Rural America Is Struggling. Where’s Philanthropy?

In an old ranch house that serves as the headquarters of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, Jason Baldes greets federal officials and others with doughnuts and coffee. It is his second stop of the day: Early that morning, he drove out to the herd just west of Morton, Wyo., to feed formula to a 3-month-old bison calf whose mother had died.

Baldes, the charity’s executive director and a member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe, has been working to bring back bison since 2006. His goal is to reacquire thousands of acres of private lands within the reservation that were sold long ago so that bison can roam a huge area and be managed as wildlife. He wants his people and the Northern Arapaho tribe with whom they share this land to be able to hunt bison and harvest a traditional and healthier food source than the cattle that predominate on these sagebrush plains. He also hopes to attract tourists driving to Yellowstone and bolster the reservation’s struggling economy.

Hand-feeding the calf didn’t exactly fit the wildlife narrative. But when a film crew from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom zeroed in on a previous calf feeding a few weeks earlier, Baldes didn’t object.

Sofia Jaramillo

“Once they found him, he stole the show,” Baldes tells the group of visitors. “If he can raise money to buy land back for us, that’s a pretty good way to have him kick in his fair share.”

In August, Baldes learned that the charity he founded less than two years ago would receive its largest grant yet, $9.8 million from the federal Economic Development Administration, to build a new museum and headquarters here.

Philanthropy helped the organization win the federal grant — in an example of what smart philanthropy can foster in rural and tribal areas. The Wind River Development Fund, a Native CDFI, included the buffalo initiative as a signature project when it applied for a federal grant in EDA’s Recompete competition, which focused on locally driven economic-development ideas in communities with higher than average unemployment.

When the Wind River project edged past more than 500 competitors to become one of 22 finalists, the Just Transition Fund, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, stepped in with a $100,000 grant to help cover some of Wind River’s costs for completing the final application — including hiring grant writers, architects, and engineers.

That modest philanthropic assistance yielded a huge windfall: In August, the Wind River fund learned it was one of just six winners and would receive $36 million.

Persistent Funding Gap

But for now, at least, the success at Wind River is an anomaly. In much of the country, rural America is struggling and philanthropy isn’t doing enough to help.

Economists at the Federal Reserve are working on the first comprehensive look at rural philanthropy in almost a decade. Their work is expected to show that national foundations continue a long-term trend of underinvesting in rural areas.

In early 2025, the research is expected to affirm statistics that have roughly persisted for at least a generation: Rural areas receive only about 7 percent of philanthropic spending, even though they account for 14 to 20 percent of the population. (The wide range is due to varying definitions of “rural.”) Put another way, rural areas receive only a third to half as much philanthropic support as one would expect based on population alone.

Few national foundations have made investing in rural America a signature issue. When asked to name a major national foundation with a strategic plan for rural grant making, most rural advocates can name just one — the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which hopes to improve health outcomes in some of the nation’s most diverse and poverty-stricken rural areas.

“Among national funders, Robert Wood Johnson is the only one that has made a consistent effort to build a portfolio and worked to get to a deeper understanding,” says Jim King, CEO of Fahe, a charity working to improve the economy in Appalachia and one of the leaders of a partnership that serves three-quarters of the counties in the country with persistent poverty.

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That’s the bad news. Rural advocates nevertheless see reasons for hope, with more than a dozen new philanthropic collaboratives focused on rural areas. In addition, abundant funds are available through federal grant programs, like the one that will pay for the Wind River center. Advocates point to a growing realization among grant makers that locally generated ideas tend to work best.

Wealthy individuals are also making some huge gifts, such as Denny Sanford’s $350 million contribution in 2021 to create a virtual-care hospital for rural areas, and Byron Trott’s $150 million gift this July to expand the number of rural students attending top universities. There’s also hope that having a vice president with rural roots will help. Democratic candidate Tim Walz grew up in a small town in Nebraska, and his opponent, Republican candidate J.D. Vance, wrote a memoir about his upbringing in Ohio and Appalachian Kentucky.

Rural America is often covered in the national press as a monolith, and those overly broad strokes tend to pique — temporarily — national philanthropic interest. When Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016 brought frustrated white rural voters to the forefront, national foundations briefly became “rural curious,” says Tony Pipa, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and host of the Reimagine Rural podcast. But philanthropic momentum quickly faded.

Defying stereotypes, rural America is remarkably diverse. It ranges from small towns in Vermont separated by a few miles, to ranching families in the West that might be 30 miles from their nearest neighbor, to unincorporated communities along the southern border where immigrants receive few services.

One of the constants throughout rural America is above-average poverty. As of 2019, 86 percent of the counties with persistent poverty in the United States were rural, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Among the biggest problems in these communities is basic infrastructure — closed hospitals, crumbling community centers, failing or nonexistent wastewater systems, too few child care providers, inadequate internet connections.

The persistent-poverty counties include a racially diverse assortment of rural areas, such as the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, the Black Belt, the southern border, Indian reservations, the Ozarks region, and the southwest. More than 60 percent of the residents in persistent-poverty counties are people of color.

“Rural is compelling for lots of different types of funders — or at least it should be,” says Ann Lichter, director of Resource Rural, a platform that connects foundations and donors to groups helping rural communities obtain federal grants. “Whether you’re looking at this from a climate and clean energy, an economic-justice, a racial-equity, or a democracy and civic-engagement perspective — all of those come together in rural places.”

Field Coordinators

One way foundations have improved their grant making in rural areas is by getting closer to the places they’re trying to support. The LOR Foundation, which describes itself as a “start-up accelerator for community driven ideas,” has narrowed its grant making to just seven rural towns in the Mountain West. It hires community officers to fund ideas and connect local innovators — and it plans eventually to move on to new small towns and repeat the process.

The Ford Family Foundation

At the Ford Family Foundation, a regional grant maker focused on rural Oregon and one California county, field coordinators help in certain geographies and with certain populations, such as Native American and Latinx people.

Maurizio Valerio is the field coordinator for eastern Oregon, which differs so much from urban, coastal Oregon that 13 counties have voiced a desire to secede and join Idaho. Many of the small towns Valerio works with want to build new fire halls that can double as community-gathering spaces. After meeting with the volunteer fire department in North Powder (population 501), Valerio helped persuade the foundation to contribute nearly $250,000 to the construction of a new fire hall.

“You need to have a place where you can break bread together,” Valerio says. “The last two years, they’ve had the prom in there. The trucks go out, the prom comes in.”

One popular trend in rural philanthropy focuses on reducing polarization and bridging differences — the kind of work being done by upstart collaborations like the Trust for Civic Life and the New Pluralists.

Advocates for the approach say they’re encouraged by a 2023 study of central Appalachia that found high levels of civic engagement were closely correlated with a community’s economic prosperity and health. The challenge is how to support engagement across ideological differences without having it feel staged or forced.

Charlie Brown, executive director of the Trust for Civic Life, says he’s intrigued by a recent grant the Roundhouse Foundation made to the Libraries of Eastern Oregon to teach canning and preservation.

The Ford Family Foundation

“What they found is that the people coming to learn how to can often represent a very diverse spectrum of political views, and this is often one of the few places and times they come together,” Brown says. “It’s one of those entry points that we wouldn’t think about: ‘How can we make our democracy better? Canning.’ But it’s getting people together to do things that aren’t on-the-nose political, and as a result they’re building relationships.”

‘Rural Isn’t Just White’

For the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the turn toward rural started in 2015 when the foundation noticed a national report documenting significantly worse health outcomes for rural residents. The foundation initially worked with the Center for Rural Strategies to learn more about what works in rural areas. That led to a broader set of grants, including to a group of six community development financial institutes (CDFIs) known as Partners for Rural Transformation.

“We’ve gotten more and more clear that our focus is not on all rural communities — it’s very specifically on deeply disinvested places, places that are persistently poor and mostly communities of color,” says Katrina Badger, a program officer overseeing the foundation’s rural work.

A 2017 report found vast disparities in foundation spending by region, with some of the most impoverished rural areas receiving the least support. Alabama’s 12-county Black Belt region and the Mississippi Delta received just $41 per person, compared with a national average of $451 per person.

CDFIs can borrow cheaply from the federal government, and sometimes banks, to support distressed areas. The six members of Partners for Rural Transformation work in the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, Indian reservations, the Deep South, the Rio Grande Valley, and the rural West. Together, they serve three-quarters of the counties with persistent poverty.

“Each of these places are different — these communities are unique,” says King, whose charity, Fahe, is a member of the coalition. “But we are choosing to really pay attention to what ways are we the same.”

They’re united by the consequences of poverty: high unemployment, low graduation rates, inadequate housing, and a weak tax base for supporting schools. And, of course, the reason the six CDFIs got together in the first place.

“Philanthropy is not getting to these areas,” King says.

The Black Belt Community Foundation, which started 20 years ago with help from the Ford Foundation, works in 12 rural counties in Alabama — all of which are majority African American. The community foundation has distributed more than $20 million over that period but has just $1.25 million in its endowment. Money goes out the door almost as quickly as it comes in — for the Head Start programs the foundation runs in four counties and for urgent needs like helping low-income residents improve wastewater systems — says Felecia Lucky, the community foundation’s president.

Tanisha Stephens

Black Belt has received support from Robert Wood Johnson, and in June it received $425,000 from the Trust for Civic Life. But Lucky says she’d like to see national foundations do more, such as setting aside part of a large endowment and letting the community foundation benefit from the interest or investment returns.

“If folks are really serious about racial justice — if it’s not just something for the passing moment — there’s a lot of opportunity,” Lucky says. “Rural isn’t just white.”

Funders Join Forces

A flurry of new donor collaboratives focus on rural areas. Sixteen philanthropic-serving organizations that belong to the United Philanthropy Forum are finalizing principles about working effectively in rural areas. The principles emphasize building a “truly inclusive table” and elevating the voices of people of color. The Neighborhood Funders Group, which has a program focused on racial justice in rural areas, is supporting 13 charities or movement organizations in New York state.

A funding collaborative called the Rural Climate Partnership, a program of the Heartland Fund, aims to help rural areas transition to clean energy. Several state-based networks, such as Texas Rural Funders, are expanding or hiring full-time staff.

Some longtime rural advocates say the burst of new collaborations — perhaps 20, and nearly all new since 2016 — is hard to keep straight. Allen Smart, a consultant who focuses on rural philanthropy, says the activity may signal renewed interest in rural issues but shouldn’t be confused with the deep investments that the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation made in the 1960s and ‘70s.

“It’s an easy way for funders to say they are involved and engaged without putting much into strategizing other than cutting a check,” Smart says.

But Pipa, of the Brookings Institution, says the collaborations are fertile ground for experimentation — as long as foundations follow through.

“There’s a real opportunity for it to be consequential,” Pipa says. “We just need to continue to take those conversations and those collaborations further, figure out where investment can have the highest and best use, and grow that investment over time.”

Some successful rural models are already under consideration for export. Last year, the Lumina Foundation gave $1.6 million to Coastal Enterprises, a Maine CDFI, to expand a program that helps people start child care businesses and refine the model so that other states can adopt it. Coastal’s Child Care Business Lab provides tips on how to start a business and navigate the licensing process to aspiring entrepreneurs, most of them women. Coastal started the business lab after noticing that areas of the state with high poverty and unemployment tended to have few child care facilities.

Rayitos del Sol

Since 2020, the program has helped 33 people — a third of them immigrants — start child care businesses.

Juana Rodriguez Vazquez signed up for the lab before opening a new nonprofit bilingual child care center in Milbridge, Me., in 2021. This summer, she broke ground on a new facility that will accommodate up to 60 children year-round and an additional 20 during seasonal peaks. Roughly 400 farmworkers live in Milbridge throughout the year, but about 2,000 additional workers come in seasonally for the blueberry and cranberry harvests and for wreath-making and fish processing.

Vazquez, who also runs a nonprofit that helps immigrant farm workers, says she couldn’t have opened the child care charity without the business lab’s help. “It’s an experience that you have to learn from the providers that have been doing it for a long time,” Vazquez says. “You can’t learn it from a textbook. My experience at the business lab was critical in opening up the center.”

Not a Lot of Nonprofits

In some states, the resources for rural innovation simply aren’t available. The last national study of rural philanthropy, by economist John Pender in 2015, featured a county-by-county map, with yellow spots indicating a dearth of philanthropic support. It’s hard to find a state with as much yellow as Missouri — and not much has changed in the intervening years.

About a third of Missouri residents live in rural areas, and 18 percent of them live in poverty — a higher share than urban residents of the state. Yet of the more than $5.4 billion in philanthropic spending in Missouri from 2017 to 2022, only $21 million — less than one-half of 1 percent — went to rural areas, according to a study by Rural LISC.

Grant makers in the state realize they need to do more. Philanthropy Missouri focused on St. Louis for the first 50 years of its existence, but in 2021, the association of funders made a commitment to the entire state. The organization hired its first rural-based staff member, Amy Wescott, whose focus includes rural outreach.

“Missouri has not had a coordinated rural voice,” Wescott says. “That is something that we and some other partners in the state have been working on in the last couple of years.”

For the past two years, Philanthropy Missouri and the Community Foundation of the Ozarks have hosted a statewide Rural Philanthropy Summit.

An awkward moment in planning this year’s meeting shows that grant makers still have work to do to understand how services are delivered in small-town Missouri. Organizers reached out to Buffalo, Mo. (population 3,512), to try to coordinate charity site visits — the kind of thing philanthropy professionals often do when they gather. Hollie Elliott, executive director of the economic-development nonprofit in the county that includes Buffalo, paused when the request came in. No charities came to mind.

Philanthropy Missouri

Instead of a charity tour, Elliott took the visitors on a tour of Buffalo’s public spaces, including the pool, historic park, fairgrounds, and airport. She and other community leaders talked about how they’re trying to move from a scarcity mentality — pursuing any grants they can find — to a strategy of building on assets, including improving broadband access and water and wastewater infrastructure so that new businesses will consider moving to town.

“We’re a very giving community, but philanthropy is outside of the normal jargon,” Elliott says. “We don’t have a ton of nonprofits. You can’t just write a check to a nonprofit that administers the work. It’s generally a partnership through our schools or the city or a community-action agency or the YMCA.”

Applying for federal grants is also a nonstarter — the city and her organization have no dedicated grant writers, and even the mayor works only part-time.

“We know there are lots of federal dollars out there,” Elliott says, “but we don’t have the skill sets or capacity to apply for those.”

Slow-Moving Funds

That is the sad reality for many rural areas: While rural communities have a “significant opportunity” to compete for more than $450 billion in recently appropriated federal funds, according to a Brookings Institution analysis, few small towns are in a position to take advantage.

“There are a lot of barriers to accessing that funding from a rural perspective,” says Lichter, the Resource Rural director. “The federal programs can be quite complex and complicated, and you have limited staff in local governments and nonprofits that have experience.”

Resource Rural, a project of the Heartland Fund, was started in 2023 to address that exact problem. Resource Rural raises money from foundations and passes the funds along to “rurally rooted” regional organizations that help communities or rural charities with all aspects of the grant-seeking process — planning, applying, and implementation. Local First Arizona, one of the groups that Resource Rural supports, has spent $3 million since 2021 helping rural and tribal communities win $80 million in grants.

Resource Rural’s supporters include Ford, Robert Wood Johnson, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Yet the project has raised just $15 million toward its $75 million goal.

Heidi Binko, chief executive officer of the Just Transition Fund, the organization that helped the Wind River Development Fund win a big federal grant, says national foundations should work harder to support efforts like Resource Rural and her own fund.

“When all is said and done, I think we’ll question, ‘Did philanthropy do enough?’” Binko says. “I’m not so sure. Because what I’ve seen from national philanthropies is that if dollars have moved at all, they’ve moved slowly.”

The Ford Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.