Monday Mailing - December 7, 2020

RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 12

07 December 2020 1.

Quote of the Week: 2.

“It is December, and nobody asked if I was ready.”

- Sarah Kay

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Oregon Fast Fact Bly, Oregon is the only place in the continental US where Americans were killed by enemy action during WWII. A Japanese balloon bomb – an experimental weapon - killed a pastor’s wife and 5 kids.

More info.

Building Resilient Rural Places: Strategies from Local Leaders to Strengthen Rural Assets, Diversity, and Dynamism (Alison Smith & Bree Cubrilovic) Science, Interrupted: Oregon Research Threatened in a Pandemic World (Katie McFall) Tug of Water: Plan Restores Flows to Upper Deschutes But May Fall Short for Threatened Species Guest Column: Oregon’s Virus Message Misses Mark (Lydia Ivanovic) COVID Shifts What We’re Buying (Alison Smith) Sunriver is Oregon’s Most Desired “Zoom Town” In Rural Washington, a Small County Gets Ahead of the Curve for Vaccination Planning A Helpline Connects Indigenous Immigrants to Crucial COVID-19 Information 5 Communication Best Practices for Remote Teams PODCAST: Out West: Reintroducing Natural Fire in Western States VIDEO: The Rural Edge: Wilson, North Carolina

Building Resilient Rural Places: Strategies from Local Leaders to Strengthen Rural Assets, Diversity, and Dynamism The Brookings Institute The 2016 and 2020 presidential elections ushered in new waves of national attention to rural America—and along with them came a flurry of misconceptions about rural places and the people living in them. The dominant narrative from pundits, journalists, and policymakers twists and turns depending on who’s telling it, but can typically be boiled down to: Rural America is white, dependent on traditional industries, and characterized by stagnation, decline, and despair.

These characterizations are not just inaccurate—they actively obscure effective solutions for rural economic and community development and the local efforts underway to implement them. While rural communities face severe and systemic barriers to economic opportunity, rural America is not RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 1 of 6

a monolith. Rural and small towns vary across regions, are characterized by a growing number of people of color, diverse local economies, and undervalued assets. Moreover, rural places are not destined for despair or abandonment. For decades, local leaders have been implementing locally tailored economic development strategies that value and build upon place-based assets, and have garnered real successes in fostering recreation, amenity-based, and service economies that support rural places of opportunity.

Read the full story.

2. Science, Interrupted: Oregon Research Threatened in a Pandemic World

Oregon Public Broadcasting During the early days of the pandemic, whether or not you had a backbone could have been the difference between life and death. At least if you were a lab animal. “(Oregon State University) would let you take care of fish during the shutdown, but invertebrates were not considered to be, I guess, important enough,” said OSU ecotoxicologist Susanne Brander.

She studies how microplastics and chemical pollutants affect sea life – including the lowly spineless mysid shrimp that plays a big role in the ocean food web.

Not being able to access her lab was a big problem, so she had to come up with a solution on the fly.

Read the full story.

3. Tug of Water: Plan Restores Flows to Upper Deschutes But May Fall Short for Threatened Species Oregon Public Broadcasting The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is set to decide on a plan to conserve habitat for threatened species in Central Oregon’s Deschutes Basin. It will mark the end of a yearslong debate over how to allocate a limited resource to meet the needs of fish, frogs, farmers and all others who use water.

Humans have tinkered with Central Oregon rivers over the years to meet the water demands of a growing region, ravaging habitat for threatened wildlife in the process.

“Our native fish and amphibians have been hurt quite a bit by how we manage the river,” said Tod Heisler, who directs the rivers program for Central Oregon LandWatch.

“Essentially we’re managing that Upper [Deschutes] River like an irrigation ditch, not managing it as an aquatic ecosystem.”

If approved, the plan would set in motion a 30-year itinerary to move the basin’s waterways — including the Upper Deschutes and Crooked rivers — back toward their natural state by

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restoring flows. In short, it means more water for frogs and fish in the winter and, ultimately, less for irrigators in the summer.

Water managers say this lays a foundation for long-term projects to better share water across the basin while also conserving critical habitat.

Read the full story.

4. Guest Column: Oregon’s Virus Message Misses Mark The Daily Astorian As Gov. Kate Brown announced her latest COVID-19 restrictions on businesses and social gatherings, one of the state’s top doctors offered this advice: Learn how to cook your grandmother’s stuffing recipe through using Zoom instead of looking over her shoulder.

It was a rare moment of humanity, underscoring how Thanksgiving 2020 will be very different so Oregon can thwart the spread of the coronavirus.

COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have shot up recently. In response, Brown ordered Oregonians — at least until Dec. 2 — to stay away from gyms and fitness centers, only patronize eateries though takeout or delivery, up their usage of face coverings, gather with only a handful of other folks at Thanksgiving, and more. The governor slightly tempered those restrictions by subsequently offering $55 million in aid for hard-hit businesses.

But Oregonians can handle only so many reiterations of, “We’re all in this together,” “I know Oregonians already have made tremendous sacrifices,” “The virus sets the timeline” and “Masks save lives” before those statements lose their impact. Oregonians passed that point months ago.

Read the full story.

5. COVID Shifts What We’re Buying Oregon Office of Economic Analysis OK, this was fun. Willamette Week is out today with a set of articles highlighting some of the sectors of the economy that are doing quite well this year, despite the pandemic and recession. My hat’s off the Aaron Mesh and company for their ability to turn my spreadsheet of figures into coherent, local stories. But in general, I appreciated the request about which sectors are doing well because it allowed me to clarify my thoughts and better think through some of the changes we have seen so far this year. Last month we posted a chart showing industries that have seen job growth this year and noted a lot of them are related to e-commerce and the housing market. We fleshed out the discussion a bit further in our latest forecast document, but today I wanted to really dive into the figures a bit.

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First, the main reason consumer spending has held up relatively well this year is the fact that incomes have. In fact incomes for the majority of households are flat, or up, allowing us to continue to buy things. The top line in the chart below shows total income across the country (we get 2020q3 Oregon data in a couple weeks). The main reason it is higher is due to the one-time recovery rebates back in the spring, plus the expanded unemployment insurance benefits. However even if we exclude the federal support, incomes in October were essentially back to where they were prior to the pandemic (-0.17%). Total consumer spending has rebounded accordingly. The fact that spending is still a bit weaker than incomes, means household savings is growing. Latest figures indicate Americans have saved nearly $1.5 trillion extra so far this year. That savings is literally just sitting in bank accounts at the moment and will be a key source growth next year, when the pandemic wanes.

Read the full story.

6. Sunriver is Oregon’s Most Desired “Zoom Town” Willamette Week Parvaneh Kalantari usually finds Sunriver relaxing. She enjoys the Central Oregon resort town so much, she hoped to buy a second home there—a place to escape her job as a Portland real estate broker.

But it's hard to find solitude in Sunriver now. For the past two weeks, Kalantari, 36, has been shopping in the middle of a vacation home-buying frenzy.

"There is not one single listing under 650 in Sunriver right now," she says. "It's the perfect storm of historically low interest rates plus zero inventory, and people that are going a little stir-crazy in the Portland metro area. When something pops up, it grabs everyone in the market who's looking. Which is me, unfortunately."

Read the full story.

7. In Rural Washington, a Small County Gets Ahead of the Curve for Vaccination Planning Daily Yonder When it comes to administering Covid-19 vaccine to frontline healthcare workers and long-term-care facility residents, a small county on the Canadian border in eastern Washington may have an advantage.

Earlier this year, the Ferry County Health system, with headquarters in Republic, Washington, constructed two outbuildings for Covid-19 testing and vaccinations. Then they purchased specialized freezers that can reach temperatures as low as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit – the storage temperature for one of the vaccines on track for federal approval.

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“We were one of the rare ones who got that freezer,” said Aaron Edwards, CEO of Ferry County Health. “We were watching the media about who looked like they were going to come through with the vaccine and made an educated guess that it would be Pfizer, so we went ahead and ordered one. … Being this remote, we thought we had to have one.”

Read the full story.

8. A Helpline Connects Indigenous Immigrants to Crucial COVID-19 Information High Country News In mid-June, the rural coastal towns in Lincoln County, Oregon, experienced a COVID-19 outbreak. In a week, the county’s cases went from five to at least 124, all of them linked to a seafood-processing warehouse in Newport. It quickly became Oregon’s second-largest outbreak since the pandemic began.

Employees at the Lincoln County Public Health Department began contact tracing: They called workers, asking about their symptoms, where they had been and who they had seen, and asked them to quarantine.

“What we found when we were calling to do our contact tracing was that either most of them were Hispanic and spoke Spanish, or didn’t speak Spanish or English,” said Susan Trachsel, a public information officer with the Health Department. Instead, they spoke Indigenous Mayan languages, primarily Mam, but the county lacked the necessary translators. No information about COVID-19 had been relayed in that language.

Read the full story.

9. 5 Communication Best Practices for Remote Teams Know Your Team An endless barrage of Zoom meetings. Non-stop Slack pings. This is your new normal, and it feels bleak. You think to yourself: “Communication best practices for remote teams must exist…right?”

You’re having a hard time imagining the way you’re communicating remotely right now is the way you want to continue to communicate at work. You’re drained working remotely, more than you were when you were working in-person – and your team is too.

As we dig our heels into remote work for the foreseeable future, naturally, we ask ourselves: Is there a better way for working remotely? What are the exact communication best practices for remote teams?

Read the full story.

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10. PODCAST – Out West: Reintroducing Natural Fire in Western States Western Governors’ Association Reintroducing Natural Fire in Western Landscapes, the latest episode of WGA’s Out West podcast, highlights the benefits of utilizing prescribed fire, managed fire, and cultural burning.

Bill Whitacre, WGA Senior Policy Advisor, leads a conversation about the ways that fire can be used to restore western lands, as well as barriers to its expanded use. He speaks with Ron Goode, Tribal Leader of the North Fork Mono; Lenya Quinn-Davidson, Director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council; and Laura McCarthy, the New Mexico State Forester.

Listen to the full story.

11. VIDEO – The Rural Edge: Wilson, North Carolina Center on Rural Innovation 40 miles east of Raleigh sits rural Wilson, North Carolina, a burgeoning town of 50,000 that’s carving a clear path into this century’s economy.

For decades, Wilson was an agricultural powerhouse, and as the economy grew more industrialized, Wilson followed, growing a diversified manufacturing economy in cutting edge industries and embracing the boom of the nearby Research Triangle. It was even one of the first cities in America to have an electrical grid.

As the turn of this century hit, local leaders recognized that they needed the new infrastructure required to fully support the community in a rapidly changing economy: high-speed broadband. In 2007, the city of Wilson began building Greenlight Community Broadband, an effort that brought fiber-to-the-home to every resident and business in the city.

Greenlight was one of the first municipal networks of its kind, and it has become a model for small towns seeking to build future-proof infrastructure needed for modern life and work. Wilson is already seeing the payoff of that work, as the town is growing a dynamic digital and entrepreneurial ecosystem that sustainably supports its people and place.

Watch the full story.

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