WP 08-01: Access to Social Services in Rural America: The Geography of the Safety Net in the Rural West
Scott W. Allard and Jessica Cigna
June 2008

This paper investigates social service provision in two high poverty rural regions in the American West by using unique survey data of social service agencies in California, Oregon, and New Mexico to answer several important policy research questions: What types of assistance are readily available to the rural poor? How are programs in rural areas funded? How stable is program funding and service provision? We provide an accurate snapshot of social service provision in two very different rural regions: the mountainous border counties of Oregon and California, and the oil and cattle country of Southeast New Mexico. Despite differences in regional economies and population demographics, we find social service provision to be quite similar across these two regions. Most towns have access to few social service agencies, particularly few nonprofit agencies. When looking at the clustering of service providers across these rural regions, we find poor persons in high poverty areas near town centers to have greater access to services than poor persons in outlying areas. Reflecting the diversity of rural communities, however, these patterns of access vary from one rural region to another. In addition, we find many governmental and nonprofit agencies to have experienced funding cuts in recent years that have forced serious reductions in service provision. Not only are rural safety nets for the poor inconsistently matched to need, therefore, but they appear to be less stable and predictable than we might otherwise assume. Such findings should inform future research exploring place, poverty, and the safety net in rural areas.

WP 07-02: Assessing Community Capacity in Rural America: Some Lessons from Two Rural Observatories
Alex Marre and Bruce Weber
August 2007

Building community capacity is a central concern of both policymakers and community residents. Both want to understand why some communities are more successful in achieving positive social, economic and environmental outcomes, and how to increase the capacity of communities to achieve these outcomes. This is particularly true in communities that face the most difficult economic challenges: central cities of large metropolitan areas and remote rural communities. Most attempts to define, assess and build community capacity, however, have been undertaken in urban neighborhoods. While there is much to learn from these studies of urban places, there are distinctive characteristics and dynamics of rural communities that introduce unique challenges to the assessment and building of community capacity.

WP 07-01: Participation and Employment Dynamics of Child Care Subsidy Users in Rural and Urban Oregon
Elizabeth E. Davis, Deana Grobe, and Roberta B. Weber February 2007

Differences in the local economies and poverty rates of rural areas suggest that there would be rural-urban differences in the use of public programs such as child care subsidies and food stamps that are designed to support working low-income families. This study analyzes employment and program participation dynamics for rural and urban families in the Oregon child care subsidy program. Demographic characteristics, employment stability, and participation in work support programs were fairly similar for families across county types. Despite higher county poverty rates and higher overall unemployment rates, families in noncore counties had slightly fewer months of child care subsidy use, food stamps and TANF compared to those in metropolitan and micropolitan counties.