Season 3: Recent Episodes
Center for Rural Policy and Development
The Center for Rural Policy recently released a report outlining the trends of rural newspapers in Minnesota and some of the challenges and opportunities they are currently facing. On this episode, Marnie Werner, Director of Research, discusses the report and what she found while researching this important issue.
In this episode, Marnie Werner interviews Kelly Asche, Senior Researcher for the Center for Rural Policy and Development to discuss the most recent research report- "Shedding Light on the Education Formula". They touch on the reason the education formula is complex, that it distributes funds "unequally" by design, and their amazement on how much the program attempts to take into account when distributing funds.
The Center for Rural Policy and Development partnered with Minnesota State University, Mankato - Center for Rural Behavioral Health to survey and interview rural mental health providers to identify barriers in recruiting and retaining workers. Through the survey it has become apparent that the mental healthcare workforce shortage is being aggravated by a handful of quite specific and identifiable problems around graduating workers, recruiting them, and keeping them once they are hired. You can find the report here.
In this episode, Marnie Werner interviews the researchers Thad Shunkweiler, LMFT, LPCC, Associate Professor and Director, Center for Rural Behavioral Health, Minnesota State University Mankato and Tracie Rutherford Self, Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Center for Rural Behavioral Health, Minnesota State University Mankato to discuss their findings.
The 2023 Legislative session is in full swing so Julie checks in with Scott McMahon, the Executive Director of the Greater Minnesota Partnership. They discuss what the session may hold for various rural issues such as child care, housing, and broadband.
On this episode, Marnie Werner, Vice President of Research & Operations, interviews colleague Kelly Asche about this years State of Rural report. Every year the Center for Rural Policy and Development publishes the State of Rural - a report outlining the various economic and demographic trends taking place in rural Minnesota. Most years it's a simple update since trends tend to shift and move slowly over the course of a decade. Unless, that is, a significant event takes place which disrupts the trends. And that's exactly the era we are living - both the pandemic and the predicted demographic shifts have hit home and are disrupting the trend lines.
Instead of small adjustments and tweaks to the language, this years State of Rural report needed some significant reworking to represent the major shifts that are occurring. In particular, the in-migration of people to our rural counties across Minnesota and the out-migration away from the seven-county metro.
On this episode, Marnie Werner, VP of Research and Operations, interviews Julie Tesch (CEO and President of CRDP) and Kelly Asche (Senior Research Associate) about their experiences working with and in municipal governments and their attempts to find, apply, and administer grants. What are some of the challenges, and solutions that would help our small local governments receive more grant dollars?
On this episode, Julie Tesch interviews Center for Rural Policy and Development Board member Martha Castanon. Martha is an Accredited Representative for the Immigrant Law Center in Moorhead, Minnesota. Julie and her discuss how her parents met in Comstock, Minnesota, the services that the Immigrant Law Center provides to immigrant and refugee populations as well as some of the issues these populations are facing in rural Minnesota.
Starting with the 2020 Decennial Census, the U.S. Census Bureau is implementing a new framework to ensure privacy of the census takers - essentially, making sure that a nefarious actor can't identify an individual from published census tables. Although the U.S. Census Bureau has been employing various strategies for decades, this new framework is very different. And although the intent of this framework has good intentions, the tradeoff between privacy protection and data accuracy will mean rural areas will have less than accurate data.
On this episode, Kelly Asche - Senior Research Associate, interviews David Van Riper from the Minnesota Population Center who has been one of the leading researchers exploring this tradeoff between privacy and accuracy, and what it might mean for rural data.
In this episode, Marnie Werner, VP of Research and Operations, interviews Amy Baldwin who works as the Community Development Director for Otter Tail County. Probably one of the top three issues facing most rural community and economic developers is solving the housing shortage. In this conversation, Marnie and Amy talk about Otter Tail's new initiative called "The Big Build" - an intentional effort around housing growth and investment within the county.
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 organization that partners with and supports communities in 14 counties across north central Minnesota, Initiative Foundation has been on the forefront of organizing and supporting initiatives to expand child care capacity in the region.