Category: Blog

By Marnie Werner, Vice President, Research & Operations Greater Minnesota can be hard to define for people who don’t live there. Kind of amorphous. And it is hard to come up with a good single name that encompasses what is basically the whole state outside of the seven-county Twin Cities metro. But for us at ...

Our hyper-focus on population numbers overlooks important trends in the number of households. By: Kelly Asche, Senior Researcher Leaders in communities are obsessed with population numbers – are they growing or declining and by how much, over how long of a time period? – and they believe that the trendline is a marker of their ...

By Marnie Werner, VP, Research & Operations We’ve been spending some time with mental health and mental health care the last few years here at the Center, and one thing we’ve found, which should be surprising to no one who follows our work or just lives in this state, is that we have a shortage ...

January 2025 By: Kelly Asche, Senior Research Every year, the Center for Rural Policy and Development publishes the “State of Rural,” a report that tracks various economic and demographic trends in rural Minnesota. The following is a highlight from that report, which will be published the week of January 13th, 2025. It’s common knowledge that ...

By Sarah Harstad, Ph.D., Researcher Why should business owners start planning so early? The Center for Rural Policy and Development’s recent report on business ownership succession showed that 81% of business owners are not prepared for succession or exit when the opportunity comes up or when they decide to go through with it. On the ...

November 2024 By: Kelly Asche, Senior Researcher After the release of our report exploring the declines in nursing facility beds, we received a question wondering if there was any relationship between facilities that closed and the type of license (nonprofit vs. for-profit) they were under. So let’s explore that question. Between 2005 and 2024, there ...

November 2024 By Kelly Asche, Senior Researcher Our new report, “The declining capacity of nursing facilities care in rural Minnesota,” documents the shrinking number of nursing facility beds across rural Minnesota. In the report we raise concerns about the vulnerability of rural facilities and the frequency at which they close. In this post, I want ...

By: Kelly Asche A new report by the Center for Rural Policy will be published in early November focused on trends in nursing home facility beds. As many of you may have heard or experienced, nursing homes across Minnesota have been either closing or reducing the number of beds they have available, lately due to ...

By: Kelly Asche, Senior Researcher Every January, the Center for Rural Policy and Development releases the “State of Rural,” a report that reviews the important demographic and economic  trends in Greater Minnesota. We usually have to wait until December—that is when the U.S. Census Bureau releases the newest batch of data for the American Community ...