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When rural communities decide to work on expanding local broadband, they have to decide what kind of network best meets the community’s needs. They often see a tradeoff between performance and cost. But in most situations, we actually don’t think communities need to compromise. Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks have the fastest speeds, the highest quality connectivity, and often the lowest costs in the long run.
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This capital gap has real consequences: Rural entrepreneurship rates have fallen significantly, standing at just 12.2% in the 2010s compared to 20% in the 1980s. And without the power of entrepreneurship to spark economic growth, rural economies overall have struggled as innovation has concentrated in major urban hubs.
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Since its launch in 2019, we’ve onboarded 2 cohorts of the Rural Innovation Initiative, with a total of 19 participants. We are deeply proud of the impact it has had on small towns all across the country, and our experience has shown that when rural communities have access to the expertise of an outside organization with national resources like CORI and RISI, they can transform ideas into actionable local benefits.
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While the vast majority of pandemic-related coverage has focused on dense urban areas, smaller towns across the country have also felt deep health and economic shocks. Each month in our Employment Impact Update, we share key findings, trends, detailed maps and analysis based on BLS monthly employment data to help you understand what’s happening to rural economies.
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Often, as rural people, we underestimate our talent, or have imposter syndrome. We think there’s not a space for a rural entrepreneur or a small business, or no opportunity to scale. But when we’re persistent, when we actively build a community of people who can help strengthen and grow and fine tune a brand, we can succeed, it may take time, but I do believe it is possible.
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Since even before the Great Recession, innovation jobs have concentrated ever more heavily in just a handful of superstar cities. Many people have long assumed that if they wanted to work in tech, they would have to live in a dense urban area where HQ was located.
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Each month in our employment impact update, we share key findings, trends, detailed maps and analysis based on BLS monthly employment data to help you understand what’s happening to rural economies.
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And while Proximity now has a national reach, they never lost their rural roots. Founded in Montrose, Colorado, (a community with a population of 19,000), about 65% of the spaces in Proximity’s network are rural.
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COVID-19 has upended the once simple idea of sharing space with others. As the pandemic has spread and shutdowns have been needed to stem the health crisis, many industries have been hit hard across rural America. One of those industries is the rural coworking space.
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At the Center On Rural Innovation (CORI), we’ve honed a careful approach to showing communities how they can use data to tell their best story. Now, we’re sharing these best practices with you, for help as you incorporate data into your community’s unique story.
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