A Georgia group is using some U.S. Department of Agriculture Housing Preservation Grant funding to help people stay in and better afford their homes, while also saving energy. It's one of more than 200 projects transforming rural housing, infrastructure and economic conditions with federal funds.
Groundswell is a nonprofit working to facilitate home repairs and lower energy costs, with a focus on clean energy. Its CEO, Michelle Moore, said helping people cut their energy bills is one path to achieving housing equity.
"In fact," she said, "in many rural counties, households with low and moderate incomes pay 20%, 30%, sometimes even 40% of their entire household income for their home electricity bill."
So far, Moore said, the USDA grants have allowed Groundswell to assist 25 households in Troup County, helping them with repairs from fixing drafty floors to plumbing upgrades. She said these investments align with a Biden administration executive order to advance racial equity and support underserved communities.
Moore noted that the challenges faced by rural communities extend beyond housing deficiencies. She said local organizations - from city and county governments to nonprofits - often lack the necessary resources and fair-housing policies to adequately serve the local residents.
"In the quality of housing, and in one neighborhood versus another, have their roots in segregation - policies like redlining and other systemically racist policies, practices, and programs that have deprived families of the ability to live in a healthy, safe, affordable home," she said.
Moore said Groundswell also offers to connect interested groups with other organizations with experience securing federal funds, to help even more people address the specific needs of rural communities.
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Later this month, on March 26, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that challenges the constitutionality of a federal fund that aids rural broadband service.
South Dakota advocates say a negative outcome could be devastating for customers.
A conservative organization brought the case, hoping to end a Federal Communications Commission fee that flows into what's known as the Universal Service Fund.
It provides $8 billion a year for telecommunications programs geared toward underserved populations. That includes high-speed internet service in rural areas.
Kara Semmler, general counsel and executive director of the South Dakota Telecommunications Association, said she worries about the impact if the challenge is successful.
"Children will be missing out on educational opportunities," said Semmler, "businesses will lose their competitiveness."
Industry groups say rates for customers, benefiting from the fund, will double if it's struck down.
The plaintiffs contend the fee mechanism used to prop up the fund is more like a tax, meaning Congress should have the oversight.
Semmler said shifting that power would result in funding uncertainty for an industry that relies on long-term planning.
Cellphone service providers and other telecom companies pay the fee that's at the center of the legal argument. Those costs are passed along to consumers across the country through their monthly bills.
Semmler said it's a small price to pay to maintain critical broadband infrastructure in rural pockets.
"It's that ongoing operation, maintenance, and affordability of the product," said Semmler. "It does no good to have infrastructure in the ground if it becomes unaffordable for South Dakota consumers to use."
Semmler said they've had productive conversations with South Dakota's Congressional delegation about "Plan B" strategies.
But she acknowledged the budget-cutting tone in Washington D.C. right now, while adding it would be hard for state government to fill any sudden funding gaps.
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By Anya Petrone Slepyan for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for North Carolina News Service Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration
In the 1930s, women employed by the Works Progress Administration rode pack horses through the mountains of eastern Kentucky, bringing books to rural residents in hard-to-reach places. Nearly a century later, Kirsten Crawford Turner is carrying on that tradition, with the help of a truck and a U-haul rather than a horse and saddle bags.
Turner grew up in Shelby, North Carolina in the Appalachian foothills, an area pummeled by Hurricane Helene in September 2024. Though she now lives in Greenville, South Carolina, she saw the extent of the damage the hurricane caused during frequent trips up the mountain to bring food and supplies to family members in the Asheville area.
"I saw all the devastation and I thought, 'what can I do?'" Turner said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. "I cannot operate heavy machinery. I cannot rebuild this whole area. What can I do that would be impactful and make a difference?"
As a military wife and mother of three, Turner has been through difficult seasons herself, and said that she always found solace in reading. She had also learned about the historic packhorse librarians from a number of books, including Kim Michele Richardson's The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. So she thought, why not take books to people like a modern-day packhorse librarian?
She began by asking friends and neighbors for gently used books that she could deliver on her trips up the mountain. The project grew quickly in the months following the hurricane.
"It started with one box of books on my porch," Turner said. "Now I have thousands of books [to give away] in my house."
Books for Burnsville
On November 2, 2024, Turner and her husband pulled into the parking lot of the West Burnsville Baptist Church in rural Yancey County, North Carolina. Along with a handful of volunteers, including Turner's parents, they started passing out thousands of books that had been donated from around the country.
More than 500 people attended the event, including Burnsville residents Jamie Black and her 10-year-old daughter Jenavieve, a voracious reader who had been anxiously awaiting the event for weeks. The family had been without power for a month, but Black had seen a post about the event on Facebook and thought it would help her daughter, who like other children in the area, had missed a significant amount of school.
"Books take you away on an adventure," Jenavieve said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. "It doesn't matter what's going on around you if you're reading a good book."
That's one of the ideas behind the 21st Century Packhorse Librarian project, according to Turner.
"I think [reading] gives people a respite from their own story, so they can really process and heal from their trauma more gently," Turner said.
More than 100 people in North Carolina were killed by Hurricane Helene, and the September storm caused a record-breaking $59.6 billion in damages, according to the state budget office. Over 5,000 homes will need to be rebuilt, with thousands of businesses damaged or closed as a result of the storm. North Carolina Governor Josh Stein is urging state legislators to increase recovery spending, even as President Trump, who visited North Carolina in late January, is enacting plans to dissolve the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Since October, Turner has organized events in nine communities in western North Carolina, and given away more than 9,000 books for free. The books are arranged by age group, and there is no limit to how many books people can take.
"I don't put a limit on it. Because say someone is taking four tote bags full of books - that person could have lost their whole house and all their books," Turner said.
Donations have poured in from across the country, Turner said, with people driving from as far as Texas and Ohio to deliver books. People can also donate books through Turner's Amazon wishlists, as well as by mail.
A number of children's authors associated with Christian publishing and media organizations such as Story Warren and Rabbit Room have donated books. Turner, who is Christian, has also made sure to keep high-quality, large-print bibles in stock.
Though she isn't able to read everything that comes through, she tries to curate her selections. She avoids books with sexually explicit content and references to the occult, and prioritizes books that she considers to be healing and uplifting, especially classic literature. Many of the books on her wishlists are the same as those distributed by the original packhorse librarians nearly a century earlier.
"There's a lot to say about the power of story in the classics," Turner said. "Bless those kids, they love Diary of a Wimpy Kid and I can't stand that book. I bring it for them, but I also try to get a good book in their hands as well."
Bearing Witness
According to its Facebook page, the primary mission of the 21st Century Packhorse Librarian project is to "distribute quality literature, free of charge, throughout the Blue Ridge Mountains, ensuring that individuals and families - especially in rural and remote areas - have access to great books."
But Turner has found that her role goes beyond handing out books to those who want them. She spends most of her time at each event talking to people, and hearing their stories. This is both rewarding and challenging, Turner said.
"I get to carry a little bit of their burdens for them, and hear how much bringing books means to them. But it's also a bit emotionally overwhelming at times, because we hear not only stories from the storm, but all sorts of things we wouldn't imagine we'd hear," she said.
Turner also uses her platform on Facebook to bring awareness to the destruction in communities she visits, posting pictures of places like Marshall, North Carolina, that were devastated by the storm. She says bearing witness to the communities' distress is part of her mission to keep attention on the ongoing recovery efforts.
"The rest of the world has moved on with their lives, and people aren't thinking about it anymore," Turner said. "I don't want anyone to feel forgotten."
Recovering from disasters like Helene takes years, but Turner is in it for the long haul.
"People keep asking me how long I plan to do this. And the answer is always 'as long as God wants me to," Turner said.
And though the project was born as a response to the hurricane, Turner feels the books she brings help address a deeper need in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
"The more I hear, the more I realize that these books aren't just disaster relief, they're life relief."
Anya Petrone Slepyan wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.
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By Ilana Newman for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Eric Galatas for Colorado News Connection for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration
One rural Colorado town is working to turn an irrigation ditch into a walking trail to connect the community, get people outside, and grow their recreation economy.
In 2022, Monte Vista, Colorado received a Recreation Economies for Rural Communities (RERC) grant, which helped the city strategize to revitalize main streets and grow their outdoor recreation economy. What’s now known as the Lariat Ditch Project came out of the RERC planning process.
The city of Monte Vista, population 4,070, sits in the middle of the San Luis Valley, a high elevation valley known for agriculture and access to some of the tallest mountains in the state. The region is known for their potato production, as well as growing barley, hay and alfalfa, according to their city manager, Gigi Dennis.
Dennis saw developing the local economy through tourism and recreation as a way to support agriculture and get people to “think about Monte Vista in a different light.” She wants people to think of the city as an active, enjoyable place to visit and not just an agricultural community.
Local nonprofit organization San Luis Valley Great Outdoors (SLV GO!) applied for and received the RERC grant on the city of Monte Vista’s behalf in 2022 and has since been involved with creating the plan to develop more of a recreation economy in the area. Mick Daniel, executive director of SLV GO!, said they saw a lot of potential for Monte Vista to benefit from more planning around outdoor recreation.
“We were sitting in the middle of like 8 million acres of public land….it kind of felt like there just wasn’t a lot of coordination between our public land managers, our communities, our recreationists,” Daniel said. The planning grant created an opportunity for all of those disparate groups to come together and create a cohesive strategy for the future of the city.
RERC is a program in partnership with the EPAs Office of Community Revitalization, the Forest Service, the USDA, the Northern Border Regional Commission, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and the Denali Commission.
It provides planning assistance for rural communities to grow their recreation economies. This can look like Main Street revitalization to support bringing visitors into the community, building infrastructure like trails, or creating community consensus on how to attract visitors and manage natural resources.
The Lariat Ditch Project takes a two mile stretch of open irrigation ditch that Daniel said is often filled with trash, pipes it, and places a trail on top.
In conversations with the ditch company, Monte Vista city planner Dwayne Enderle said “they were more than happy to look at placing the ditch into a concrete culvert and placing the walkway on top”. Especially because, according to Daniel, the company was experiencing a huge loss in water due to “seeping through the walls of the ditch”.
The trail would connect main street businesses in Monte Vista to their homes and other recreation opportunities around the area, including passing a half mile from the recently renovated Sky Hi Complex, a conference and event center that hosts Colorado’s oldest professional rodeo.
“What if we can connect this community to these valuable recreation resources? Maybe we don’t think about them as outdoor recreation, but a rodeo pretty much is outdoor rec,” said Daniel. The ditch also passes near downtown, the high school, the golf course, tennis courts, and through several neighborhoods.
The idea to build a trail along or on top of the ditch has been floating around the community for over a decade, Daniel said. But funding has, and continues to be, a challenge. The city of Monte Vista applied for a grant through the University of Colorado in 2024 to fund the project, but as of early January 2025, Dennis said that they have not yet been awarded any funding.
“It’s a $12 million project, which is phenomenal for Monte Vista because my general fund tax base is only about four and a half million dollars…It will be hard to fulfill if we don’t get the grant funding.” Dennis said.
Building trails to connect communities to the outdoors is something that SLV GO! is doing around the region. The Lariat Ditch trail would become a part of the “Heart of the Valley”, a system of trails that will connect the communities of the San Luis Valley to each other and to the public land that surrounds the area.
“You could potentially get on a bike or an e-bike and ride to the BLM or the Forest Service or ride over to dinner in Del Norte or lunch in Del Norte and maybe ride back,” said Daniel.
While these trail systems might also add appeal to tourists visiting the towns, for Daniel, developing the region’s recreation economy looks mostly like appealing to locals, not visitors.
Other towns in the valley, like South Fork, close to Wolf Creek Ski Area and located on the Rio Grande river, and Alamosa, the larger town closer to Great Sand Dunes National Park, see more tourism than Monte Vista. But Daniel knows that small business owners in Monte Vista would also love to see more visitors.
“I think by making it more livable for the people who live there, tourism will be a very pleasant side effect, not a bad side effect. The great thing about tourists is that they go home. They spend money, they go home,” he said.
Ilana Newman wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.
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