State Republican leaders are cracking down on rural members of their own party who oppose universal school vouchers, which allow families to take a portion of their state’s education funding away from public schools to pay for their child’s private education.

Rural state legislators have been more likely to oppose school voucher laws because they worry the programs will weaken local public schools without ensuring educational investments for rural students. 

Opposition to vouchers has been a rare point of agreement between rural Republicans and urban Democrats, who also tend to oppose vouchers.

But recently, the state leaders in the Republican Party have resorted to more aggressive tactics to force voucher legislation through to the governor’s desk, said Jennifer Berkshire, author of the forthcoming book called The Education Wars: The Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual, in an interview with the Daily Yonder.

“The biggest change that has happened over the last few years is a fairly successful effort to define school choice as a kind of litmus test for Republicans, the way that something like abortion has been historically,” Berkshire said. 

Public schools provide more than just a high school diploma in rural areas, which frequently lack private alternatives. They are a large employer, serve as public gathering spaces for community events, and they inform the community’s next generation of workers, voters, and leaders.

Berkshire, who’s reported extensively on the politics of public schools, said that the voucher debate isn’t new, but it’s been heating up in the past few years. She said the Republican Party has been ramping up this fight for years now by degrading perceptions of public education, framing it as a welfare program and the source of radical indoctrination.

While rural voters and legislators haven’t been swayed by the quasi-populist rhetoric and continue to oppose private school vouchers, Republican Party leaders are spending millions of dollars to challenge rural Republican defectors.

Just last month in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott targeted Republican members of the state house who opposed his school choice initiative using out-of-state cash from billionaire donors and super PACs. Six members were defeated in the March 5 primary and four more were forced into runoffs.

In response, grassroots campaigns against aggressive pro-voucher efforts are popping up, like Reclaim Idaho. The organization, co-founded by Idaho resident Luke Mayville, mobilized a group of teachers, administrators, families, students, and others to oppose vouchers.

“A critical factor has been the outpouring of phone calls, emails, and public testimony from Idahoans across the state,” Mayville said. “Public comment and testimony has made it very clear that the school-voucher agenda is not the will of the people.”

What’s a School Voucher?

School voucher programs have taken different forms in different states, to maneuver around restrictive state constitutions and resistant citizens. 

In traditional school voucher programs, when a family chooses to send their child to a private school, the state government directly awards the private schools with taxpayers funds to cover at least part of the cost of the student’s education.

This practice was found unconstitutional in states like Colorado, where the state’s Supreme Court ruled that one district’s voucher program violated separation of church and state because it funneled public funds to religious schools. 

A new voucher program, commonly called an Educational Savings Account (ESA), has become a popular and successful route that Republicans have taken to advance their school choice agenda.

Unlike traditional vouchers that directly award public funds to private schools, ESAs deposit taxpayer funds into savings accounts that families can use to pay for various educational purposes including tuition at private and religious schools.

In states where resistance to voucher programs has been more robust, Republicans are also experimenting with tax credit programs that provide tax relief to businesses or individuals who donate to organizations that give educational scholarships to students attending private schools. 

Another important term in the school-voucher debate is “universal.”

Historically, school vouchers were limited to students in need — like students who are disabled or come from low-income homes — so they could gain access to particular services that their local public school may not provide. 

That changed in 2021 and 2022, when West Virginia and Arizona became the first two states to enact universal school choice, allowing any family, regardless of their socioeconomic status, to gain access to taxpayer dollars to cover private school tuition. 

Since then, nine other states have joined in adopting universal voucher programs, and more are considering similar programs.

Welfare for the Wealthy?

Proponents of school choice say that voucher programs will help resolve educational inequities across the country for students, especially for students in need. 

“In any area, some number of families may decide that the assigned neighborhood school is not working for their students,” said Andy Smarick, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank committed to policy research in areas like school choice. “School choice enables those families to access other options.”

Smarick acknowledged that there are specific challenges that make school voucher programs less popular in rural areas, like lack of access to private schools and higher risks of public school consolidation or closure.

“To date at least, more densely populated areas have benefited more from school choice programs,” he said.

Jonathan E. Collins, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University, says that school voucher programs may only deepen the social and economic inequalities they claim to fix, and could ultimately harm the country’s public education system.

If state education budgets begin to move toward supporting private schools through vouchers,  public schools could see a decrease in state funding. This is exacerbated when universal voucher programs are passed that would provide state funds to students from wealthy families who were already paying for private school tuition. 

Rural communities may face a disproportionate amount of economic stress, as voucher money is even less likely to trickle down to rural families who lack access to private schools, Collins said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.

Another of the key demographic that school choice advocates claim vouchers will help are low-income families in the southern Black Belt region.

“Policy makers have been trying to build a multi-racial coalition around school voucher programs,” Collins said. “They are championing the idea that Black families should support vouchers as a way to create educational equality for Black youth.”

The messaging that voucher programs create a more equal, integrated education system contradicts another front of the voucher campaign: the public school culture wars.

If you want to get families to turn their backs on public schools in support of school vouchers, you’ve got to convince them that the schools have taken a turn for the worse, said Jack Schneider, professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in an interview with the Daily Yonder.

“You have to convince them that something is fundamentally rotten at their core and that it has happened quickly and covertly,” he said. “Otherwise you’re telling people that they’re stupid and they haven’t seen what’s happening right under their noses.”

This political technique tries to suggest that public schools prevent parents from getting involved in their child’s education. This provides rhetoric for the parents’ rights movement, who say “they want to be able to control what their children are exposed to in schools,” Collins said. “To have the right to keep their kids from being indoctrinated into critical race theory and the politics of gender.”

In reality, public schools best help prepare the next generation of political participants in American democracy by teaching students how to interact with people from different homes, with different cultural values and experiences, Collins said.

“If there’s a continued siphon of kids away from our public schools systems, which has been our best way of getting people to interact across backgrounds,” Collins said. “Then what do we have left?”

The folks who are pushing hardest for school vouchers, conservative elites, are also the ones who have the most to gain, said Schneider, who also pointed out that the top users of vouchers are families whose children were not in the public education system, and who are using these vouchers to reimburse themselves for private school tuition that they were already paying.

“The irony here is a bitter one,” he said. “So much of the rhetoric in the Republican Party of the past five to 10 years has been about anti-elitism and the ordinary, forgotten Americans … But the push against public education is chiefly rooted in market thinking and is very much about the best interests of elites who don’t understand why they have to be financially on the hook for paying for the education of other people’s children.”

The Cash Register for Politics

Advocates of school vouchers say that voucher programs provide families with more control over their child’s educational experience, that families should be afforded transparency in knowing what their child is taught and the power to choose. 

In 2019, Robert Asen, a professor in the communication arts department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, interviewed rural public school advocates in Wisconsin about the concerns they had with school voucher programs that had recently been enacted in the state.

He found that many rural advocates felt their state government wasn’t being transparent with how school voucher programs were being funded and how the programs would impact the funding their local public schools would receive. 

“People in rural communities tend to like their public schools,” Collins said. “Drumming up political support for this type of program is not a selling point if you’re a rural Republican legislator.”

That was until leaders in the Republican Party and billionaire donors started to challenge rural Republicans who defected from the party’s all-or-nothing stance on universal school vouchers.

Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall, a popular rural legislator, faced big money blowback for halting a school voucher bill in 2022.

Residents of Sulphur, which, with a population of 5,000, is the largest town in McCall’s district, received a wave of political mailers and TV ads attacking the representative. The money for this political blitz came from Club for Growth, a conservative PAC located in Washington, D.C..

Unlike the representatives from Iowa and Texas, McCall’s constituents continued to support their representative. 

“We felt like we had school choice in rural Oklahoma already,” said Matt Holder, superintendent of Sulphur Public Schools, in an interview with the Daily Yonder.

The Sulphur school district already operated on a system of open enrollment that didn’t pose any financial concerns, Holder explained. That system allows students who live outside of district to transfer in. Many other districts and states across the country also offer some form of open public enrollment.

Last year, the Oklahoma legislature enacted a universal school choice program that will award tax credits to families who pay for private school tuition. 

Unlike traditional school vouchers that take money out of the pot for education in Oklahoma, this program seemed to be more palatable because the money is coming from elsewhere, Holder said. 

As an additional compromise, the state increased the education budget by  more than $500 million.

“They put more money into public education funding than they have ever before,” Holder said.

But while the school tax credit program, which reduces the state’s revenue, will persist for the foreseeable future, there’s no guarantee that the state will continue to allocate unprecedented amounts of money for public education.

“It’s too soon to tell what, if any, ramifications there might be from that,” Holder said. 

Republicans in other states have been less compromising. Pro-voucher hardliners, backed by big money, have successfully replaced rural Republicans in primary races in states like Iowa and Texas.

“School privatization is really a top-down model of policy change,” said Asen, the Wisconsin professor who studied rural attitudes toward school vouchers. “These changes are driven by a small group of lobbyists and financial backers against large-scale public opinion.”

“It’s like a cash register for politics,” Collins said. “There’s big money in it. There’s big money in terms of the donors who are getting behind candidates who support it, especially in the Republican Party.”

The Persistence of Rural Resistance

While some school choice advocates say that rural residents are becoming more supportive of voucher programs, numerous rural grassroots organizations have begun advocating against such policies in light of the aggressive voucher movement in the Republican Party. 

In Wisconsin, rural advocates told Asen that they rejected the idea that education is a commodity.

 “They wanted to emphasize the important roles that public schools played in these rural towns,” Asen. “Public schools weren’t just a place where kids go to learn, they were a place where the community came together to establish a common identity and civic sensibility.”

To many rural families, education isn’t a consumer good. It’s a public good. Students aren’t just consumers. They are community members. They are citizens. They are community members.

Jess Piper is a retired rural public school teacher from Missouri who made a run for state office in 2022 as a Democrat.

After losing the general election, she decided to found Blue Missouri, an organization that seeks to increase political competition by raising money for down ballot Democrats who don’t receive party funding.

Education funding remains a top priority of Piper’s work. Missouri ranks 50th nationally in teacher pay and 49th in educational funding. 

“The state only covers 32% of any school’s budget and the rest comes from local taxes,” she said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “If you live in a rural community, that’s going to be tough.”

Part of Piper’s work involves going door to door in her community to speak with her neighbors about policy issues like school funding.

She says that supporting public schools is a bipartisan issue in rural communities, that rural Democrats and Republicans don’t always think in line with the larger party.

“I’ve never knocked on a door where someone said, ‘Gee, I wish there was a private school I could send my kid to,’” Piper said.

Piper says she’s up against a big pile of money from folks like Rex Fel, Betsy DeVos, Leonard Leo, and the Herzog Foundation. 

“They have no reason. They have no data. They have nothing to prove that vouchers are better,” she said. “They only have lies, rhetoric, and a s***-ton of money.”

In March, after agreeing to increasing public education funding and teacher salaries, Missouri lawmakers passed a sprawling education bill that expands the tax-credit scholarship program to all counties in the state and increases the income cap used to determine eligibility for the program.

In rural Idaho, similar efforts have been led by Reclaim Idaho. The organization originated as a small-scale, short-term campaign to keep funding intact for a local school district in North Idaho.

But after seeing local success, the organization launched statewide, focusing on protecting public schools, public lands, and healthcare for working families. An initial success of the organization was securing a $410 million increase in state education funding.

When it comes to school vouchers, there is very little bottom-up interest for school choice in Idaho, organization co-founder Luke Mayville wrote in an email to the Daily Yonder.

“Idahoans generally believe in public education and value their local public schools, especially tiny towns and rural communities,” Mayville said. “The problem is that national special-interest groups have decided Idaho is an easy target for their agenda.”

Mayville says that vouchers would transfer wealth out of rural Idaho communities to provide “new entitlements” for affluent suburban families.

Mayville credits the success of the organizations anti-voucher efforts to a coalition of teachers, administrators, families, students, and citizens who contributed to an outpouring of phone calls, emails, and public testimony.

“Public comment and testimony has made it very clear that the school-voucher agenda is not the will of the people,” he said.

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The post Republicans Double Down on School Vouchers by Taking Fight to Rural Members of Their Own Party appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

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New research from American University and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund says the currently stalled farm bill is an avenue for reversing historic discrimination against farmers of color by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

I spoke with Sara Clarke Kaplan, executive director of American’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, to learn more about their new toolkit – “Pointing the Farm Bill Toward Racial Justice.”

Enjoy our conversation about the current state of the farm bill, and Kaplan’s hopes for its future, below.

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What’s the current state of the farm bill? Or, in other words, what’s the occasion for this toolkit? 

The farm bill is reauthorized every five years; reauthorization is always a big deal because there’s a tremendous amount of money involved for issues ranging from sustainable agriculture to farm extension programs to nutritional assistance programs. This reauthorization was especially high stakes because of the infusion of money from the Inflation Reduction Act into conservation programs. In 2023, ARPC, The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, UC Berkeley’s Food Institute, and AU’s Center for Environment, Community, and Equity convened a national summit on racial justice and the farm bill when Congress was in the process of deliberating a new Bill. Unfortunately, Congress kicked the farm bill reauthorization into 2024 and we still don’t have a new farm bill. That means that the goal of building in policy changes that would increase racial justice is still a critical issue right now.  

That said, this work – and this toolkit – isn’t just about a single reauthorization: it’s part of a longstanding and ongoing collaboration of grassroots agricultural organizations and food justice scholars that has produced a strong, lasting coalition of farmers, advocates, researchers, and workers who are seeking to infuse questions of racial equity into food, climate, and agricultural justice. The toolkit reflects that coalitional thinking, with the goal of carrying it forward into ongoing efforts for this eventual farm bill reauthorization and beyond. 

Why is the farm bill a good target for justice-oriented demands?  

It’s important to remember that the farm bill is a huge omnibus bill, and the primary Congressional vehicle for setting U.S. agricultural and food policy. As such, it’s an instrument for distributing huge amounts of money and for setting multi-year political priorities. It’s not just farm subsidies, it’s the provision of rural broadband, the mediation of food insecurity, the decision of who has access to the treasury of germplasm. These funds are already slated to be spent on agriculture, so the question becomes where these resources will go? How can we ensure that the farm bill’s policies and allocation of resources address the needs, interests, and long term sustainability and wellbeing of all of the diverse people who are impacted by its 12 titles? And if you look carefully, some of the most important racial justice issues of our time are present in the farm bill. Researchers of mass incarceration have traced how when small farmers lose their farms, it opens that land up to prison development; reproductive justice organizers have pointed out that the ability to have and raise children requires secure access to healthy, affordable food; there are so many ways in which the farm bill is a critical site for interventions by people and organizations committed to intersectional racial justice. 

This research is based on years of listening sessions and symposia with Black farmers. What were the most surprising findings from those community-based conversations? 

Our colleagues at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, conducted two years of extensive listening sessions with their many Black farmer and landowner members in the South. These were led by their former Director of Land Retention and Advocacy, Dãnia Davy, who is now continuing this important work at Oxfam. The results of these unprecedented listening sessions were distilled and presented at the summit, where we continued to discuss them with farmers, researchers, and other allied grassroots organizations. While I can speak to those summit presentations and conversations, our Federation colleagues are really the experts on this.

One point that Federation speakers emphasized was that despite provisions in the previous farm bill for “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers” many programs and sources of funding are still not reaching Black farmers. At the summit, we discussed various ideas for making the language in policy more specific about the needs of Black farmers, Indigenous farmers, and other farmers of color.

The toolkit’s central tenet is “Climate Justice = Racial Justice = Food Justice = Farm Justice.” Can you elaborate on that idea?  

I can imagine that at first glance, this equation might seem cryptic, but it’s crafted to clarify matters by making implicit connections explicit. All too often, discussions of agricultural policy marginalize questions of racial equity and justice, and far too little is known in the broader racial justice movement about the long history and ongoing role that farming and farmers have played in racial liberation struggles in the U.S. and globally. I consider myself as having been part of that problem. I’m relatively new to Farm Justice, with a long history in racial and gender justice movements, but largely in urban settings. Yet the more I learn about central issues in Farm Justice work, the more I see how inextricably these issues and movements are entwined.  

Of course, rural participants in grassroots racial justice movements have always known this. Take, for example, projects like Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative, which enabled Black farmers and sharecroppers who had been excluded, exploited, and terrorized by white landowners to exercise self-determination while providing a source of much-needed food to the hundreds of poor Black families who worked that land. Or take the BIPOC farmers who are innovating new approaches to regenerative agriculture and the building of sustainable, resilient rural communities, who are at the frontlines experiencing the effects of climate change. As long as the vast majority of recent investments in conservation and climate-smart agriculture are directed to white farmers, existing racial disparities will increase, and we will all lose out on opportunities to benefit from the climate-forward work of these small BIPOC farmers.  

What’s the connection between American University and this Farm Justice work? 

It’s so important to remember the historical relationship between institutions of higher education in the United States and agriculture. There are over 100 land grant universities in the U.S., from large, well-known universities like Cornell or the University of California, Berkeley to small HBCUs like the University of the District of Columbia. Not only did those land-grant institutions’ original emphasis on agriculture, science, and engineering, create an idea of postsecondary education and research as a resource for everyone, not just elites, but it was through the land grant system that the HBCU system and Tribal College system as we know them now first came into being. In fact, several of our collaborators on the summit and the toolkit came from land-grant universities: April Love from Alcorn State’s Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Policy Research Center, Sakeenah Shabazz from The Berkeley Food Institute at UC Berkeley, Mchezaji Axum from the College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia. Of course, that’s not a history that American University shares. But AU faculty like Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, for example, have been working in collaboration with community partners like the Federation, Rural Coalition, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, for years – in some cases, over a decade – to build a coalition that connects grassroots movements, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers and scholars. And that’s where the Antiracist Research and Policy Center comes in. From summit to toolkit to our forthcoming online research hub, the “Pointing the farm bill Toward Racial Justice” project is an example of what we believe is the best way toward future social justice: the creation of transformative, scholarship through reciprocal, equitable, and sustainable collaborations among scholars, organizers, and policymakers, presented in ways that are accessible to everyone, including the people most impacted by the issues we address. Not only does it touch on all of our core focus areas – that is, not just climate, land, and environmental justice, but race and reproduction, educational access and equity, and even carceral politics – but it’s an important opportunity for us to remind people that race issues aren’t just urban issues – race is a huge part of the fabric of rural and agricultural American life, and needs to be addressed as such.

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The post Q&A: Can the Farm Bill Promote Racial Justice? appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

A Daily Yonder analysis of 2023 Census Bureau data showed that rural America gained population for the second year in a row, continuing to reverse a decade-long trend of rural population loss.

The gain came primarily in counties that are closest to metropolitan areas and was the result of people moving to those counties from other parts of the country or internationally.

From 2022 to 2023, the number of people living in nonmetropolitan (rural) counties grew by 109,000 residents, a 0.24% increase. That’s slightly lower than the 150,000 residents that rural America gained from 2021 to 2022. These gains came after rural America lost nearly 300,000 residents in the 2010s. 

Meanwhile, metropolitan counties grew by 1.5 million residents from 2022 and 2023, a 0.53% increase in population.

Migration Fueled Rural Growth

In nonmetropolitan counties, growth came primarily from people moving to rural communities, both from the U.S. and abroad.

The Census’ annual population estimates include numbers for  births, deaths, and migration. Those figures helped us see what demographic components caused changes in the American population. 

From 2022 to 2023, 229,000 people moved to rural counties. Seventy-nine percent of those migrants moved from other parts of the U.S., while the remaining 20% of migrants (48,000 people) came from outside the country. 

But that gain was offset by what demographers call natural decrease, which happens when the number of deaths is greater than the number of births. In 2023, rural counties recorded 610,000 deaths and 491,000 births. Nonmetropolitan counties lost 119,000 residents to natural decrease. 

Rural Counties Near Cities Gain Population

Ninety-seven percent of the rural population growth happened in nonmetropolitan counties that are adjacent to metropolitan counties.  From 2022 to 2023, rural counties adjacent to metros gained 105,000 residents. Counties not adjacent to metro areas only gained 3,500 residents. 

The table above breaks out nonmetropolitan counties into two types: those that are adjacent to a metropolitan area and those that are not.

In both urban adjacent and non-adjacent counties, domestic migration was the predominant driver of population growth. From 2022 to 2023, 159,000 domestic migrants moved to rural counties near metro centers, while 22,000 domestic migrants moved to rural counties not adjacent to urban counties.

From 2022 to 2023, 4,300 people moved to Jackson County, Georgia, a rural county of about 89,000 adjacent to Athens, for example. 

Metro Growth Returns to Pre-Pandemic Norm

From 2022 to 2023, metropolitan counties grew faster than nonmetropolitan counties, and growth in the nation’s largest cities returned to pre-pandemic patterns.

Population change in major metropolitan areas (those with populations of 1 million or more) gained 128,000 residents from 2022 to 2023, a 0.14% increase. These places lost population during the pandemic, but the gain last year represented a nationwide shift to pre-pandemic population trends, according to the Census Bureau.

The suburbs of major metropolitan counties, meanwhile, saw a growth of 0.78% from 2022, an addition of 746,000 more people.

The biggest gains in population occurred in the suburbs of medium-sized metros, which added 183,000 residents to the population, a 1% growth since 2022. Brunswick County, North Carolina, a coastal community of about 160,000 residents, gained 7,000 more people between 2022 and 2023, for example. 

Both small and medium-sized metros saw about a half of a percentage point increase in population from 2022 to 2023. Small metros grew by 172,000, while medium-sized metros grew by 300,000 residents.

Statewide Data

Some of the most significant rural growth occurred in the South. Among some of the fastest growing states were Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida.

Texas had the greatest raw-number increase in rural population. About 27,000 people moved to nonmetropolitan counties in Texas between 2022 and 2023. But that migration was offset by natural decrease, when the number of deaths is greater than the number of births. The resulting net gain in rural Texas was 24,000 residents, a 0.8% increase over 2022.

Florida, meanwhile, had the greatest rural rate of increase. Thirteen thousand people moved to rural Florida in 2023. But deaths outpaced births by about three to four. The consequent net gain in population was about 1.47%, or 11,000 residents.

Florida’s rural growth was part of a statewide trend, which saw the state second only to South Carolina in overall population increase.

Not every state saw an increase in rural populations, however. Louisiana had the worst rate of rural population decline. Louisiana lost 5,900 rural residents, a 0.82% drop from 2022. About 4,500 people moved out of rural Louisiana between 2022 and 2023, and the remaining population loss was due to natural decrease.

The post Rural Population Grows for Second Consecutive Year appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

In rural news and analysis, there’s a lot of talk about what happens when a small town’s newspaper goes out of business. But what about when a town’s former newspaper building gets repurposed to bring a hub of art and media – and affordable housing – to its small Western community?

The Mancos Times-Tribune was written and printed in a small building on Grand Avenue in Mancos, Colorado from 1910 until 1970, when the paper merged with the Cortez Journal to create a regional newspaper. The building was boarded up and forgotten about for 40 years, until 2013 when 100 years of old newspapers were discovered, along with a Cranston press.

The Cranston press is a newspaper press built in the late 1800s that was popular with small-town newspapers across the country into the 20th century. Today other functional Cranstons are rare, if not non-existent, and a group of community members wanted to resurrect the old printing press. So they started a nonprofit and began restoring the building and the press to create a space to tell stories through art that reflects the history and culture of the town. They called it the Mancos Common Press.

“People tend to overlook the potential of rural communities as places for artists and for creativity,” said Tami Graham, president of the board and one of the founding members of the Mancos Common Press.

One of the first people to identify the Cranston press was Frank Matero, a professor of Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. Matero had spent summers working in the Mesa Verde region and saw potential in the old Mancos Times-Tribune building and the then-defunct press. The building and all its contents were donated to the nonprofit by the Ballentine Family, who currently own the Durango Herald and the Cortez Tribune – the main publications for the region.

Matero began a collaboration between Mancos and the University of Pennsylvania, with the additional support of Matt Neff, founder of the Common Press, a letterpress studio at the University of Pennsylvania. Neff helped with the actual restoration of the Cranston press. The old newspaper building was also restored to look exactly like it did in the early 1900s, according to photos, from the tin ceiling to the color of the walls.

In 2019, Mancos Common Press opened its doors as a letterpress studio and arts center. The pandemic threw a wrench in plans to have classes, but in 2021 they finally hosted the first of many Letterpress 101 classes and started building an artist community.

“Small-town newspapers were incredible in that they were the means of letting people know what’s going on, just like they are today. But also [they would] perpetuate all these stereotypes and the colonization of the West…[the Mancos Common Press] can now be used to tell maybe a different history than was shared at the time,” said Graham.

Artists at Mancos Common Press explore this alternate history in a variety of ways, including a project called Herstory, a collective of women printmakers creating art around underrepresented women in the Four Corners. Another project recently supported by Mancos Common Press featured Rosie Carter, who works at Mancos Common Press, in an art exhibit called buffalo soldiers: reVision. This show examined the complicated legacy of the all-Black army regiment known as Buffalo Soldiers around the West.

An endeavor like Mancos Common Press fits naturally in Mancos, which is a hotbed for creative development in Southwest Colorado. In 2015, the town became a certified Colorado Creative District, a program under the Colorado Office of Economic Development.

Mancos Creative District has transformed what used to be a quiet downtown with “tumbleweed rolling down the street,” said the Creative District’s Executive Director, Chelsea Lunders. Now, galleries, restaurants, and studios like Mancos Common Press line the handful of blocks that comprise downtown Mancos.

In May 2024, the newest project connected to Mancos Common Press will open its doors. The brand new Mancos Commons is a 3,700 square foot two-story building that will provide a light-filled studio space to expand the Press. New printing presses, a darkroom, and lots of table space will allow for more classes and more artists to use the Mancos Common Press space. Upstairs, three one-bedroom apartments will provide affordable housing for people who currently work in the small town.

“We raised $2.5 million here in maybe, at the most, three years for this project in this tiny little town in western Colorado,” said Graham. Funders included Colorado Housing and Finance Authority, Colorado Division of Housing, El Pomar, and Colorado Creative Industries. Construction began in June 2023 and the building will be available for use in May 2024.

Mancos Common Press brings people from around the region to visit the studio as artists-in-residence or for classes, and they want to continue to be a hub for art and community for the Mountain Southwest. “There’s just so much great potential for this community continuing to grow and evolve in a really sustainable way through arts and culture,” said Graham.

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The post A Rare Printing Press, a Community Art Space, a Small Town Where Creativity Thrives appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

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This story is published in collaboration with The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.

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William Garriott is an anthropologist who teaches at Drake University and wrote the 2011 book Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America. His research features prominently in the Daily Yonder’s new five-part podcast, “Home Cooked.” 

In that series, we’re investigating how meth went from a rural-coded chemical moonshine to an endemic drug problem present in all the nation’s major cities.

Enjoy our conversation about hillbilly stereotypes, urban and suburban meth use, and the concerning recent convergence of the meth and fentanyl supply chains. And if you want to hear more from Garriott, you can listen to “Home Cooked” wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: How’d you get interested in methamphetamine as an academic subject?

WG: When I started my PhD in anthropology in 2003, I knew I wanted to focus on the Appalachian region of the United States. At the time, I was curious about religious life in the region and its contribution to the growth of Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism around the world.

But I had also just taken a course with medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman. He says that we should seek to understand “what’s at stake” or “what really matters” for people in their everyday lives. 

And what really mattered to people in places like Eastern Kentucky at the time was drugs. We now know we were at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. OxyContin was already taking a toll on local communities. And there was little national concern because it was seen as an isolated regional problem (the derogatory term “hillbilly heroin” was getting thrown around a lot at the time).

When I started my dissertation research, methamphetamine had become the primary concern, both regionally and nationally. When the PATRIOT Act was reauthorized in 2005, the only significant addition was anti-meth legislation called the Combat Meth Epidemic Act.

DY: In what sense was the meth surge of the 90s and early 2000s a rural phenomenon?

WG: Lots of ways. The internet gave people access to meth recipes, and meth cooks tended to be located in rural areas. It was easier to hide and access key ingredients like anhydrous ammonia. In fact, the number of meth labs grew so quickly that huge swaths of the rural U.S. were labeled High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas – something that had only been applied to cities like New York and Los Angeles before. 

The rural economy was also changing. Jobs weren’t paying as well or were going away altogether. Meth found a niche as a kind of performance enhancement drug for people working long hours at physically demanding jobs – something I saw in the poultry industry in West Virginia and journalist Nick Reding found in the pork industry in Iowa and anthropologist Jason Pine found in general in Missouri. Eventually some folks just left these jobs to work in the meth economy full time.

I think it’s also important to mention how meth was being portrayed in national media as the drug of choice for poor white people. From there it doesn’t take much to connect it to rural communities, given how those communities are often thought of as predominantly white and poor in the public imagination. 

Anti-meth programs like the Montana Meth Project and Faces of Meth played a big part in this. They were very visual campaigns that focused on the damage meth does to the body. All of the people they pictured appeared to be white. They had sores, scars, and sunken eyes. They also were often missing teeth. All of that invokes a lot of stereotypes. Sociologists Travis Linnemann and Tyler Wall have a great journal article on this.

All of that said, it is important to keep in mind that meth is just as much an urban and suburban problem as a rural one, particularly now. Sociologist Miriam Boeri has made this point really clearly. Also, something to keep in mind about Faces of Meth: It was created by a jail deputy in Oregon who used mugshots of people booked into the county jail. The jail is in Portland, so the folks featured probably weren’t living in rural communities at the time.

DY: Your book was called Policing Methamphetamine. I’m curious – what made you zero in on that element of meth culture, its policing? 

WG: When I began my research, I thought my focus would be on the treatment experiences of people who use methamphetamine. But what I quickly found was that those experiences couldn’t be understood outside of the criminal justice system. Many people only got treatment after an arrest, and often as a condition of probation. One officer told me that people came up to him on the street and asked to be taken to jail so they could stop using drugs. Community members also often channeled their concerns into calls for increased enforcement. 

In retrospect, none of this should have been surprising. U.S. drug policy has long focused on enforcement. This puts police and the criminal justice system on the front lines whenever and wherever a new drug problem emerges. There is no exception to this dynamic for rural communities. What’s more, the justice system is likely to be the most visible and well-resourced state institution in the community (which is not to say it is sufficiently resourced).

DY: What are the questions you still have about meth in American life?

Today the most pressing question from my perspective is how meth and opioids are converging. One of the more unfortunate developments is that people have started injecting meth. There is also the broad contamination of the drug supply with fentanyl.

All of this creates additional public health challenges, particularly in rural communities.

Something else I’m thinking about a lot is what happens when drugs like meth stop making headlines and get replaced by the next drug scourge. Today people are much more likely to talk about fentanyl than meth. This is understandable given the overdose risks, as well as the way news media works. But what are the consequences of this for the communities where meth is still a major concern?

Bigger picture, I’m thinking about meth in the broader context of U.S. drug policy. My next book is about marijuana legalization and justice reform. It’s been interesting because the conversation around cannabis is so different from the conversation around meth. One of the big questions I have is if the kinds of reforms that are following cannabis legalization will do anything to change the conversation around the broader punitive approach to drugs. The debate happening right now in Oregon over Measure 110 is something I’m watching very closely. It’s a major test case for whether or not a different, less punitive approach to drugs is possible. 

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The post Q&A: Is Meth Really a Rural Problem? appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Donald Trump won the Michigan primary with widespread support across the state, with slightly higher margins in rural areas and the suburbs of metropolitan areas, according to a Daily Yonder analysis.

The results were a soft echo of former President Trump’s performance in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, in which he polled strongest among suburban and rural voters.

In Michigan, Trump defeated former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley by 3 to 1 (77% to 23%) in the state’s 50 rural (nonmetropolitan) counties. These voters represented 25% of the turnout in Tuesday’s primary.

He did nearly as well in the state’s small metropolitan areas, which include eight counties and 12% of the turnout. Cities in these small metropolitan areas are Battle Creek, Jackson, Midland, Monroe, Muskegon, Saginaw, Bay City, and Nile-Benton Harbor.

Trump also received over 70% of the two-candidate vote in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas (Detroit and Grand Rapids) and medium-sized metropolitan areas (Lansing, Flint, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, and South Bend, Indiana). 

Voters in the Grand Rapids and Detroit metropolitan areas constituted nearly two-thirds of the turnout. Voters in small metropolitan areas were 12% of the electorate on Tuesday.

Definitions

The Daily Yonder analysis uses the 2013 Office of Management and Budget Metropolitan Statistical Areas to define rural.

• We define counties that are not located within a metropolitan area as rural. Under the OMB’s 2013 system, nonmetropolitan counties don’t have a city of 50,000 or greater and don’t have close economic ties to a county that does have a city of 50,000 or greater.
• Major metropolitan suburbs are the outlying counties of metros with a population of over 1 million.
• Medium-sized metropolitan core counties are the central counties of metros with a population of 250,000 to under 1 million.
• Medium-sized metropolitan suburbs are the outlying counties of metros with a population of 250,000 to under 1 million. 
• Small metropolitan areas include all counties in metros of fewer than 250,000 residents.

The post Trump Wins Michigan with Slightly Greater Support in Rural Areas and Suburbs appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.

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Among the Hollywood figures who were honored in memoriam last month during the 75^th Emmy Awards was Norman Lear. The iconic television writer, director, and producer passed away at 101 in December. Lear leaves in his wake a bevy of iconic television shows that defined his era and shaped the future of American popular culture. His role in U.S. television history also had a complex impact on how the nation sees — and doesn’t see — rural America.

Fifty-three years ago, Lear’s breakout hit, “All in the Family,” aired on CBS. A satire set in the New York City borough of Queens, the program made topical comedy out of the post-1960s culture wars. It also touched an immediate nerve. An instant hit, the program became the nation’s most-watched television show of its era. But Lear’s legacy is more complicated for rural Americans. His 1971 rise signaled the demise of rural America on network television.

“All in the Family’s” white-hot popularity spelled almost instantaneous doom for the show that immediately preceded it, “Hee Haw.” But the country music variety show was not the only rural-themed program on borrowed time. Airing on CBS on the same night as “Hee Haw” were “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Within a year, those programs, along with “Mayberry RFD,” “The Jim Nabors Hour,” “Petticoat Junction,” “Gomer Pyle,” and the “New Andy Griffith Show,” were canceled. Termed the “rural purge,” Norman Lear marked the end of an era. 

Sara K. Eskridge, Ph.D., believes “escape” was exactly the point. “I think they provided a sense of soothing,” said Dr. Eskridge, a historian who authored Rube Tube: CBS and Rural Comedy in the Sixties. “They were set in contemporary times. But they were focused on friendships. You don’t see conflict.” 

Unlike Lear, who found comedy in social conflict and made shows that spoke to the moment, Eskridge said the rural-themed programs “were permanently in the past even when they were contemporary. They were not culturally relevant.”

In the 1960s, CBS so dominated television ratings with its rural-themed programming that critics dubbed it, the “Country Broadcasting System.” At television’s birth in the 1940s, CBS had also conquered the medium. But it did so with highly rated and critically acclaimed shows ranging from “I Love Lucy” to “The Twilight Zone.” Dubbed the “Tiffany Network,” for combining popularity and quality, CBS faced a changed television landscape by 1960. 

In 1959, the network’s hit quiz show, “The $64,000 Question,” was embroiled in a rigging scandal.

In addition to this, technology had finally given rural Americans access to television. To please their expanded audience of urban and rural viewers, networks turned to Westerns. Popular with every demographic, the networks aired as many as 41 Westerns in one season of television programming.

Brooks Blevins, Ph.D., understands the show’s popularity a bit differently. The Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University sees a timeless narrative thread in these programs. Dr. Blevins told me, “The rich fat cats are always the butt of the joke. And that has existed for as long as there has been humor.” 

But Blevins also understands that once the tumult of the 1960s fully emerged, “these shows are escapism. You can’t deny that there is an escapist measure in these shows.” 

To Tim Brook, a television critic, the programs relied upon the trope that “Rural America was like true America, without all the problems,” he wrote in the Bitter Southerner. But even Mayberry was not immune to the times. In 1967, “The Andy Griffith Show,” in a slight nod to contemporary events, finally featured its first African American character in a speaking part. 

Ironically, it was integration that spawned the rural purge. During Jim Crow and segregation, African Americans were absent from television. In that time, Dr. Blevins claims it was “hillbillies” who played the role of the exotic “other.” Through these “non-threatening, non-conformist” characters, writers could “poke fun at American materialism in a non-leftist way.” When Norman Lear integrated television, African Americans became the “other” who held up the mirror to society; hillbillies were redundant. 

Network executives were eager for a change. CBS president William Paley loathed the “Country Broadcasting Network” moniker. To fix it, in 1970, he hired 33-year-old Fred Silverman as head of network programming. Silverman also detested the rural comedies but now he had a rationale to cancel what were popular shows. The new Nielsen ratings measured viewer demographics, not just raw viewership. CBS dominated the ratings, but its rural, downscale viewers would never attract top advertising dollars. 

Paley and Silverman sought to revive the “Tiffany Network” by producing prestige television that attracted a younger, educated, and urban audience. Lear’s “All in the Family” fit the bill. Within a year of its premiere, Silverman had, as one observer quipped, canceled every show “with a tree in it.” 

Norman Lear had blazed a trail for these programs to follow. He proved it was feasible to be “topical, funny and immensely popular.” But his success came at a cost. The “rural purge” was a tipping point for depictions of rural America in popular culture. Sure, “The Waltons,” “Lonesome Dove,” “The Dukes of Hazard,” and (now) “Yellowstone” are hit programs that center on rural life. But these are outliers. Rural America, when it is depicted at all, is too often a setting for horror movies or reality show rubes. Dr. Eskridge understands that many rural people feel ignored in popular culture. They ask, in her words, “Where am I in this melting pot?” 

Christopher Ali, Ph.D., thinks the rural purge points to a deeper issue. Fred Silverman’s quest for the urban, educated middle class did not stop with network television. Today, media almost wholly ignores rural America. The Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications at Pennsylvania State University told me wide swaths of rural Americans now live in “double deserts.” They lack access to both broadband and reliable local news and media.  

These “double deserts” pack a powerful social wallop. In Ali’s words, “The lack of representation of rural communities creates a terrible cycle. Rural communities are vibrant, rich, and diverse. But the lack of connectivity, news, and information are never good. It limits opportunity to learn and grow economically. It limits options. It can only be a bad thing. You end up in echo chambers without connectivity.”

Lear proved television could speak to the moment — and, at times, could help heal division. His passing reminds us that television and media ignore that legacy. 

Jeffery H. Bloodworth is a professor of political history at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, and co-director of the university’s School of Public Service & Global Affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming book Heartland Liberal: The Life & Times of Speaker Carl Albert.

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The post For Good or Bad, Norman Lear Helped Erase Rural America from TV appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Luring cardiologists to rural parts of Iowa may mean subsidizing their salaries, a new study has found.

Tom Gruca, a marketing professor at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, looked at data from more than 40 years of public health in his state. His study, Bringing the Doctor to the Patients: Cardiology Outreach to Rural Areas, found that paying doctors to participate in traveling practice models could help alleviate the coming cardiologist shortage in his state. 

Using subsidies and an existing Visiting Consultant Clinic (VCC) model would be a better and more cost-effective way to get cardiology care to rural patients, he said.

A VCC model is a formal arrangement between a rural hospital or clinic and a specialist physician, typically from an urban area nearby. In a VCC arrangement, the specialists travel to rural areas on a regular basis to see patients in their own communities. There, they can use the rural hospital to examine them and provide basic support and non-invasive procedures, and treat them in larger hospitals for more complex procedures.

“The policy that the American Heart Association and everybody else always talks about is let’s get doctors to move to rural areas,” Gruca said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “That might work with the primary care physician because if there’s a hospital there, there’s probably enough equipment and staff for them to do what they’re doing. This will not work for almost any specialist because they need the imaging equipment, the surgical equipment, the surgery nurses, and all that other stuff to do their jobs.”

The VCC model is used in every state, he said. Looking at the numbers the research found that the model would not only provide rural patients with access to care, but save money.

Putting a cardiologist in a rural community would mean the doctor would not have enough patients or patient visits to support their practice, Gruca said. And paying cardiologists on a per mile basis to drive to rural communities would be excessively expensive. In some cases, getting doctors to give up patient time to spend up to three hours of “windshield time” to get rural communities to participate in the VCC model was a challenge.

His research found that a state investment of about $430,000 per year would provide doctors with the necessary funding to cover “windshield time” and still provide current levels of cardiology coverage in the state.

Getting that cardiology care to rural communities is important on a number of levels, he said. First, rural residents are more likely to have cardiology issues. According to one study, between 2010 and 2015, the death rate for rural residents from coronary heart disease was significantly higher than it was for those in urban areas. And a 2017 study found that people in rural areas have a 30 percent higher risk of dying from a stroke due to their increased chronic disease, and reduced access to pre-hospital care.

Second, research shows that rural residents who have access to cardiology care are better off for it.

“What we can say is that the difference between having VCC outreach and not having VCC outreach means anywhere between 700,000 and a million rural residents having better access,” he said. “And studies show that Medicaid patients who see a specialist at least once a year are way more likely to stay out of the hospital and way more likely to live for another year.”

Even more important, he said, is that rural America is facing a pending shortage of cardiologists. Currently, the state has fewer than 200 cardiologists, Gruca said, almost all of them in urban areas. Nationally, the number of cardiologists is expected to decline by as much as 10% due to retirement and aging workloads. While fellowship programs graduate about 1,500 new cardiologists a year, he said, about 2,000 leave the practice annually.

“I thought, what’s going to happen when the number of cardiologists goes down?” he said. “When this shortage actually hits… If we lose 10% of our current cardiologists… there are a lot of cities (in Iowa) that will get no outreach at all.”

Similar programs have worked in Australia, he said. The same kind of subsidies could be successful in encouraging specialist physicians to work in rural areas as well.

Even though the program was expensive, he said, it will still save states money over the alternative.

“We looked at what it would take to hire people and put them into rural areas and the cost was many, many times (the annual subsidies) simply because they would have very little to do,” he said. “If we pay them some amount to do this outreach and we build a mathematical model to figure out how much would we have to pay them per mile or per minute… it’s actually really many, many, many times the $400,000 for the subsidy that we calculated.”

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One of the most iconic landmarks in downtown Grants Pass, Oregon, is a 100-year-old sign that arcs over the main street with the phrase “It’s the Climate” scrawled across it. 

To an outsider, it’s an odd slogan in this rural region, where comments about the climate – or rather, climate change – can be met with apprehension. But for locals, it’s a nod to an era when the “climate” only referred to Grants Pass’ warm, dry summers and mild winters when snow coats the surrounding mountains but rarely touches down in the city streets. 

Now, the slogan takes on a different meaning.

In May 2023, the Grants Pass City Council passed a one-of-a-kind sustainability plan that, if implemented, would transition publicly owned buildings and vehicles to renewable energy, diversifying their power sources in case of natural disaster.

While passing the sustainability plan in this largely Republican county was an enormous feat on its own, actually paying for the energy projects proves to be Grants Pass’s biggest challenge yet. 

“There are grants out there, but I don’t think we’re the only community out there looking for grants to help pay for some of these things,” said JC Rowley, finance director for the city of Grants Pass. Some project examples outlined in their sustainability plan include installing electric vehicle charging stations downtown and solar panels at two city-owned landfills, and converting park streetlights to LED. 

Rural communities face bigger hurdles when accessing grant funding because they don’t have the staff or budget that cities often do to produce competitive grant applications. This can slow down the implementation of projects like the ones laid out in the Grants Pass sustainability plan.

And time is not something Grants Pass – or any other community – has to spare.

Global climate models show the planet’s average annual temperature increasing by about 6.3° Fahrenheit by 2100 if “business-as-usual” practices continue. These practices mean no substantive climate change mitigation policy, continued population growth, and unabated greenhouse gas emissions throughout the 21st century – practices driven by the most resource-consumptive countries, namely, the United States. 

In southwest Oregon, this temperature increase means hotter summers and less snow in the winters, affecting the region’s water resources, according to a U.S. Forest Service analysis. This could mean longer and more severe wildfire seasons. 

In Roseburg, Oregon, about 70 miles north of Grants Pass, a 6.3°F increase would mean the city’s yearly average of 36 days of below-freezing temperatures would decrease to few or none, according to the analysis. Grants Pass would suffer a similar fate, drastically changing the climate it’s so famous for. 

Grants Pass has a population of 39,000 and is the hub of one of the smallest metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. The metro contains just one county, Josephine, which has a population of under 90,000, nearly half of whom live outside urbanized areas. Over half of the county’s land is owned by the Bureau of Land Management or National Forest, and it contains a section of the federal Rogue River Scenic Waterway.

“In the event of a natural disaster, we are far more likely to get isolated,” said Allegra Starr, an Americorps employee who was the driving force behind the Grants Pass sustainability plan. “I’ve heard stories of communities that were less isolated than us running out of fuel [during power outages].”

Building resilience in the face of disaster is a main priority of the plan, which recommends 14 projects related to green energy, waste disposal, transportation, and tree plantings in city limits. All of the projects focus on improvements to city-owned buildings, vehicles, and operations. 

In partnership with Starr and the Grants Pass public works department, a volunteer task force of community members spent one year researching and writing the sustainability plan. In spring 2023, it was approved by the Grants Pass City Council. 

Now, the public works department is in the grants-seeking stage, and they stand to benefit from the influx of climate cash currently coming from the federal government. 

Money for Sustainability, If You Can Get It

In 2022, the Biden administration passed the single largest bill on clean energy and climate action in U.S. history: the Inflation Reduction Act, which funnels $145 billion to renewable energy and climate action programs. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, allocates $57.9 billion to clean energy and power projects. 

“It’s almost like drinking through a fire hose with the grant opportunities, which is a curse and a blessing,” said Vanessa Ogier, Grants Pass city council member. Ogier joined the council in 2021 with environmental and social issues as her top priority and was one of the sustainability plan’s biggest proponents. 

But competing against larger communities for the grants funded through these federal laws is a struggle for smaller communities like Grants Pass. 

“I really don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but when a small community only has one grant writer and they have to focus on water systems, fire, dispatch, fleet services, and they’re torn in all these different ways, it can be difficult to wrangle and organize all these opportunities and filter if they’re applicable, if we would even qualify,” Ogier said. 

Having a designated grant-writing team, which is common in larger cities, would be a huge help in Grants Pass, Ogier said. 

A 2023 study by Headwaters Economics found that lower-capacity communities – ones with fewer staff and limited funding – were unable to compete against higher-capacity, typically urban communities with resources devoted to writing competitive grant applications. 

“[There are] rural communities that don’t have community development, that don’t have economic development, that don’t have grant writers, that may only have one or two paid staff,” said Karen Chase, senior manager for community strategy at Energy Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit that helps people transition their homes and businesses to renewable energy. Chase was a member of the volunteer task force that put together the Grants Pass sustainability plan.

When the Inflation Reduction Act money started rolling in, many of the rural communities Chase works with did not have plans that laid out “shovel-ready” energy and climate resiliency projects, which is a requirement of much of the funding. Grants Pass’ sustainability plan should give them a leg-up when applying for grants that require shovel-ready projects, according to Chase.

“Most of my rural communities pretty much lost out,” she said. 

This is despite the approximately $87 billion of Inflation Reduction Act money classified as rural-relevant, rural-stipulated, or rural-exclusive funding, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institute. Rural outreach is part of the Biden administration’s larger goal to put money into rural communities that historically have been left out by state and federal investments.

But this outreach isn’t perfect. Most of the federal grants available to rural communities still have match requirements, which are a set amount of money awardees must contribute to a grant-funded project. 

The Brookings Institute analysis, which also looked at rural funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, found that “over half [of the rural-significant grants programs] require or show a preference for matching funds, and less than one-third offer flexibility or a waiver.” 

Of the rural-exclusive and rural-stipulated programs, less than one-third of the total grants offer match waivers or flexibility to reduce the match requirement. This makes getting those grants a lot harder for rural communities with smaller budgets. 

Help From the Outside

To address limited staffing, in 2021 the Grants Pass public works department applied to be a host site for an Americorps program run out of the University of Oregon. 

The program, coined the Resource Assistance for Rural Environments (RARE) program, assigns graduate students to rural Oregon communities for 11 months to work on economic development, sustainability planning, and food systems initiatives. An Americorps member was assigned to Grants Pass to work as a sustainability planner from September 2022 to August 2023. 

Without the Americorps member, Grants Pass officials say there’s no way the plan would have been written.

“She came in and learned about the city and the operations and the technical aspects of it and was able to really understand it and talk about that,” said Kyrrha Sevco, business operations supervisor for the public works department. “That’s hard to do.”

Bringing outsiders in can be a tricky undertaking in a rural community, but RARE program director Titus Tomlinson said they collaborate with the host sites to make the transition for their members as smooth as possible. 

“When we place a member, we place them with a trusted entity in a rural community,” Tomlinson said. “[The site supervisor] helps them meet and engage with other leaders in the community so that they’ve got some ground to stand on right out of the gate.” 

Each participating community must provide a $25,000 cash match that goes toward the approximately $50,000 needed to pay, train, and mentor the Americorps member, according to the RARE website. Communities struggling to meet this cash match are eligible for financial assistance. 

Grants Pass paid $18,500 for their portion of the RARE Americorps grant.

Allegra Starr, the Americorps employee, no longer works in Grants Pass since completing her 11-month term. In her stead, a committee of seven has been created to monitor and report to the city council on the progress of the plan’s implementation. 

Much of this implementation work will fall on the director of the public works department, Jason Canady, and the business operations supervisor, Kyrrha Sevco. 

“There has to be that departmental person who’s really carrying that lift and that load,” said Rowley, the Grants Pass finance director. “It’s the Kyrrhas and Jasons of the world who are leading the charge for their own department like public works.”

Now, Canady and Sevco are laying the groundwork for multiple solar projects. Eventually, they hope to bring to life what local high school student, and member of the original volunteer sustainability task force, Kayle Palmore, dreamed of in an essay titled “A Day in 2045,” which envisions bike lanes, wide sidewalks, solar panels, and electric vehicle charging stations on every street corner. 

“A smile spreads across your face as you think of how much you love this beautiful city,” Palmore writes. 

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