Baseline Survey Findings & Next Steps
Service areas
- Generally speaking, the response pool was slightly weighted toward community foundations with rural and expansive (county-wide or multi-county) service areas.
- Of the 540 counties covered by the responding community foundations, 1990 ERS data designated 61% rural, 10% borderline and 29% metro.
- Respondents' self-designation of each county found 50% rural, 20% borderline, 9% metro and 21% were left undefined.
- Respondents described their community foundations as serving the following regions:
Service area vs. governance & donors
- The total response pool reported service areas that averaged about 39% rural, yet the percentage of rural board members and rural donors averaged 30% and 27% respectively—a 9 to 12% disparity.
- Service areas averaged about 39% borderline with a near average of 41% board members and donors from "borderline" communities.
- The total response pool reported service areas that averaged 21% metro, but with 28% of board members and 30% of donors representing metro communities—a 7 to 9% disparity.
Learning Network vs. non-Network
- Learning Network Members reported greater rural development philanthropy across all the elements—but most particularly in areas of community economic development grantmaking, non-dollar program work and board representation. These results suggest that Learning Network members know a lot about "what works" in developing rural CED grantmaking programs, convening and building capacity in rural communities and establishing rural governance structures. The Learning Network will tap into this knowledge and design ways of sharing what we know with other community foundations.
- Learning Network members reported levels of rural donors and overall grantmaking to be only slightly greater than non-network respondents. These results indicate that there may be a need for more strategies and innovative ways of identifying and working with rural donors and nonprofits. The Learning Network will identify community foundations that are succeeding in identifying rural donors and developing strong rural grantmaking programs and share these lessons and strategies with the field.
Majority or 100% rural community foundations
100% rural
- About 25% of respondents reported a 100% rural service area
- About 25% of respondents reported 100% rural board members
- Just over 10% of respondents reported 100% of Year 2000 donors were rural
- About 25% of respondents reported 100% of Year 2000 grants were made to rural communities
- About 25% of respondents reported 100% of their endowed funds serve rural communities
Majority rural
- About 40% of respondents reported majority of their service area is rural
- About 33% of respondents reported a majority of board members are rural
- About 33% of respondents reported majority of their Year 2000 donors were rural
- About 33% of respondents reported majority of Year 2000 grants were made to rural communities
- About 33% of respondents reported majority of endowed funds serve rural communities
Range of responses from majority or 100% rural
- Several patterns emerged among respondents that reported either a majority or 100% of an RDP element as rural:
1. A majority or 100% of rural donors or rural board members translates to a higher level of other RDP elements. 2. A majority or 100% rural service area does translate to consistently high levels of other RDP activities except of donors; in fact, respondents with a "majority" rural service area dipped far below other "majority" elements when it came to other RDP elements.
Endowed funds for rural communities
Learning Network members reported that on average, their rural service area was far greater than the percentage of endowed funds serving rural communities. On the other hand, non-members reported that on average, the percentage of endowed funds serving rural communities to be about equal to their rural service area. In both cases, the percentage of rural board members and rural donors each averaged considerably beneath average rural service area.
Further inquiry might help determine whether these endowed funds operate as discretionary, advised, designated or scholarship funds. In other words, we might ask: how does endowed philanthropy operate in rural communities? How many of these endowed funds are designated to one particular organization? Do any of these endowed funds allow for local people to make decisions about these endowed assets?
By exploring the way endowed philanthropy operates in rural communities, we may discover how and when the process of building and overseeing endowed assets actually helps to increase civic capacity and economic security in rural communities.
Percentage of RDP elements:
Average of total response pool
RDP elements |
Mostly |
Borderline |
Mostly |
N= |
 | ||||
|
21% |
39.2% |
39.8% |
211 |
 | ||||
|
28.5% |
41% |
30.5% |
218 |
| ||||
|
30.2% |
41.9% |
27.9% |
212 |
| ||||
|
26.7% |
38.6% |
34.7% |
187 |
| ||||
|
26.6% |
40.6% |
31.8% |
208 |
| ||||
|
27.2% |
41.1% |
31.7% |
201 |
| ||||
|
28.6% |
41.2% |
30.2% |
121 |
| ||||
|
29.2% |
41.2% |
29.6% |
124 |
| ||||
|
26.3% |
41.1% |
32.6% |
186 |
| ||||
Get background information on survey rationale and definitions.
Linking levels of RDP to
rural poverty and rural diversity
In a second phase of survey analysis, we took into account excellent suggestions from Network members about what you wanted to learn about rural development philanthropy in the United States. We also correlated survey results with recent Year 2000 census data concerning poverty, population and minority statistics. Consequently, we have re-calculated the initial results with the larger pool of respondents and have studied the data in ways that can help us better understand the relationship between philanthropic activity and rurality, poverty and diversity. While the details and updated analysis from the Baseline Survey will be presented on the RDP website soon and in its entirety, we are offering below a preview of some interesting insights gleaned thus far.
We hope that, by repeating the RDP Baseline Survey every several years, we can track both incremental and long-term change in the development of philanthropic vehicles and resources for rural communities.
RDP & rural poverty
We first researched the rurality of every county that responding foundations identified as part of their service regions. Rurality was measured using census and USDA data measuring county-by-county rurality. Having identified the rural counties covered by respondents, we then researched county-by-county poverty levels, based upon 1997 census data. Using this data, we were able to isolate the ten community foundations (from the entire response pool) that serve counties with the highest rural poverty rates—a rate of between 25.5 to 38%. In the same way, we were able to isolate the ten responding community foundations serving rural counties with the lowest poverty rates.
It is important to note that respondents were asked to consider their service based on rurality alone—not based on rurality and poverty (or diversity). So, we cannot say for sure that within a single community foundation's service territory, service to the poorest rural counties lags behind service to wealthier rural counties. Nevertheless, when we more broadly compared the activities of the group of community foundations serving the lowest poverty counties to the group of community foundations serving counties with the highest poverty levels, a clear pattern is revealed:
Community foundation respondents that serve counties with the highest rural poverty indicated that the levels of rural development philanthropy did not keep pace with the size of their rural service area nor with respondents serving counties with the lowest levels of rural poverty. While it is not at all surprising that the foundations serving rural counties with high poverty might not have many rural donors, board members, or even endowed funds, it is significant that these foundations indicated that the levels of rural grantmaking and program are also very low.
This could result from several causes. In deeply rural and poor regions, the nonprofit infrastructure may not exist to accept grants or to convene other non-grant program activities. Moreover, metro communities may be headquarters for regional nonprofits that serve surrounding rural areas, so while a grant might officially be awarded to a metro community, it benefits a rural community. Still, the startlingly lower percentages of rural activity among the respondents that serve high poverty counties suggests that the areas in greatest need may not be receiving the philanthropic attention of their metro and borderline rural/metro counterparts.
Conversely, the extremely high levels of rural development philanthropy by respondents that serve rural counties with the lowest poverty rates is also notable. Among these ten community foundations, the percentage of RDP elements averages over 70 percent across the board.
These results indicate that the presence of RDP activities are not related to rurality alone, but rather correspond to levels of rural poverty and wealth. When rural poverty is low, RDP activity not only comes close to matching the percentage of rural service area, it sometimes exceeds it! In general (and again, not surprisingly), community foundations in this group displayed the highest levels of rural service among the entire response pool.
Rural poverty: Community economic development
vs. rural endowment building
Among respondents serving rural counties with the highest levels of poverty, the activity elements (among those listed above on the charts) that averaged the most attention were numbers of grants and total grant dollars committed to community economic development, at 24 and 33% respectively. Considering the lack of attention rural communities have tended to receive when it comes to economic development of any kind and the need for effective community economic development as a response to persistent poverty, this may indicate a promising starting point for rural-focused community foundations serving poor regions.
What may not be surprising, but nevertheless deserves attention, is the subsequent column indicating an extremely low level of endowed resources committed to rural, high-poverty counties. Respondents serving the counties with the highest poverty reported much lower levels of "donors" and "endowments" for rural communities than for borderline or metro communities—even when a foundation's rural service area far exceeded its borderline and metro service areas.
One challenge for community foundations—it would appear—is to translate the positive CED grantmaking occurring in rural areas into donor relationships and permanent, endowed resources from which these communities can draw now and in the future. That is, community foundations must connect rural donors (or any donor, for that matter) with the potential and impact of rural community economic development. Developing strong programs is one thing. But telling the stories of these grants to donors who may become passionate about building permanent resources for rural communities is another thing altogether.
These results suggested to the RDP team at Aspen CSG that we add a session on connecting donors to rural grantmaking and program to our July Peer Exchange Workshop—Building Rural Livelihood—on rural program and grantmaking for community and economic development. And so we did! In this session, called Making the Rural CED Case to Donors & Funders a panel of community foundation leaders will discuss the methods they have used to engage a range of donors and private foundations in rural community economic development programs and grantmaking.
RDP & rural diversity
It would appear that rural is not the key challenge to rural development philanthropy—poverty is. And, according to our baseline survey, so is diversity. To develop the chart below, we again tracked the counties that each responding foundation claimed as part of their service region. From that set of counties, we matched census and USDA data measuring rurality and, this time, non-white population (which we have called diversity for this discussion) to each county. Again, we isolated the group of respondents serving rural counties with the least diversity and the respondents serving rural counties with the most diversity. Having gathered these two sets of respondents, we then compared rural service levels.
The levels of rural development philanthropy generated by foundations serving rural counties with lesser diversity proved considerably higher than that of foundations serving communities with greater diversity. In fact, across the board, community foundations with the most diverse rural populations indicated that the only element that matched (and in fact, slightly exceeded) the percentage of its service region that is rural was grant dollars awarded for community economic development (a 29.9% rural service area compared receiving 34% of rural CED grant dollars awarded).
Because both endowed funds and donors within the most diverse rural communities are so much lower than CED grant dollars awarded, one might guess that these dollars may likely have been generated by pass-through or special initiative funds, rather than from the communities themselves. In this analysis of extremes, it seems that the most diverse rural counties appear to be utilizing community foundations as a philanthropic vehicle to a lesser degree than their less diverse counterparts.
All graphs ©Community Strategies Group of The Aspen Institute. Reuse by permission only.
Rural Development Philanthropy Learning Learning Network
The Aspen Institute
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Suite 700Washington DC 20036
Ph. 202.736.5804Fx. 202.293.0525
rdpinfo@aspencsg.orgwww.aspencsg.org/rdp