For more than 40 years, Aspen CSG has worked alongside rural communities and Native nations on what holds regional prosperity back: funding that doesn’t fit rural conditions, thin health infrastructure, and barriers tied to place, race, and class. What follows are specific examples of resources that help close those gaps, sorted into four areas:
- Funding strategies and financial support
- Health and wellness initiatives
- Cross-sector collaboration for economic development
- Local wealth creation
Funding Resources for Rural Communities
Rural organizations most often run into funding that’s short-term, restricted to specific projects, and designed without rural conditions in mind. In Funding Rural Futures: A Call to Action, Aspen CSG worked with the Partners for Rural Transformation coalition to identify what more flexible, trust-based grantmaking would require in practice.
The report points to two concrete examples of what this can look like in practice:
- The Imperial Valley Wellness Foundation (IVWF) in Imperial County, California, which operates as a Rural Development Hub in its own right. In addition to directing money in from outside, it functions as a funder embedded in the region it serves. Aspen CSG profiled this model in Building Funder Capacity to Work with Communities: A Rural Environmental Justice Case Study.
- The US Economic Development Administration’s Distressed Area Recompete Pilot Program, authorized under the CHIPS and Science Act, is cited in the report as an example of federal funding built with rural conditions in mind. EDA awarded $184 million to six distressed communities in August 2024 — half of them rural — and wrote about how the program was designed with rural eligibility barriers in mind.
Health and Wellness Resources
In May 2024, Aspen CSG released Collaborative Strategies for Rural Health and Economic Prosperity, synthesizing input from 29 rural and Indigenous practitioners across public health, economic development, and racial and environmental justice. The report lays out three principles: rural health and economic development should share common goals, their funding and evaluation systems should be aligned rather than run in parallel, and implementation should be led locally.
Aspen CSG also partnered with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to build the Thrive Rural Health Framework. It’s the practical follow-through on the report’s alignment argument above: a tool regions can use to identify their own health assets and track progress against them, rather than just a set of principles for why that alignment matters.
Economic Development Resources
The Rural Opportunity and Development series brought Aspen CSG together with the Housing Assistance Council, the International Economic Development Council, the Rural Community Assistance Partnership, Rural LISC, and the Federal Reserve Board over several years of joint programming.
At the culminating ROADs event in June 2024, practitioners shared what non-traditional collaboration looks like across local, regional, and national levels. Speakers included Brett Doney of the Great Falls Development Authority and Ann Lichter of the Rural Innovation Initiative (affiliations as of 2024).
Wealth-Building Resources
WealthWorks is a community-centered approach to economic development, co-created by practitioners rather than developed as a theory-first approach. It underpins the Local Theory of Change in Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework, starting from what communities already have in people, places, and local businesses, rather than from what they lack.
More From Aspen CSG
These examples are a starting point, not the full list. Aspen CSG’s Rural Development Hub directory profiles dozens of organizations doing this work region by region, and the blog and reports library covers each of these topics in more depth.
Frequently Asked Questions
The most effective resources for rural communities tend to fall into four categories: flexible funding designed around rural conditions, health and wellness infrastructure, cross-sector economic development partnerships, and local wealth-building approaches like WealthWorks. Rural Development Hubs, regional organizations that connect these pieces together, are often the starting point for accessing all four.
Rural Development Hubs are place-rooted organizations that work within and across a region to build inclusive wealth, increase local capacity, and improve well-being for rural people. They act as a strategic entry point for regional funders and policymakers, since it’s impractical to engage every small town or civic organization individually. In short, they’re one of the most efficient rural resources for connecting communities to outside capital.
Rural organizations often face funding that’s short-term and poorly suited to rural conditions. Aspen CSG’s Funding Rural Futures report, developed with the Partners for Rural Transformation coalition, outlines what more flexible, trust-based grantmaking looks like in practice.
The Thrive Rural Health Framework, developed with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, gives regions a practical tool to identify their existing health assets and track progress rather than starting from a blank page. It’s built on the idea that rural health and economic development should share funding and evaluation systems instead of running in parallel.
Some federal programs, like the Rural Health Transformation Program, were designed with rural eligibility barriers in mind. Aspen CSG’s newsletter shares these kinds of opportunities as they become available.
WealthWorks orients community development efforts around a full range of community assets matched with market demand, in ways that build livelihoods that last. Rather than focusing only on financial wealth, it takes a holistic view across multiple forms of community wealth, including intellectual, natural, cultural, built, and social capital. It’s one of the more established local wealth creation resources for rural communities working with what they already have, rather than what they lack.
Aspen CSG’s Rural Development Hub directory profiles dozens of organizations working across sectors and issue areas in rural regions across the United States.
