It’s no secret that rural communities face different realities and challenges than urban environments, from smaller populations to fewer large corporations to provide employment.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, which covers Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, works to help create jobs and boost economic development in all of the communities it serves, and these five states have a large concentration of rural communities.
The Richmond Fed created the Rural Investment Collaborative to help revitalize rural communities in its district. It creates collaborations with organizations to help communities to access capital that’s needed to advance economic and community development efforts.
The Rural Investment Collaborative’s steering group, which doesn’t include Richmond Fed staff members, raised $640,000 through 2025. The funds are awarded through a competitive process, and last year, more than $312,000 was awarded to organizations that completed the Community Investment Training program.
Richmond Fed officials describe the Rural Investment Collaborative as “a commitment to treating rural economies as deserving of dedicated research, targeted resources, and authentic partnership.”
Emily Corcoran, senior manager of regional and community analysis for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, recently sat down with Integrated Media Publishing to talk about the divide between rural and urban economies, the challenges, and what kind of programs are needed to close the gap.
Excerpts from the conversation have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q. What are some of the challenges that rural economies face?
Emily Corcoran: From the work that we do at the Richmond Fed’s Center for Rural Economies and the conversations that our team has regularly with 5th District community leaders, we know that rural economies face many of the same challenges as urban economies, including workforce shortages, housing affordability, child care access, and infrastructure gaps. But limited resources and thin organizational capacity can make these challenges more acute in rural communities.
On the bright side, though, small, close-knit communities can be a real asset. If you know who to call and you have trusting relationships, that can help unlock solutions to some of these challenges.
Q. There was a study that came out in the third quarter of 2025 saying that one in five Americans live in rural areas, but in the 5th District that share is even higher, about one in four. Are those figures changing, in your estimation?
Corcoran: Our one-fourth of rural 5th District residents has been relatively consistent over time. One of the interesting things that we are keeping an eye on is what that composition looks like within that one-quarter of 5th District residents. Because of course there is in-migration and out-migration from rural communities. So we absolutely keep an eye on younger folks moving in or out of rural communities. Older folks wanting to age in place, for example, or retire to a more rural community. We work to understand what those changes mean for rural businesses, for the rural workforce, and for rural economies generally.
Q. On the Richmond Fed website, in the insights on rural versus urban economies, it cites the challenges, employment barriers, transportation costs, housing affordability, child care shortages, and infrastructure. Have you studied those and can put those in any sort of priority order?
Corcoran: That's an interesting question. Honestly, no, I don't feel like I can put them into a priority order simply because the priority order will differ by community. The approach that we take is really drilling down to the community level. We have, for example, community conversations and other engagements across our district where we talk with communities about the specific challenges that they're experiencing, the barriers that, for example, their workforce is encountering. And we look for opportunities to share solutions across communities and really connect folks across our district. That’s a big focus of our Investing in Rural America Conference, which brings together rural leaders across our district, and this year across the nation. By making a space for rural leaders to talk about solutions to those exact challenges, we can help shine a light on the many innovative solutions that communities are developing. Microtransit solutions, home-based child care solutions, all kinds of creativity happening to really make sure that local communities and rural workers are well-supported. We want to really understand how communities are creating solutions and how those solutions can be shared, replicated, scaled at times to help other communities with similar challenges.
Q. When you look at South Carolina, obviously the Greenville, Columbia, Charleston areas are growing well, but then on your way to Charleston, you go through Dillon County, which by most statistical measures has fallen behind the urban areas. That also strains the county in a lot of ways. The per capita income is down, unemployment is higher. Is there a fail-safe solution that you can look at?
Corcoran: One thing that this work has really taught us is that there's no silver bullet. It's really a question of communities, community members, community leaders doing the very hard work of partnering, collaborating, being honest about what the current state is and what the desired future state is. And then working towards that. It sort of has to be driven by the uniqueness of that particular area, that particular community. There are absolutely solutions across rural communities that are so innovative, exciting (and) can really help unlock workforce participation, help unlock development if that is the desire of the community. But that's not one thing, right? It's a whole collection of partnerships and resources and creativity that all comes together to help communities renew if that's the direction that they're taking.
Q. In the urban areas we hear that there are some couples paying more for child care than they do on their home mortgage. In the rural areas, it's not quite that extreme, but child care is an issue. Would you rank that as among the most challenging issues? Are there partnerships to help make that happen? A lot of CEOs will tell you it's not their responsibility to provide child care. Is child care in the rural areas, from what you can tell, as much of an issue?
Corcoran: Absolutely, yes. I would certainly rank child care among the … short list of challenges that have come up in our conversations with communities and that some of our work focuses on to help communities think through what the real need is. Where are there gaps in child care service? What is the real cost of child care for both the providers and the parents? And where are there opportunities for businesses to help, for employers to help step in? We have certainly heard examples of employers providing on-site child care. We've heard examples of organizations coming together to provide some shared on-site child care. I mentioned home-based child care before. There have been some examples that we've seen where there are network partnerships to support home-based care providers. So there's a little bit of scalability there. I would certainly put it on the short list of top challenges and I would just emphasize that we have been encouraged by some of the solutions that we've seen.
Q. The Richmond Fed has said that the recent USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Code shows some South Carolina counties shifting more toward rural classification, reflecting population and metro proximity changes. That underscores the need for tailored economic strategies to address both rural decline risk and urban growth pressures. That falls in line with what you were just talking about. Can you amplify that a little bit?
Corcoran: Absolutely, yes. I would say in South Carolina and in other places across the 5th District and across the country, there can be some really interesting and challenging demographic dynamics that play out. You may have an influx of retirees, for example. You may have folks who move to a certain community for remote work opportunities. We certainly saw this during the pandemic and immediately post-pandemic, and we're still seeing it to some degree. Depending on the specific dynamics at play, they may create a situation where a community has had a certain economy for a long time and then is put in a place where they need to adjust, adapt to new folks moving into the community. (There are) maybe some changes in who's calling that place home, how they think about economic growth and development, maybe in a place that doesn't necessarily have some of the infrastructure … to help navigate some of those changes.
Q. The Fed has said on its website that rural households spend a larger share of income on transportation, making them vulnerable to high gas prices. Mass transit is as prevalent in the South as in other regions. Have you studied that issue enough to know what rural households can do in partnerships like you mentioned? Is there anything to help with transportation costs?
Corcoran: Yes, absolutely. I would point you to some work that we've done on microtransit solutions in rural communities. … To really lift up how folks in different places across the 5th District are getting creative about what those solutions look like. We know of communities that have developed microtransit rideshares to ease commutes. We know of regional collaborations to help provide transportation while also sharing costs across the respective counties. Rural transportation solutions can look like a lot of different things.
Q. Let’s switch to employment barriers. A lot has been written about rural areas facing fewer local job opportunities. As South Carolina grows, there's so much of the economic gain that goes to the larger urban areas. Limited access to training programs, lower educational attainment. Have you studied those and is there a solution somewhere in there?
Corcoran: Are you asking about educational attainment specifically?
Q. Yes, it's been an employment barrier. There’s been lower educational attainment, limited access to training programs, reducing the incentives to invest in human capital. The rural areas, if they want to attract some of this economic growth, they still face those barriers. Do you think that we're making progress or do we have a lot more work to do there?
Corcoran: One thing I'll lift up from our work is something called the Survey of Community College Outcomes, which is a data initiative that we run to better measure the outcomes of community colleges and to capture the ways that community colleges serve different types of students. That research initiative is not exclusive to rural community colleges, but we do drill down. We provide some information on our website about how rural community colleges in particular act as anchor institutions oftentimes within their communities and the ways that they help provide access to training and employers. Outside of academics, community colleges also often partner with other organizations to help address some of the barriers that you mentioned previously. They can be major players in the transportation space, in the child care space, even in food access. Our research shows the many ways that community colleges support a range of successful student outcomes, including the wraparound services that support student success.
Q. One of the summaries from the Richmond Fed talked about rural economies facing structural disadvantages and things we've talked about— employment, housing, and infrastructure— while urban economies benefit from clustering and innovation, but the Richmond Fed's research points to targeted place-based policies as a way to close the gap. Can you talk about what it means by targeted place-based policies?
Corcoran: When we say place-based policy, we're really thinking about policies, programs, and practices that support people where they want to thrive. That can look like a couple of different things, but it includes things like … federal place-based programs that support institutions and organizations that are located in a particular place. So, for example, the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund at the US Department of the Treasury provides both financial assistance and technical assistance to nonprofit, mission-driven financial institutions called CDFIs. CDFIs in general are very place-based. Part of how they approach their lending and their provision of financial services is that they work within a specific service area. They very much focus on relationships with their borrowers, whether those borrowers are consumers, small business owners, other nonprofit organizations or local government. They partner with public entities to form public-private partnerships that help drive investment in place – including in rural places. That type of investment in a particular place is really what we are talking about and thinking about when we talk about place-based policy. It's really: where are there opportunities to invest in a place and to help provide some of the support to help different places thrive?
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