities have become more socially isolated in recent years as rural economies have declined and young people moved away.

For me, I doubt living in a small town would be socially isolating -- I think there are a lot of interesting folk who live in small towns -- but it's just finding work that pays decently, lets me live the live-style I desire. While I don't need a lot of fancy toys, a lot of things that you need for a good rural life are pretty expensive.

The Rise of the Rural Creative Class – CityLab – Pocket

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The Rise of the Rural Creative Class – CityLab – Pocket

A series of studies from Tim Wojan and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service documents the drivers of rural innovation. Their findings draw on a variety of data sets, including a large-scale survey that compares innovation in urban and rural areas called the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS).

This is based on some 11,000 business establishments with at least five paid employees in tradable industries—that is, sectors that produce goods and services that are or could be traded internationally—in rural (or non-metro) and urban (metro) areas. The survey divides businesses into three main groups. Roughly 30 percent of firms are substantive innovators, launching new products and services, making data-driven decisions, and creating intellectual property worth protecting; another 33 percent are nominal innovators who engage in more incremental improvement of their products and processes; and 38 percent show little or no evidence of innovation, so are considered to be non-innovators.