Tag: economy

A slow recovery among home builders

The number of residential housing builders still isn’t at peak levels of 2006. October 2022 By: Kelly Asche, Senior Research Associate Now more than ever we are seeing the linkages between economic development, workforce development, and housing. No matter where you turn, it seems that small communities are trying to crack the code on how ...

Season 3, Episode 1: Childcare Solutions with Initiative Foundation

In September, the Center for Rural Policy and Development released the results of an environmental scan of child care initiatives taking place across rural Minnesota. In this episode, Vice President of Research, Marnie Werner, interviews Don Hickman, the Vice President for Community and Workforce Development at the Initiative Foundation in Little Falls, MN. As an ...

The value of a regional overview for developing child care

By Marnie Werner, Vice President, Research & Operations Click here to read the main article, “Rural Child Care Solutions: From the Ground Up.” One factor that has been helpful in the rural childcare arena is the involvement of organizations with a regional perspective, operating in a wider area than a county but more focused—with greater ...
Four cute babies sitting in a row

Rural Child Care Solutions: From the Ground Up

By Marnie Werner, Vice President, Research & Operations Click here for a printable version of this report. For a quick summary of this report, click here. Click here for more on what the MN Department of Human Services is doing to help with the child care shortage. Click here for more on the value of ...

Webinar – COVID-19, by the numbers

COVID-19 didn’t just impact the health of rural communities, it also deeply impacted the local economy and workforce. In this webinar, Kelly Asche from the Center for Rural Policy and Development examines recently released jobs and workforce data during the pandemic. Three panelists join the conversation to discuss the numbers and dive deeper into the ...

COVID-19 in Rural Minnesota, by the numbers

Marnie Werner, VP Research Whitney Oachs, Research Associate Kelly Asche, Research Associate Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, there has still been little research on the impact of the coronavirus on rural communities or the accompanying public health and economic measures taken to control its spread. In Minnesota, like the rest of the nation, the ...

Research explainer video – Amazon effect and rural tax revenues

Online sales have permeated everyday life and their impacts stretch beyond convenience of shopping. Local leaders see the evidence every day in their communities: more and more delivery trucks going down their roads, stopping at their neighbors’ or their own houses, dropping off products that were once maybe purchased in their own or a nearby ...

Season 2 Ep 9: Discussing the data trends from the pandemic

Now that we are beginning to exit the pandemic (hopefully), the data from the previous year and a half are being released. In this episode, Marnie Werner and Kelly Asche discuss what they’ve been seeing in the data. And although the illness and deaths associated with COVID-19 hit hard in our rural areas, some of ...