Rural Communities

By focusing on the relationships between people, organizations, and ideas, residents in some of North Carolina’s poorest rural communities are taking the lead to improve their overall health and quality of life.

Server farms are supplanting scrub brush and cornfields, underwritten by small-town tax breaks.

The Rocky Mountains should brace for more, bigger fires, if history is any indication.

A Cabinet-level council released a report this week on ways the administration can do a better job to support broadband for low-income and rural communities. The recommendations are good but need to go further to encourage and support small communities, advocates say.

"The real challenge is how do we make rural areas of the world just as exciting, just as dynamic a place to start a business, to grow a business, to raise a family, and have your kids have the option to stay there and get great jobs or build companies of their own, and really exploit broadband for its full potential as opposed to just using it for another means by which we all live cheek by jowl in cities?"

The cost of not automating the milking process may be greater for some farmers than shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars, experts say.

Child poverty, rural arts and culture, philanthropy, youth initiatives – Rural Assembly sessions get participants thinking about their own communities and beyond.

We’re not saying that in a complaining way, but in a partnership way.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we’re starting a series of interviews with a few of the people who will attend next month’s National Rural Assembly, September 8-10, in Washington, D.C. The national gathering of rural advocates focuses on rural America’s place in federal policy making.

The figure is even higher in counties that depended on manufacturing jobs, which eroded during the Great Recession.