The emerging fight in Washington over how to define “rural” for some federal programs is distracting us from the real issue: Federal support of our rural communities is inadequate, ineffective and needs to change. (The Yonder has printed commentary on proposed changes in rural definitions here, here and here.)

I have spent nearly 30 years working on rural and frontier definitions, responding to Federal Register rule-making, executive and congressional initiatives. I’ve worked at all levels professionally to personally – from the White House to my extremely under-resourced home community of 300 in frontier New Mexico.

Government keeps us so tied up in the busy work of defining who’s in and out of rural programs there is never time to get to the heart of definition madness. It’s time to demand to know why we are spending our time defining rural, and why we are doing it now.

The economic collapse and so-called “austerity” have left rural America reeling. Everybody and his brother have conducted studies and reported the tragic, intentional, immoral rural poverty data ad nauseum.

Everyone needs help, including urban and exurban America. The whole country is being neglected and destroyed by “austerity” cuts. But, since my expertise is the 85% of the country’s land area that is not urban, I am going to stick to what I know.

HAC Rural Research Note: Poverty in Rural AmericaMap shows counties with poverty rates of 20% or more in every decennial census since 1990.

EDITOR’S NOTE: How will rural America fare under the Affordable Care Act? That’s one issue the National Rural Assembly will tackle next week in Bethesda, Maryland. Steph Larsen with the Center for Rural Affairs will help lead two sessions on “Obamacare” and rural America. Here she answers some of the questions she’s hearing about the health-care reform.

Steph LarsenIf you were to look in my email inbox, one thing is clear – rural Americans, like the rest of the country, are confused about the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare or the ACA. I’m happy people are asking me about the health care law, frankly, because that means they aren’t just believing the latest rumor they heard from their mother’s hairdresser’s cousin.

So here’s a place to start – some answers to common questions about what the Affordable Care Act means for rural communities.

What parts of the Affordable Care Act are likely to be easiest (and most problematic) for rural communities?

The easiest provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for rural people will be the ones that happen automatically. For example, keeping a child on your health insurance until they turn 26 or free preventative services will happen without consumers doing anything. When the ACA passed, I received a letter from my insurance company detailing changes to my policy. They were all good things, and each one was mandated by the ACA. I didn’t have to do anything.

Buying insurance has never been easy, but there’s one piece that won’t be a problem for anyone – no one will get a rejection notice. No matter who you are, where you live or what your past health problems have been, if you want to buy health insurance, no one will be turned away. And you will pay exactly what everyone else of your same age, tobacco use, family size and location pays. In other words, you won’t pay more regardless of your health. Just like those sketchy commercials you see on daytime TV claiming “no health questions” – except this is real.

Foundation grants to some of the nation’s most highly regarded rural community development corporations grew significantly in the years following a U.S. senator’s 2006 call for the nation’s philanthropies to do a better job in rural America.

But by 2011 those gains in funding had largely disappeared.

Shawn PoynterRick Cohen addresses the National Rural Assembly in 2008. He'll give a presentation on trends in rural philanthropy at the 2013 Assembly in Bethesda, Maryland, next week.Reporting in Nonprofit Quarterly last week, Rick Cohen (also a contributor to the Daily Yonder) says private foundation grants to key rural community development organizations grew only slightly in the five-year period starting in 2006. That’s the year Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana) challenged the nation’s charitable foundations to double their gifts to rural projects within five years.

Cohen will present these findings and the results of a larger study on rural grantmaking at a plenary session of the National Rural Assembly on June 25 in Bethesda, Maryland. 

In his Nonprofit Quarterly report, Cohen looked at grants to organizations in the rural program of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (Rural LISC) and the NeighborWorks Rural Initiative. These networks include 58 and 80 community development corporations (CDCs) respectively. They work on a variety of community development projects in rural communities including housing and business development.