Thrive Rural

This Call to Action highlights six principles for measuring rural development progress to encourage funders and investors to design programs that consider lower-capacity communities’ realities, needs, and goals. 

Rural communities must start planning for disaster before a community is forced to grapple with response and recovery. 

The Foundational Element of the Thrive Rural Framework requires identifying and dismantling historical and ongoing discriminatory practices that disadvantage rural people and places.

The Thrive Rural Framework helps you take stock, target action, and gauge progress on rural prosperity. We invite everyone involved in rural development to use it to spark new ways of thinking and acting to move communities, regions, and systems toward equitable rural prosperity.

Tailoring economic and community development efforts to the assets, actors and goals of specific communities and regions is critically important.

This book chapter highlights six action principles “do economic development differently”—that shifts from the risky “winner takes all” approach that is heavily reliant on a business-recruitment strategy to a “let’s all win” approach of building on a region’s existing, underutilized assets.

What are the pathways of influence for public health and health care to foster more prosperous, equitable and sustainable communities across rural America? This field scan provides an understanding of the state of relevant health fields in the rural United States.

What must happen for economic development to foster a more prosperous, healthier, equitable and environmentally sustainable rural America? This scan of field practices and trends advances our answer to this question.

Quality of life is largely determined by the characteristics of places, for better or worse. Differences between places drive inequalities in economic opportunity, educational attainment and health outcomes. A Thrive Rural Brief by Brian Dabson.