When Jules Edwards was a teenager, they say being able to access an abortion was life-saving health care. 

“I was somebody who had an abortion as a teenager and didn’t tell my family and got support through a family friend,” Edwards said recently. “And that saved my life and gave me my future.”

Now, as executive director of Abortion Care Tennessee (ACT) and Mountain Access Brigade (MAB), independent organizations funding Appalachians who need to seek abortion care out of state, Edwards spends every day fighting to provide that same life-saving care for others. 

It’s increasingly difficult. Edwards says they’ve been threatened and doxxed doing this work. Their home state of Tennessee enacted a trigger ban when the U.S. Supreme Court first overturned Roe v. Wade; abortion remains banned across the state, as well as in the bordering states of Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. Tennessee’s abortion laws are so strict that the state is currently entangled in two court cases over them. 

With the government enacting ever-tightening bans across Southern Appalachia, nationwide organizations like Planned Parenthood are no longer able to provide life-saving abortion care in Tennessee, and have faced intense operational threats. It’s left to grassroots organizations in Appalachia — usually founded, funded and run entirely by and for their communities — to continue fighting to provide care and helping each other when no one else will or can, despite funding challenges, tightening restrictions and risks of persecution. 

Edwards’s organizations, ACT and MAB, are among the grassroots funds filling a reproductive health gap by operating statewide to service Tennesseans going out of state for abortion care. Among community work and educational measures, ACT funds procedural costs for Tennesseans traveling for abortion access, and MAB is an abortion fund and doula collective.

Now, New York and Maryland are the only Appalachian states who have permanently legally protected abortion, without six- or twelve-week bans. (At six weeks, many individuals do not even yet know they are pregnant). 

The ulterior motive of the state’s injunctions against abortion, Edwards said, is taking away the ability of young people to have power and autonomy, as well as to “make it impossible for the Planned Parenthoods, the abortion funds, or support groups to do their jobs.” Both abortion providers in Appalachia — and individuals who need abortions in the region — are left grappling with a landscape that’s nearly impossible to navigate. 

Organizers work through an ‘access crisis’ 

Tennessee was sued over its abortion law, a ban with virtually non-existent exemptions, in a case led by the Center for Reproductive Rights and three Tennessee women, Katy Dulong, Allie Phillips and Nicole Blackmon,who faced near-deadly barriers in accessing abortions for life-threatening pregnancies and/or fetuses that were virtually non-viable. In a temporary injunction in late October 2024, judges ruled that doctors in Tennessee who provide abortions to patients facing certain medical conditions can do so without facing disciplinary action. As of December 2024, the case is still active. 

Meanwhile, back in September 2024, a judge temporarily blocked enforcement of Tennessee’s ban criminalizing any non-parent from helping a minor to obtain an abortion, according to reporting from Tennessee Lookout. For organizations like ACT and MAB, bans not only impact them providing aid, including to minors, but also complicate elements of their work.

Before Roe’s overturn, “Tennessee was actually a safe haven for abortion in the South,” Edwards said, noting Tennessee’s central location to other Southern states and previously higher number of abortion clinics. As of 2012,  more than one in four abortions in Tennessee were being obtained by someone traveling from out of state, an outcome of the 2000 Tennessee Supreme Court decision that struck down abortion restrictions.

“We received quite an influx of out-of-state patients,” Edwards said. “So when Tennessee lost abortion access, it sent the entire South into an access crisis.” Doing this work in the South, Edwards said, “feels like a microcosm of the fascism that we’re facing on a national level.”

‘The need is significant’

That “access crisis,” driven by Tennnesee’s trigger ban, was compounded by violent blowback against providers. For MAB and ACT, the uptick in work kicked off before Roe’s overturn when, on New Years Eve of 2021, Knoxville’s Planned Parenthood clinic was destroyed. Mark Reno, a Jan. 6 insurrectionist and member of a Catholic Orthodox militant group, allegedly arsoned the $2 million yet-to-be-opened facility, but died in jail before he could be convicted. The year before, he had allegedly fired shots at the same clinic. 

The day of the arson, Noé Monárrez, an East Tennessee Community Health Educator who has worked at the Knoxville Planned Parenthood since June of 2021, recalled opening their phone and scrolling through Twitter. Monárrez immediately saw that a Planned Parenthood was on fire – and realized where it was. 

“I had an inkling that somebody had burned it down, because it is Knoxville, it is East Tennessee, that’s just one of those things you have to expect potentially,” Monárrez said. 

“The day it burned, I remember the first thing I thought was, ‘Did that person have my address? Did they find me online?’ said Tory Mills, who was Director of Community Engagement at Planned Parenthood for 11 years. Mills recalled fear that she — along with her friends and colleagues — were in danger. 

“That’s what that building being burned down was [for], was to scare people, to scare them away from getting care [and] from doing this work,” said Mills, now a member of Knoxville Abortion Justice Alliance (KAJA), a community organization advocating for stigmatization and education around reproductive care.

For a year after the arson, Knoxville, the third largest city in the state, was left without a Planned Parenthood. After that, Knoxville’s Planned Parenthood had a brief tenure of offering limited services out of a bus until the provider went on maternity leave. Even when the mobile unit was offering services, many community members didn’t know; Planned Parenthood was reluctant to advertise given the violence and threats they’d previously faced, and struggled with zoning issues, according to Monárrez. 

Because it was still a functional clinic, the bus had to be in a location zoned for health care. It couldn’t remain on the site of the previous Planned Parenthood due to construction starting, and had to be moved overnight due to safety concerns. 

“At the time, we also didn’t publish [the location of the bus] anywhere publicly except social media and maybe [the Planned Parenthood] website,” Monárrez said. “We tried to keep the announcement of it very quiet just because of safety and security reasons.” 

In anticipation of Roe’s overturn, the mobile health unit’s offerings were kept fairly simple. They focused primarily on basic birth control services, pregnancy testing and limited UTI treatment, with the hope of being able to offer ultrasounds, gender-affirming care and more extensive STI/UTI testing and treatment in time. 

“[For many of the patients,] the only times they were seeing any kind of medical care was when they were coming into Planned Parenthood,” Monárrez said.

The Dobbs decision left the entire state without abortion care. Now, the Knoxville Planned Parenthood facility has been rebuilt with tightened security measures and reopened in November 2024. But it still legally can’t offer abortion care within the state, though it will help navigate patients to the closest clinic that offers the services they need. The Knoxville Planned Parenthood also has an internal patient navigation assistance fund, which can be applied to travel costs such as flights and hotels as well as procedure costs, and partners with abortion assistance mutual aid funds such as MAB, according to Monárrez.  

In Appalachia, the stigma against abortion, as well as systemic barriers like lack of access to transportation and failure to expand Medicaid, directly impact community members. There are gaps in the narrative around what attacks on Planned Parenthood mean and how they impact people, particularly how they potentially leave “the everyday person who needs an abortion feeling terrified for their life,” according to Edwards. Whereas Planned Parenthood is a national organization, most local abortion organizations — the ones stepping in to fill health care gaps and save lives — are funded by the community and often lack capital. 

Multiple organizers with MAB and KAJA previously worked for Planned Parenthood, and noted the importance of the organizing work they learned there; Planned Parenthood is the first stepping stone for many people, some said. But Planned Parenthood doesn’t share the same funding burden with the funds, some organizers said.

One MAB member mentioned that the fund’s anonymous support line sometimes has to be closed for a week or so out of a month due to lack of funding. In late September, the fund posted a message to Instagram: the support line was closed because they’d spent double their weekly budget the week prior, supporting appointments.

The need is significant. A study from The Guttmacher Institute detailed that more than 10,000 Tennesseans crossed state lines to access an abortion in the last year. While Tennessee is already classified as a “maternity care desert,” experts have stated that maternal and infant mortality rates could rise in states with abortion restrictions, according to reporting from The Tennessee Lookout. Because Tennessee is out of Title X compliance due to a policy of refusing to allow clinics to share information on elective abortions, the state is also ineligible for vital federal Title X funding. 

Mills also noted that many abortion funds and national organizations deem the climate in Appalachia too difficult to navigate and too hostile, and simply give up on providing care here.  “This country as a whole has painted Appalachia as a throwaway place,” said Mills. 

The organizers in Tennessee see this as another social justice battle that Appalachia is being thrown to the frontline of.  “And now we’re experiencing that around abortion,” Edwards said, noting that many of the most brilliant social justice activists come from the South, particularly Appalachia.

The lack of resources, rights, wealth and more that Appalachians often face is discussed and widely known – but rarely are Appalachians celebrated for the “grittiness, resourcefulness and tenacity” they show in the face of oppression and injustice, Edwards said, pointing out that Appalachians rarely fail to rise up and provide for each other. 

People in Tennessee and East Tennessee will always need abortion, Mills said, and regardless of what entities or organizations hold the work, there will always be workers ensuring people get the care they need.

“Even as tired as I am 20 years into this fight, I will never leave this region,” Mills said. “I will never leave Appalachia, and I will never let the bastards win.”

Contact Mountain Access Brigade’s Support Line at 855888MAB8.

Kacie Faith Kress is an investigative journalist, with an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School, specializing in Social Justice & Solutions Journalism.  Born and raised in East Tennessee, she now lives in Chicago. 

The post Appalachian Tennessee Abortion Providers Are Still Fighting to Provide Care appeared first on 100 Days in Appalachia.

KOSU wrote dozens of articles about agriculture and rural affairs this year, led by reporter Anna Pope. They were about everything from wind turbine recycling to farmer mental health and more.

What you need to know:

• An Alaska State Trooper post proposed for the Talkeetna area aims to improve public safety and reduce response times. The post would serve areas along a roughly 60-mile stretch of the Parks Highway, from Willow to just north of Trapper Creek.
• The post would include six full-time positions. It was proposed as part of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s fiscal year 2026 budget and would cost $2.4 million to fund in its first year.
• The post was proposed in response to local concerns about an inadequate trooper presence in the area, highlighted by community feedback following a 2023 kidnapping and double homicide linked to drug trafficking.

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WASILLA – An Alaska State Trooper post proposed for the Talkeetna area would add dedicated law enforcement officers to the upper Matanuska-Susitna Valley as part of an effort to improve public safety response times, officials said Thursday.

Funding for the post is included in Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s proposed $16.8 billion budget for fiscal year 2026, which begins in July. The budget proposes $2.4 million to establish the post with six new positions: a sergeant, three full-time troopers, a wildlife trooper and a criminal justice technician, public safety officials said. The post would be part of B Detachment, which patrols an area the size of West Virginia, stretching hundreds of miles from Glennallen to Cantwell.

If approved, it would not be the first time a trooper post has operated in the Talkeetna area. A facility on Talkeetna Spur Road was closed in 2016 due to state budget cuts, and its six employees were transferred to the Meadow Lakes post.

Rather than field its own police force, which borough officials estimate would cost at least $14 million annually, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough relies on troopers to provide law enforcement for much of the region. About six troopers patrol the vast area at any given time, public safety officials said earlier this year. Incident response times vary widely, with some calls to locations outside the core area taking hours, borough officials said.

Reopening a post near Talkeetna would help address that problem, said Austin McDaniel, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety. Troopers assigned to the new post would cover a roughly 60-mile stretch of Parks Highway from Willow to north of Trapper Creek, he said. They would not be regularly called to core area patrols or incidents, he said.

McDaniel said the funding request for the post stems in part from feedback gathered at a community meeting following a kidnapping and double homicide near Trapper Creek in 2023 that was linked to drug trafficking.

“They were very clear that they felt that the responsiveness from the Alaska State Troopers wasn’t up to what it should be,” he said.

Both a Mat-Su Assembly resolution passed unanimously in January urging residents to arm themselves and a free gun safety and live-fire training program approved by the Assembly in May were created in direct response to the lack of trooper presence in the Trapper Creek area, said Assembly member Ron Bernier, who represents the area and sponsored the measures.

Troopers receive about 2,500 calls annually to the region between Willow and north of Trapper Creek, McDaniel said, or about 15% of calls received area-wide each year, according to trooper incident data. Since 2021, troopers have logged 262 welfare checks and 421 vehicle collisions in the area north of Willow, he said. Since 2020, they have recorded 785 reports of illegal drug use, he said.

If funding is approved, the exact location of the proposed Talkeetna post would be determined through a state leasing process, McDaniel said.

Mat-Su Borough officials said they are eager to support the proposal and could share land or space in an existing facility.

“This is a huge deal for us and something that I think we all want to dive into and lend our support wherever we can through this legislative session to retain what the governor has done,” Mat-Su Borough Manager Mike Brown told the Mat-Su Assembly during a meeting Tuesday.

While the reopened post would add new trooper positions if approved, filling those spots is a separate challenge, public safety officials said.

Fourteen of B Detachment’s 72 trooper and wildlife trooper positions were vacant as of Oct. 1, according to public safety data. A dozen recent academy graduates – nine troopers and three wildlife officers – are expected to fill some of those positions, McDaniel said. The department is also working to solve its staffing challenges in part by refocusing its recruitment and retention efforts in the state, he said.

“They have doubled down on in-state recruiting, which is an area that we have frankly overlooked for a few years as we focused on out-of-state applicants,” he said.

Dunleavy’s 2026 budget proposal marks the first recent effort to reopen a trooper post in the Talkeetna area with new staffing.

In June, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District considered a proposal to convert portable buildings at Su Valley Junior-Senior High School for use as temporary office space for troopers passing through the area. The school board rejected the proposal in a 4-3 vote, citing the lack of permanently assigned troopers.

— Contact Amy Bushatz at abushatz@matsusentinel.com

You are having a health emergency. You call 911. The nearest hospital is an hour away. 

 

You are diagnosed with cancer, but it took you months to find out because you don’t have transportation to see the one primary care physician in your county. 

 

You finally get an appointment with a specialty doctor you need to see, but the closest office is two counties over, and you cannot afford it. 

 

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Click here to read highlights from the story

• Wisconsin’s homeless population has been rising since 2021. Wisconsin Watch is reporting for the first time the official count taken in January 2024 rose again to more than 5,000 for the first time since 2017.

• Counties outside Milwaukee, Dane and Racine account for 60% of the state’s homeless population, yet only have 23% of the beds.

• As the national and state focus has shifted to a “housing first” strategy for addressing homelessness, rural communities with fewer shelter beds, case workers and resources are struggling to find affordable housing for those in need.

• Shelter providers say possible solutions include bypassing county governments for state reimbursements, consolidating multiple definitions of homelessness, and more consistent and proportional state funding.

Last winter, Eric Zieroth dressed in as many layers as he could and stayed beneath a down blanket each night. He learned it was the best way to keep warm while living in his car in far northwestern Wisconsin. 

During those cold months, he and his then-20-year-old daughter Christina Hubbell had to wake, start the vehicle and blast the heat a few times a night before shutting it off again. 

For over a year, the pair regularly parked their PT Cruiser — a car older than Hubbell that Zieroth, 47, called “a shoebox on wheels” — in a corner spot at a public boat landing on Long Lake. The lot is less than a mile from the rural city of Shell Lake, with a population of less than 1,400.

Down a dirt road and tucked into the woods, they slept at the secluded launch to stay out of the way in the town where they spent most of their lives. Now, because they are homeless, they have been ostracized for showering, parking and sleeping in public places.

Washburn County has no homeless shelters, and they don’t have family to stay with. Hubbell’s mom and Zieroth divorced in 2022. The following year, when Hubbell was 19, her mom told her to start paying rent or leave. 

Hubbell’s job at a Dollar General in Shell Lake — their only source of income — keeps them from relocating to a shelter in another county. They are on a waitlist for a low-income housing unit. 

Zieroth is awaiting a surgery that will allow him to get back to work. With no way to heal or keep the wound clean, he said he couldn’t get the operation while living in his car. If it weren’t for his daughter, the former mechanic said he might have considered committing a crime and getting booked into jail instead of spending another winter in the vehicle. 

“There’s no way I could do it again,” Zieroth said. “I had to figure out something else this year.”

In rural Wisconsin, homelessness is often hidden behind a veil of individuals and families who are couch surfing and sleeping in their vehicles instead of sleeping on city streets or camping out in parks. Resources are few and far between, shelters are always full, and funding can be a significant challenge at the local, state and federal level.

After falling for years, the state’s estimated homeless population has been rising since 2021. This past year it rose again from 4,861 in 2023 to 5,037. In the “balance” of the state — all 69 counties outside Milwaukee, Racine and Dane — the homeless population increased from 2,938 individuals in 2023 to 3,201 in 2024, according to data Wisconsin Watch obtained from the region’s continuum of care organization, which conducts homeless counts each year.

Despite accounting for over 60% of the state’s homeless population in 2023, these mostly rural counties collectively contain just 23% of the state’s supportive housing units — long-term housing models with on-site supportive services, which experts say is the best way to address chronic homelessness. But providing long-term housing and services on top of shelter is an expensive, labor-intensive task for small, rural providers with limited funding.

According to the Department of Public Instruction’s latest data, 18,455 students experienced homelessness during the 2022-23 school year — a number that has increased each year since 2020. Some 11,000 of these students reside in districts outside of Milwaukee, Madison, Racine and Green Bay.

The annual data collected on homelessness are an undercount, especially in rural areas, said Mary Frances Kenion, vice president of training and technical assistance at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. That means less funding for already disadvantaged smaller communities. 

“Where there’s more concentration of people, that’s always going to drive funding, because we have block grant funding that is directly tied to the census,” Kenion told Wisconsin Watch. 

Despite rural communities having fewer nonprofits than urban ones, shelters and housing assistance programs are leading the way to address the expanse of homelessness in rural Wisconsin. 

“Funding and access to resources is a challenge … but there are some really bright spots in rural communities, because they are doing more with less,” Kenion said. “We’re seeing a ton of innovation and resilience just by virtue of them being positioned to do more with less.” 

But shelter directors and anti-poverty advocates face many hurdles when it comes to funding, resources and support.

Rural shelter providers across the state identified several solutions to the problem: Cutting out county governments as the middleman for state reimbursements, increasing the availability of new rental units, consolidating multiple definitions of homelessness, more consistent and proportional state funding, and assistance with case management are just a few.

Point-in-time counts, federal funding and HUD 

The annual “point-in-time” (PIT) homeless counts are collected by continuum of care organizations across the country on a single night during the last week of January. Wisconsin has four designated organizations with three covering Milwaukee, Dane and Racine counties and one for the other 69 counties. 

The counts are submitted to Congress and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for consideration and funding determinations. They are meant to include those living in temporary shelters, as well as unsheltered people living on the street, but do not include people in other sheltered situations. Those living in cars are often missed. 

“They’re typically either in their car or they’re on somebody’s couch,” said Jenny Fasula, executive director of Wisconsin’s Foundation for Rural Housing. “People on the couches don’t count in your PIT counts because they’re ‘housed.’ People in cars in rural areas — I don’t even know where you’d find them, except maybe a Walmart parking lot.”

Since 2009, HUD — the main federal agency that handles homelessness — has targeted permanent supportive housing programs with long-term, sustainable services like case management for federal funding. The national shift from temporary housing programs reflects a widely adopted “housing first” approach — that the security of a permanent shelter is the first, necessary step before people can address the root causes of their homelessness. 

“Temporary housing programs shifted their gears towards that other type of service so they could continue to operate and get funding to operate,” Wisconsin Policy Forum researcher Donald Cramer told Wisconsin Watch. 

While permanent housing programs effectively lowered Wisconsin’s homeless population in both rural and urban areas before the pandemic, the shift hasn’t been easy for rural shelters that are strapped for cash and resources.

“As a shelter, when you have 50 people, it’s impossible to have the funding to hire case managers that are really involved and able to really assist people,” said Michael Hall, a former Waupaca County shelter worker and director of Impact Wisconsin — a nonprofit providing housing and recovery services in a six-county rural region. 

“We’re small,” said Adam Schnabel, vice president of a homeless shelter in Taylor County, adding that without more staff, the shelter can’t have someone in charge of post-departure case management to make sure people stay in housing.

“We’re trying to find volunteer case managers,” said Kimberly Fitzgerald, interim director of the Rusk County Lighthouse shelter. “People to volunteer their time, to work for free, to do case management. Good luck with that.” 

Restrictions on federal funding and multiple definitions of homelessness are another barrier for rural homeless providers, said Millie Rounsville, CEO of Northwest Wisconsin Community Services Agency. 

The federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act defines homelessness specifically for youth as minor children who “lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” But HUD defines homelessness in multiple categories: 1) an individual or family who is immediately homeless and without shelter and 2) those at imminent risk of homelessness. Consolidating these definitions is key, according to Rounsville. 

Homeless children and families in the rural region surrounding Superior tend to be doubled up in some kind of housing, Rounsville said. While they often meet the McKinney-Vento definition of homeless, they are considered category two homeless under HUD’s definitions. 

But in order to qualify for HUD-funded Rapid Rehousing programs, individuals must fall under category one.

“The funding needs to be flexible,” Rounsville said. “We can’t assume that every community across the country has the same need.”

To provide permanent supportive housing and receive funding, shelters and nonprofits also have to serve and document chronically homeless populations. According to HUD, that means a member of the household has to have a documented disability. Providers like Rounsville are additionally required to provide third-party verification that someone has been category one homeless for a year or more.

“If you were in a larger city where you have a lot of shelters or street outreach, that third-party verification would be a lot easier than when you’re in a rural community,” Rounsville said.

It’s a housing issue

Rural Wisconsin is lacking affordable, habitable homes.

“When you layer the limited footprint of service providers in a rural community, packed with a housing supply that is already insufficient and continuing to shrink, that creates a perfect storm for rising numbers of people experiencing homelessness,” Kenion said. 

Providers in Rusk County, Taylor County, Bayfield County and Waupaca County said that without low-income options and available rental units, they often can’t get people into permanent housing.

“As fast as units open up, they get filled,” Fitzgerald said. “In Ladysmith specifically, there are next to no rental units. So even if somebody did get approved for the housing program, where are we going to put them?”

Among affordability and shortage issues, rural areas are also home to the state’s aging housing stock. 

“The housing stock is very old,” Fasula said. “So now you have higher energy bills. And the rent may be lower, but your energy bill is twice as much.” 

Her work at the Foundation for Rural Housing provides one-time emergency rental assistance to prevent evictions and homelessness across the state. 

“People stereotype them to think ‘Oh, we have these programs because people don’t know how to manage their money.’ It’s not that,” Fasula said. “These are folks that come in that just have a crisis. … They don’t have anything to fall back on. Any little hiccup is a big impact for them financially.”

The foundation is partially funded by the state’s critical assistance grant program, which is awarded to just one eligible agency in Wisconsin. Fasula said the foundation still relies on many private funding sources.

While working to eventually afford an apartment in Shell Lake, Hubbell is making $13.50 an hour at the Dollar General, but only scheduled to work 20 hours a week. The living wage calculation for one adult in Washburn County is $19.45 an hour working 40 hours a week, according to the MIT living wage calculator.

“Homelessness is a housing issue. It’s a symptom of an economy and policies that aren’t working,” Kenion said. “Yes, housing costs tend to be lower in rural communities, but so do wages.”

State funding 

In the state’s 2023-25 biennial budget, the Republican-controlled Legislature rejected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ recommendations to spend some $24 million on emergency shelter and housing grants, as well as homeless case management services and rental assistance for unhoused veterans.

The Legislature also nixed $250 million Evers proposed for affordable workforce housing and home rehabilitation grants.

The state funds two main grants for homeless shelters and housing annually. The State Shelter Subsidy Grant (SSSG) receives around $1.6 million per year, and the Housing Assistance Program receives $900,000.

But for small shelters like Taylor House — the only homeless shelter in rural Taylor County — Schnabel says the funding is “pennies.” The facility has a continuous waitlist. 

“We are a lost people up north, here in the rural areas,” Schnabel said. “I feel like there’s so much focus and so many monetary resources provided to Dane and Milwaukee counties.” 

The north central Wisconsin shelter with a 17-person capacity received $10,000 from SSSG this year, Schnabel said. That’s around $588 per person. But four emergency shelters in Milwaukee with a combined capacity of around 392 received $400,000 from the $1.6 million grant total — $1,020 per person.

“It’s not just local individuals we’re serving,” Schnabel said. “We’re serving individuals from Milwaukee County, Dane County, Fox River Valley, Chippewa. They’re coming from all over because those homeless shelters are either at capacity or their waitlist is too long.”

The state’s Recovery Voucher Grant Program awarded $760,000 to grantees in 2024 to provide housing to those experiencing homelessness and struggling with opioid use disorders. Half of these funds went to three providers in Dane, Milwaukee and Waukesha counties. 

Another state resource is the Homeless Case Management Services (HCMS) grant program, which distributes up to 10 $50,000 grants per year to shelters and programs that meet eligibility requirements.

Shelter directors like Fitzgerald said the state’s reliance on grant funding to address homelessness and housing needs isn’t sustainable for small providers. While helpful, these pots of money quickly run out, and many of them don’t cover operating costs or wages. 

“A lot of these funding sources, it’s like a first come first serve basis, so there isn’t money necessarily allocated to cover our expenses,” Fitzgerald said. “When the funding runs out, we’re SOL.” 

The Lighthouse is the only homeless shelter in Rusk County. Many surrounding shelters are also full, and some counties don’t have shelters at all, leaving people with limited options. 

“As fast as we empty out, we fill up. So it’s kind of a revolving door,” Fitzgerald said. “Our first priority is to serve Rusk County residents, but we’re in the business of helping, so I don’t turn people away.” 

Small shelters face county-level hurdles 

Some shelter workers and advocates say in rural Wisconsin, homelessness is addressed only to the extent that their local governments and administrations are willing to acknowledge the issue and get involved.

“A lot of these people go unnoticed, unchecked in the system, and there just aren’t any county services, especially in our community, that are there to help individuals that are struggling,” Hall said. “We, with a lot of duct tape and a shoestring, hold it down.” 

Providers in several rural counties noted that there aren’t any shelters that are owned or operated in any capacity by local governments. In most cases, Washburn County Social Services can only direct homeless residents like Zieroth and Hubbell to the Lakeland Family Resource Center, which provided them with a list of shelters too far out of their reach.

“We don’t have the extra gas or a decent enough vehicle to go too far from Shell Lake,” Zieroth said.

The Ashland Community Shelter is the only shelter in a four-county rural area. The city applied for the federal grant funds that allowed Rounsville’s agency to acquire the shelter, but she noted that if it hadn’t taken that step, there wouldn’t be a shelter in Ashland today. 

“You still need that county government saying, ‘Hey, we have a program, we need funding,’” Cramer said. “If your county is not looking to deal with homelessness, then they’re probably not asking for that funding either.”

Hall and Schnabel said local governments need to be more involved in their work, whether that be providing a county employee to serve as a shelter director, or simply making better use of the few resources they have.

Schnabel added that small shelters often cannot pay their directors a decent wage, resulting in frequent staff turnover. Taylor House has had four directors in the last 18 months, he said. The inconsistency leaves “a bad taste” in the mouth of those reviewing their grant applications.

According to Hall, some counties are much more willing than others to utilize Comprehensive Community Services (CCS) — a state program aimed at addressing substance abuse and mental health needs. The program allows counties to contract employees and case managers at local shelters who provide services such as skills development and peer support. If the notes are done properly, the county can bill those expenses back to the state through BadgerCare. 

But despite those being reimbursable expenses, some county officials either don’t know how or are unwilling to engage in the program, Hall said. 

“The tool is there, it just needs to be utilized,” he said. “Because of their unwillingness to try something, it oftentimes ends up having to tell people ‘no,’ and we’re moving them to another county.”

He added that allowing local shelters that serve those covered under BadgerCare to bill the state directly for these services instead of relying on the county to initiate it “would solve the problem tomorrow.”

Hall also noted that county governments can use their opioid settlement funds to provide housing and shelter to those with eligible needs, yet some have instead spent it on other things. 

Waupaca County, for example, told Wisconsin Watch it has spent nearly $100,000 in opioid settlement funds on awareness campaigns, training, a counselor position and equipment that helps local police quickly identify narcotics in the field.

Grant funding is often allocated to regional “parent” organizations, like a Salvation Army, which then distribute the money to local nonprofits and shelters. But Schnabel said the state must force the hand of counties that “choose not to see homelessness.” 

“By requiring that these funds go through the county to be disbursed to the homeless shelter, it forces the county to have a relationship and have skin in the game with the shelters,” he said. 

Another challenge is that some small communities like Ashland reject homeless shelters, assuming they will bring negative footprints.

“There’s going to be needles, the neighborhood houses are going to be robbed, children are going to be ran over on the highway,” Rounsville said. “There’s all kinds of things that came up when we were doing the change of use for this hotel to become a shelter. It was something that not everybody wanted to see in the community.” 

The small city of Clintonville approved an ordinance last winter enforcing a 60-day limit on local hotel stays in a six-month period, citing drug concerns, disorderly conduct and disturbances. Many homeless individuals in the area are put up in those hotels. 

“We’re trying to figure out, what are we going to do with those 50 people this winter when the police departments come through and say they have to get out,” Hall said. 

Studies estimate that every year, someone experiencing chronic homelessness costs a community $30,000 to $50,000, according to the Interagency Council on Homelessness. Yet for each person who is homeless, permanent supportive housing costs communities $20,000 per year.

“These are our neighbors in any community, and when they are no longer homeless and they are thriving, they reinvest that into the economy, into the community, into the neighborhood,” Kenion said.

While often doing more with less, local nonprofits are still the ones that are built to do this work, Hall said.

“There is no solution. There is no algorithm to get us to an answer,” Schnabel said. “But what we know is that there needs to be a place that they can go to be safe, and have warm, secure housing until they can get back on their feet.”

Shunned by their community

In June, Zieroth and Hubbell pulled their car into a Shell Lake gas station parking lot to sleep, shortly before a police officer was called and arrived to tell them they were trespassing and had to leave. 

In August, the father and daughter stopped at the Shell Lake ATV Campground to use the public showers, when a campground employee entered and demanded that Zieroth get his daughter and leave. The employee called Shell Lake police, who escorted him off the property. 

A resident living next to the boat launch where they stayed eventually took issue with them parking their car at the public lot. In October, Hubbell said the homeowner stormed into the Dollar General while she was working and told her they couldn’t sleep there anymore, threatening to call the police.

And one night after finding a group fishing at the boat launch, the pair decided to drive to another public landing in Burnett County where they parked and slept. Still under their blankets, they woke the next morning to a DNR officer and county sheriff’s deputy approaching, asking about Zieroth’s “drug of choice.” According to Wisconsin Court System records, Zieroth served time in prison for burglary as a 21-year-old, but has never faced drug-related charges.

They were told to leave. 

“They just did not want us in this area. We’re less than a mile from where we grew up, and from where she went to school and graduated,” Zieroth said, pointing to his daughter. “I’ve made my life here … everything points to ‘get out.’”

While still homeless, the pair were fortunate enough to find a temporary place to stay as the weather gets colder — a small room in the unfinished basement of an acquaintance who didn’t want to see them living out of their car. They are joined by their dog Bella, who Zieroth won’t abandon after she woke him the night his camper caught fire in 2022, allowing him to escape and likely saving his life. 

Zieroth and Hubbell have an old bed, a recliner and a bathroom for now. But their most cherished comfort is that the room is heated — something they don’t take for granted after a winter spent in their car. 

With a roof over their heads, Zieroth hopes to finally get the surgery he needs, but he’s unsure of how long they can stay. 

They insist on paying the homeowners $50 a week — all they can afford — for letting them stay in the basement. Zieroth uses his skills as a mechanic to fix things around the property, and Hubbell picks items up for them at the Dollar General whenever she can.

Once healed, he wants to get back to work and acquire a property of his own, but his first priority is his daughter. After getting on her feet, Hubbell hopes to go to cosmetology school in Rice Lake.

“She has her whole life ahead of her and experience has taught me that some real bad beginnings get really good endings, and she deserves a good one,” Zieroth said.

Wisconsin’s rural homelessness crisis and the fight to do ‘more with less’ is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Emergency dispatchers in rural Tioga County typically get 75 to 100 calls a day.

But when the remnants of Tropical Storm Debby brought a daylong deluge to parts of Pennsylvania and New York in early August, they fielded more than 500 requests for help and dispatched assistance 311 times in roughly seven hours.

The heavy rain started in the morning, quickly overwhelming local waterways. Floods washed out roads, swept away cars, poured into basements, and knocked houses off their foundations. Most of the calls came from people who couldn’t escape their homes. In some situations, first responders couldn’t reach them. Tioga County reported one fatality.

The arid conditions that choked Maine into a drought this fall stand in stark contrast to the blanket of precipitation that inundated the state a year ago. 

When an atmospheric river threatened to bring a deluge of rain and snowmelt to Maine earlier this month, parched waterways helped shield valley towns from the flooding they saw last December. 

It wasn’t just luck. Farmington town manager Erica LaCroix said the modest infrastructure projects and emergency response protocols that the town has completed in the flooding’s aftermath gave her confidence that her community was better prepared for a potential disaster. 

Weak, undersized culverts have been expanded, and emergency resources have been moved out of flood zones. LaCroix and other inland Maine town officials have strengthened their communication protocols to share resources and streamline their emergency response plans.

Over the past twelve months, Farmington and other Franklin County towns have participated in a number of county-led disaster response exercises and have created contingency plans for various worst-case scenarios, all with the expectation that more severe floods are imminent. 

“We all have an eye towards where we can partner with each other, try to mitigate the cost for our taxpayers and also have a better response,” LaCroix said. “We can all have our separate services, but a lot of times, because of geography, the closest response could be in another town.”

But after a year of ruminating on what went wrong in 2023 and recovering from the $20 million in estimated damages, some western Maine towns have reached the limit of what they can achieve on their own.

The state has doled out $60 million in storm recovery funds to businesses, working waterfronts and infrastructure projects — including $1.05 million to strengthen Norridgewock’s water main against flooding.

But federal disaster aid has been slow to trickle down and many towns lack the technical expertise required to bolster their infrastructure to the levels they’re striving for in the face of climate change.

Even larger towns like Farmington need help fronting costs and navigating federal permitting processes. A year later, LaCroix says the town still hasn’t seen a cent of the $482,875.13 promised by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for recovery costs, causing Farmington to carry a deficit until Maine forwards the funds to the town. 

In smaller communities, limited town budgets could put those projects out of reach. 

“Supporting that kind of additional cost on a major project is burdensome, particularly for town-meeting towns,” LaCroix said. “When you’re telling people you need to do a project that costs several million dollars, and you’re going to have to borrow a lot of it, it’s hard to get past town meetings.”

Pushing forward

The towns aren’t the only ones grappling with how to move forward. State agencies, too, have spent the year reflecting on last winter’s devastating flooding. In November, the state released a climate resilience playbook and a roster of state officials that can get Maine there — it’s just a matter of funding and execution.

Many of the recommendations outlined in the Infrastructure Rebuilding and Resilience Commission’s interim report address the barriers that Farmington and other towns have identified: the prohibitive cost of resilience projects, complex grant applications and highly technical permitting processes. 

One robust section details how Maine can help communities prepare for disasters by pointing to examples from other states, and outlines the creation of a new state office focused on municipal planning.

Born out of a legislative mandate and recommendation from Gov. Janet Mills’ administration, the freshly minted Maine Office of Community Affairs intends to be a “one-stop shop” that can provide coordinated and technical assistance to towns and tribal communities throughout the state.

Though many of its 30 or so anticipated staff members come from reorganizing other state agencies, part of a $69 million federal grant will fund four new positions that will form the state’s Resiliency Office, according to Samantha Horn, director of the Office of Community Affairs.

That includes a resiliency coordinator who will be a direct tie between regional planning offices and state government, linking communities to the resources they need for their larger infrastructure projects. 

In Farmington, that kind of assistance could help the town realize its dream of raising a low-lying commercial hub that was under six feet of water last year when the Sandy River spilled over its banks. Some businesses there took months to re-open, while one shuttered for good. 

“That’s the only thing that will fully mitigate that area, is raising it,” LaCroix said. “If we could get some help at the state level to even help us through permitting, and maybe not financially help us, but give us some extra guidance, some training, then maybe some of this we can do with our own personnel in-house.”

The state commission’s interim report highlighted a program in Vermont that provides free technical assistance to qualified flood-impacted communities, a service similar to what Horn hopes her office can provide in the near future.

“I think what is needed at this point is some connective tissue so that communities have an easier time navigating resources,” Horn told The Maine Monitor. “That way they spend more time doing the projects and less time finding the grants and technical assistance they need.”

In Norridgewock, town manager Richard LaBelle has seen his community largely recover since the Sandy and Kennebec Rivers wreaked havoc on buildings along their banks, but he’s concerned that residents may have rebuilt in the same flood-vulnerable areas that could be knocked out again in the next storm.

“Our local regulations don’t deal with that necessarily,” LaBelle said on the eve of this December’s projected storm. “I think folks are maybe operating under the misconception that that’s never going to happen again in our lifetime, and unfortunately, we’re looking at it 12 months later.”

LaBelle sees floodplain ordinances, which would prevent new development in the highest risk areas and reduce flood risk in floodplains, as the only way to guide future sustainable development. Horn said her office will be able to guide towns like Norridgewock through this process. 

The state plan acknowledges that housing options in Maine are limited but is encouraging communities to pursue smart growth.

“The governor has just pushed so hard to make sure we’re making resources available to communities so that they can do preventative measures as well as recover,” Horn said. That way “when they build back, they build back in a way that’s going to last for a long time.”

Expecting the unexpected

As deputy director of Franklin County’s Emergency Management Agency, Sara Bickford concedes that it’s impossible for Franklin County to plan for every curveball thrown by unpredictable storms like last December’s, but that hasn’t stopped the county from trying.

This July, the county partnered with the National Weather Service to drill towns on how they’d respond to a tropical storm hitting Maine with high winds and extreme flooding — all during the week of the Farmington Fair. When participants thought they had a situation under control, organizers would throw a wrench into their plans and keep them on their toes.

“We had really really good participation, without that our efforts aren’t as valuable,” Bickford said. “There’s something to be said for all of us going through the flood and then coming together even stronger.”

One national expert believes Maine and New England could be uniquely positioned to demonstrate model emergency management policies for the rest of the country. 

Not yet burdened by the same amount of climate change-fueled storms as places like Louisiana, New England has more resources and a depth of knowledge to get ahead on planning, according to Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

“We have the breathing room right now and the potential resources and knowledge to make really significant reforms to how we’re doing emergency management,” Montano said, which will “set us up for when those bigger disasters come and also potentially be a model for other parts of the country.”

Potential reforms include increasing the number of professional emergency managers at the municipal level (roles often occupied by town managers today), redesigning communities to accommodate flooding and undertaking a massive public education campaign on what to do when disasters strike.

Whether supported by state or local funding, expanding the number of emergency managers embedded within municipal governments will also provide a full-time staff member to pursue hazard mitigation grants and ease communities through technical planning processes, Montano said.

Many of these recommendations align with the commission’s proposals. As Horn met with her team for the first time on Thursday, she recognized the significance of the mission ahead of them. 

“We’re going to continue to face severe storms,“ Horn said, and “there is an all-out effort to address these issues so that that type of damage doesn’t happen again.” 

Carter joined other Republicans and Democrats in voting in favor of a slimmed-down spending bill.

The Current is an inclusive nonprofit, non-partisan news organization providing in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and Coastal Georgia’s communities.

Takeaways

1. One-third of rural lawyers are older than 60. Some are putting off retirement because there is nobody to replace them. 
2. Attorneys aren’t going to rural Kansas because of financial, practice and cultural reasons, a report found. 
3. A 35-person committee proposed 10 fixes to this problem.

Kansas judges in rural counties struggle to find qualified attorneys to represent defendants in cases where the right to a lawyer is guaranteed. 

“We are approaching a constitutional crisis,” said Kansas Supreme Court Justice Keynen “K.J.” Wall. 

Forty-seven rural counties are legal deserts, or areas without adequate access to legal help. One-third of rural attorneys are also over 60 years old. If they all retired, 87 counties would lack adequate legal representation. 

The attorney shortage is so bad older lawyers put off retirement because if they go, then their neighbors might have no legal representation. Some cities and counties are struggling to hire as well. 

Those findings come from a report released Friday by the Kansas Rural Justice Initiative. That 35-member committee was created in 2022 by the Kansas Supreme Court. The committee studied access to lawyers in rural Kansas and suggested solutions. 

Why this problem is so bad 

Financial, practice and cultural issues are three major barriers to legal aid, the committee found. 

Before 1980, about one in four attorneys graduated with student loan debt. That debt averaged around $12,000 — or $48,000 when adjusted for inflation. Since 1980, 93% of attorneys are graduating with $125,000 in debt. 

These young lawyers want a steady job to pay off that debt. Larger firms in urban areas pay more, the report said, and rural practices might offer pay based on the number of cases a lawyer handles. If work is slow, those younger attorneys lose out on money and can be crushed by debt. 

Add those money woes to poor child care options, limited jobs for spouses and scarce housing. So attorneys are opting for larger cities where these problems may be more muted. 

Wall said attorneys also want mentorship. Law students worry that going to rural Kansas would mean less support from more senior lawyers. 

Marla Luckert, chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, said she knew the rural attorney shortage was a problem, but the report found that it was even worse than she thought. 

She said there are solutions though, and the state judicial branch is committed to fixing this problem. 

Fixes for attorney shortage 

The report outlined 10 recommendations. Wall said the key recommendations are tuition assistance, student loan help and creating a rural attorney network. 

An attorney graduating now has two and half times as much student loan debt as an attorney who graduated before 1980, when adjusted for inflation. Wall wants the state Legislature to create a program that cuts the cost of college in exchange for that attorney working in rural Kansas. 

Similar programs already exist for veterinarians. Wall said the rural vet program has successfully placed many veterinarians in rural communities. 

The rural attorney network would help connect prospective employees with firms looking to hire. 

Other recommendations include:

• Creating a permanent committee to study and monitor rural justice initiatives. 
• Partnering with the Kansas State Department of Education to promote civics classes and outreach programs in rural school districts. 
• Encouraging rural law outreach programs at Kansas universities. 
• Creating a professional organization for rural attorneys to “collaborate on issues relating to the recruitment and retention of attorneys in rural Kansas.”

The rural justice committee had two state lawmakers on it. Sen. Elaine Bowers, a Concordia Republican, said the Legislature is prepared to act on these issues. 

“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “We have models that we’re going to start from. So I’m looking forward to the introduction of legislation.” 

The post Kansas nearing ‘constitutional crisis’ as small-town lawyers become a scarcity appeared first on The Beacon.

A group of reporters from across the North State gathered at a Shasta Community College welding lab on December 15, to hear Governor Gavin Newsom announce a new state initiative that broadens employment and educational opportunities throughout California. Members of the “credentialed media” who were invited to attend were met by modest security as they entered the facility where Newsom’s production team was setting up.  

The Governor’s formal business attire contrasted starkly with the power tools that surrounded him, setting the stage for the reason behind his visit to Redding:  a “new framework” to incentivize job development in industrial and public service fields statewide.

Newsom plans to invest more than $100 million into what he is calling California’s “Master Plan for Career Education.” The initiative is designed to cultivate “career pathways” toward sustainable employment for more Californians by removing four-year degree requirements from some state government jobs. It also establishes a digital “career passport” database or Learning and Employment Record (LER) which Californians can use with employers to present a singular accessible record of both academic transcripts and “verified skills” earned outside the classroom, including volunteering or apprenticeships. 

Before Newsom spoke, several individuals from Shasta and the surrounding counties shared personal experiences about their experiences with education in California’s rural communities. Among them was a young firefighter cadet and recent graduate of Shasta College, who has become one of the only female graduates from the College’s Fire Fighter 1 & 2 Academy.

Newly-elected Assemblywoman Heather Hadwick also spoke, describing the difficulties she experienced becoming the first person in her family to attend a university as the child of a single mother growing up in an isolated community.

“I am from Modoc County,” Hadwick explained as she advocated for career education. “I live three hours from a Costco. It is very rural, and career pathways are what we have to show our youth what’s out there.”

Increasing accessibility to higher education and a living wage to those without a typical post-secondary educational trajectory is likely to have a significant impact on the North State’s workforce. According to the US Census, 76.7% of Shasta County residents do not have a bachelor’s degree, which is statistically speaking, a barrier to accruing personal wealth over one’s lifetime. If the Governor’s initiative is implemented as planned, an expanded field of employment opportunities will be within reach for the vast majority of the County.

As Governor Newsom broke down the mechanics of the plan, which is based in part on California’s original 1960’s-era Master Plan for Higher Education, he emphasized that the new bipartisan initiative will ensure local control in its implementation. In Shasta County, some specific local considerations are the area’s higher than average poverty rate, and sociocultural resistance to higher education, as documented in Shasta Scout’s prior reporting.

Newsom acknowledged his own unfamiliarity with life in rural communities, briefly joking with the gaggle of reporters that he “didn’t know anyone lived three hours from a Costco in the United States of America,” in reference to Assemblywoman Headwick’s earlier remarks. He then addressed the differences between rural and urban communities more seriously.

“I say this often, and I’ll say it again–localism is determinative”, Newsom said, adding that parts of the Master Plan’s strategy will be developed alongside locals to meet the North State’s specific needs. “This is not a patronizing plan.”

When asked whether the change of guard in Washington this January will effect the Master Plan, Newsom responded that he and President Elect Donald Trump had “gotten along very well during COVID–notoriously so,” but cautioned that the Trump Administration’s stated goal of “virtually closing” the federal Department of Education would “be a wrecking ball to education here in the North State.” 

The reaction to the Governor’s visit from the Shasta County’s highly conservative leadership has been mixed. While Hadwick, along with Shasta College’s President Frank Nigro and other North State representatives have reacted positively, Shasta County CEO David Rickert released a statement Monday articulating his “disappointment” in the Governor’s alleged failure to include any local elected officials during his visit. 

Board of Supervisors Kevin Crye also weighed in Newsom’s appearance, which he characterized as “secretive” in a Facebook Live on Monday evening. Noting that Supervisor-elect Matt Plummer was invited to attend Newsom’s event, Crye said he “respects” Plummer’s decision to attend, and suggested that he also would have made an appearance, if invited.

“Yeah, I probably would have went… but I would have definitely spoken my mind,” Crye said before also expressing skepticism about Newsom’s motivations behind the Master Plan.

“I don’t think Gavin Newsom has any desire whatsoever of helping our County whether it’s around water rights, whether it’s around fire… all this was, in my opinion, was an attempt to get some elected Republicans standing behind him.”

A representative from the Governor’s office told Shasta Scout in request for comment that “our office invited or informed local elected officials–across party lines” as per “standard protocol.”

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