Our work

Strong tech economies will allow rural communities to chart their own courses toward prosperity. At CORI, we help small towns devise tech economy strategies that support innovation, tech entrepreneurship, workforce development, and tech job creation in the places they call home. Through our Rural Innovation Initiative, our team of in-house community managers and data experts works with cohorts of rural communities to create place-based tech economy strategies, an economic development model that works to educate and train local residents in tech skills, employ them in tech jobs, and empower them to launch the startups that will drive their local economy.

This intensive technical assistance program has helped our rural community partners raise more than $29.9 million in federal funding and matching dollars. Many of these communities go on to join our Rural Innovation Network after completing the Initiative.

We launched the CORI Innovation Fund (CIF) to invest in rural startups located in Opportunity Zones across the country. Wealth and talent have continued to accumulate in cities, perpetuating the misconception that tech startups can’t be successful in small towns and communities. We are working to change this narrative.

The CORI Innovation Fund seeks to find attractive technology-enabled operating businesses in rural geographies, which are under-served by traditional venture capital institutions. We are honored to identify, fund, and support the best tech entrepreneurs American small towns have to offer.

Gathering insights from rural mapping data is difficult due to the inherent challenges in coverage, granularity, and the relative sparseness of populations spread over large land areas. We design and build data-driven maps, tools, and resources to help policymakers, investors, nonprofits, academics, journalists, and local change agents better understand what’s happening in small towns and communities across the country and make more informed strategic decisions.

We use rural data sets and visualizations to illustrate the challenges and opportunities that lie in rural America to ensure perception aligns with reality. Our suite of mapping tools continue to grow as new needs and opportunities emerge.

Access to fast, reliable internet service is critical to daily life, a fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has only reinforced. Yet, in many parts of rural America, lack of broadband infrastructure means that communities face significant barriers to learning, working, and building sustainable local economies in a connected world. We believe that everyone, regardless of geography, should have the necessary access and availability to participate in and benefit from the growing tech economy.