Poverty and Human Services

Much progress has been made since the President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty issued The People Left Behind in 1967. However, over 7 million people still live in poverty in rural areas, and poverty is deep and persistent in several regions of our nation. While poverty is not just a rural phenomenon, remote and persistently poor rural counties bear a disproportionate share of our nation’s poverty burden.

Poverty rates are higher and more persistent in nonmetropolitan than in metropolitan areas. Along a continuum of the most urban county to the most rural county, poverty rates are highest in the most remote rural areas. High poverty and persistent poverty counties are disproportionately rural as well. Of the 386 persistent poverty counties, 88 percent of them are rural. And they are geographically concentrated - in Appalachia, the southeast and Mississippi Delta, the Rio Grande Valley, and Indian Reservations in the Great Plains and Southwest.

Many factors contribute to the high levels and persistence of poverty in rural areas. Factors such as the loss of young, highly educated workers, economic structures that include limited opportunities or low wage occupations vulnerabilities to business cycles, as well as unique characteristics of rural places all contribute to the challenges of alleviating rural poverty.

The Rural Poverty Research Center

The Rural Poverty Research Center was founded in 2002 with a three-year grant from the US Department of Health & Human Services' Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning & Evaluation. The mission of the RPRC is to examine both the causes and consequences of poverty in rural areas and the factors affecting the success of policies to improve the self sufficiency and well-being of low income workers and families in rural America.

www.rprconline.org

Rural Human Services Initiatives

Poverty alleviation and the corresponding social services delivery processes, also plays out differently in rural communities and faces different challenges, and opportunities, than in urban core cities and neighboring suburbs. RUPRI’s ongoing practice, policy and research work in poverty alleviation and human and social service delivery provisions builds upon many years of our research and understanding in this field.

Rural Human Services Initiative