By Whitney Oachs, CRPD research intern Last summer the Center for Rural Policy reported a “sea change in engagement” after racial justice protests were held in rural communities across the state following the death of George Floyd. Though more attention has been paid to these protests in urban environments, towns as small as Grand Marais ...
Last year finally brought into sharp focus just how important child care is to maintaining a functioning economy. As we noted in our original report on child care, “A Quiet Crisis,” in nearly 80% of Minnesota families, all parents work, and child care issues are the primary cause of absenteeism among American workers. Child care ...
by Marnie Werner, VP Research A unique opportunity? For a printable version of this report, click here. To view the accompanying webinar, click here. After a year of COVID, spiking unemployment, closed schools, and restricted businesses, rural Minnesotans may be looking at a unique opportunity in economic development. Since the Great Recession, rural employers have been ...
In a previous episode, we discussed the importance of rural grocery stores. Kathy Draeger, the statewide Director of the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships at the University of Minnesota, discussed their discussed their recently published report outlining results from a survey they sent to rural grocery stores across Minnesota. For this episode, we brought her back ...
By Marnie Werner, VP, Research & Operations Ready for a silver lining? So much of what we hear about the pandemic is doom and gloom, but as a new report we released last month on workforce and job vacancies showed, rural Minnesota is sitting at the crossroads of two important trends that have created a ...
For the last ten months, Minnesotans have been waiting along with the rest of the world for a vaccine to protect us from COVID-19. Now that we have one, though, officials face the next big issue: how to get those shots out to the public. For this topic, we’ve invited back Sue Grafstrom, a CRPD ...
January, 2021 By Kelly Asche, Research Associate Last week the Center released a new report on the state of rural Minnesota’s workforce. In 2019, we assembled a four-part series on rural Minnesota’s worker shortage, it’s impact on economic growth in Greater Minnesota, and what rural communities are doing about the problem. Now, almost a year into the ...
As the state begins the work of recovering economically from the pandemic, this historic event has left rural Minnesota with a unique opportunity: a large pool of unemployed workers and a large number of jobs that need filling. In this webinar from January 21, 2021 The Center for Rural Policy & Development presented their ...
Last week we released our report exploring how the pandemic has impacted jobs and the workforce in Rural Minnesota. And on this episode, we get to dive in a bit deeper into this topic with a couple of our Workforce Development Boards and a labor analyst with the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development ...
