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Monday Mailing

Year 21 • Issue 42 13 July 2015 1. Rural Gets Less Foundation Money 2. Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?

3. Online Tool Helps Find Opportunities for Bike/Pedestrian Project Funding 4. Free Webinar - Building Resiliency in Your Economy 5. Connecting Youth and Strengthening Communities: The Data Behind Civic Engagement and Economic Opportunity 6. The Transportation Choices That Millennials Want 7. 18 Reasons America Should Adopt a Per-Mile Driving Fee 8. Affordable Housing, Always 9. Passive House: A Road Map for Radically Reducing Energy Consumption 10. Big Food Is Trying to Dupe You into Loving Industrial Agriculture 11. These Are the First Full-Color HD Videos of Earth from the International Space Station 1. Rural Gets Less Foundation Money Whichever way you slice it, rural communities aren’t getting a proportionate share of foundation grants compared to the relative size of the rural population, a new report says.

Researchers found that rural communities, which accounted for 19 percent of U.S. population in 2010, received only about 6 to 7 percent of foundation grants awarded from 2005 to 2010.

Quote of the Week: “Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.” ~John Ray

Oregon Fast Fact: The world's oldest shoes, 9,000-year-old sandals made of sagebrush and bark, were found at Fort Rock Cave in central Oregon in 1938.

The federal study also found that over the same time period, grants from large foundations to organizations based in rural areas came to about $88 per capita. Organizations in metropolitan areas received foundation support at twice that per capita rate, the report said.

“This suggests an urban focus in foundation grants,” writes John L. Pender in a study conducted for the USDA Economic Research Service.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?

Annie Lowrey writes in the Times Magazine this week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky., which by several measures is the hardest place in America to live.

The Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.

To access the full story, click here.

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3. Online Tool Helps Find Opportunities for Bike/Pedestrian Project Funding A new tool from Advocacy Advance makes it easier to identify the federal transportation programs that could be used to pay for many types of walking and bicycling programs. The tool also provides helpful information about each type of federal transportation funding source available for biking and walking projects, including what it is, how much funding is available, and who to approach for more information.

To access the tool, click here.

4. Free Webinar - Building Resiliency in Your Economy Wednesday, July 22 | 1:30-3:00 p.m. ET Join IEDC July 22 from 1:30-3:00 ET for this free informative webinar on Building Resiliency in Your Economy. Everyone's talking about resiliency. What does it mean for your community? EDOs are often unexpectedly called to action when there's a manmade or natural event that suddenly disrupts the economy. Whether you're considering the results of a major plant closure or a flooded downtown, often times the results can be the same. In such instances economic developers find that much of the hard work that was contributed to grow local economies can be quickly reversed and take years to rebuild. With so much at stake, it's vitally important to build capacity and resilience measures into your plans. Register for this free webinar today!

5. Connecting Youth and Strengthening Communities: The Data Behind Civic Engagement and Economic Opportunity The Center of Rural Entrepreneurship is partnering with the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group to advance community development philanthropy. Together they are developing a comprehensive collection of resources and stories to help place-based foundations embrace or strengthen the practice of Community Development Philanthropy. Learn more about their partnership here. Learn more about our CDP resources here.

To access the full publication, click here.

6. The Transportation Choices That Millennials Want With no long-term solution in place -- or even in sight -- for the sputtering federal Highway Trust Fund, state and local governments are significantly increasing their own transportation spending.

This shift is giving more control to local governments and allowing them to explore alternate transportation modes, not only as a means of reducing traffic congestion but also as a way to attract younger professionals who don't see the automobile as the only choice for mobility.

The challenge will be to spend transportation dollars more wisely than ever before. That's the focus of a recent Deloitte University Press report that lays out strategic transportation solutions that governments can adopt. The report's central concept: By supporting alternative approaches such as car-, ride- and bike-sharing, jurisdictions can greatly improve mobility for residents without the need to spend billions of dollars on new roads, bridges and tunnels.

To access the full story, click here.

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7. 18 Reasons America Should Adopt a Per-Mile Driving Fee Oregon’s much-anticipated per-mile driving fee, called OReGO, launches today. Instead of paying the normal gas tax embedded in the price of fuel, OReGO drivers will pay 1.5 cents for every mile on the road. The initial public rollout is limited to 5,000 vehicles, but the implications of the program are vast: if all goes well, state and federal leaders might have an answer to the transportation funding crisis that’s hampered American infrastructure for years.

Here’s 18 reasons the whole country should give per-mile fees a chance.

1. The Highway Trust Fund keeps running out of money The federal Highway Trust Fund that pays for America’s roads (and to a lesser extent rails) is expected to run out of money at the end of July. We’ve seen this movie before, so we know that Congress will find a way to keep the fund afloat—even if that involves the legally dubious maneuver of transferring money from the general taxpayer treasury. But the past trends and future projections of the Highway Trust Fund make clear that it’s a badly bent spending model that’s routinely on the cusp of badly breaking.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Affordable Housing, Always AUSTIN, Tex.—Not long ago, inner cities were riddled with crime and blight and affluent white residents high-tailed it to the suburbs, seeking better schools, safer streets, and, in some cases, fewer minority neighbors.

But today, as affluent white residents return to center cities, people who have lived there for years are finding they can’t afford to stay.

Take the case of the capital city of Texas, where parts of East Austin, right next to downtown, are in the process of becoming whiter, and hip restaurants, coffee shops, and even a bar catering to bicyclists are opening. Much of Austin’s minority population, meanwhile, is priced out, and so they’re moving to far-out suburbs such as Pflugerville and Round Rock, where rents are affordable and commutes are long.

“It’s a very bitter pill to swallow for families to be priced out as it becomes a desirable neighborhood,” Mark Rogers, the executive director of the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation (GNDC), told me.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Passive House: A Road Map for Radically Reducing Energy Consumption This winter was one of the coldest on record in New York City, and many property owners saw major spikes in their energy bills. However, thanks to passive house technology and a glazed glass south-facing façade, the occupants of a recently retrofitted townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn, were able to leave the heat off even when temperatures outside fell below zero. According to the architect, the building’s cooling and heating systems consumed less than a fifth of the energy needed to keep neighboring townhouses at a comfortable temperature.

The project’s designer, a firm called Build with Prospect, bills itself as the first worker cooperative in New York City’s construction industry. Build with Prospect also is one of the first firms in the city to start doing passive house retrofits. And although construction costs for a Build with Prospect retrofit Page 3 of 4

range from 4 to 7% more than conventional construction, the energy savings are so significant that a building can start yielding paybacks within as little as four years.

“The nice thing about a passive house is that the results are verifiable,” Build with Prospect architect Nate Priputen says, noting that the energy-efficiency standard, which was developed in Germany in the early 1990s, is a holistic system based upon strict measurements of total energy usage and air circulation. In contrast, the US Green Building Council’s LEED checklist system awards points for various other environmental benchmarks in addition to energy efficiency.

To access the full story, click here.

10. Big Food Is Trying to Dupe You into Loving Industrial Agriculture Moms campaigning to raise awareness of pesticide use in industrial agriculture are elitist control freaks; organic farming uses dangerous chemicals too. And those antibiotic-resistant superbugs you’ve been hearing about on factory farms? Don’t worry, the livestock industry has it all under control.

Those are just some of the demonstrably outrageous messages that have been cropping up across the media landscape in relation to the ongoing cultural conversation about the food we eat, how it's raised, and the effects it has on our health and the health of our environment. As more consumers than ever become aware of the staggering social and ecological costs associated with industrial-scale agriculture, they’ve increasingly been turning to things like organic and locally grown food. Guess who’s none too happy about that?

To access the full story, click here.

11. These Are the First Full-Color HD Videos of Earth from the International Space Station Dan Lopez pulled his iPhone out of his pocket to show me a series of texts. Each was a satellite picture of a particular farm in Syria, optimized to show a kind of heat map—where food is growing, and where food is burning. That is, his phone gets automatic updates on the state of a food crisis half a world away.

Lopez is a technologist at Urthecast, and his phone captures the promise of the satellite imagery company, which operates two cameras on the International Space Station that cost $35 million to develop. Today, it unveiled the first full-color video of earth taken from space. (Top-secret spy satellites have presumably had this capability for a while, but this is the first available to us regular folk.)

The videos show three cities at a resolution that makes anything bigger than a meter visible; we recommend watching them in high-definition and full-screen.

To access the full story, click here.

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