Rural poverty: ‘A way of life’ for numerous Oklahomans, By Michael Overall, August 8, 2016, Tulsa World: “With no air conditioning on a brutally hot summer afternoon, 19-year-old Breeze Bunch is sitting on the front porch with a half-empty Pepsi and a bottle of sunscreen. ‘Why don’t you go splash in the water?’ Bunch tells her 2-year-old daughter, who waddles off toward an inflatable kiddie pool under a shade tree beside the house.
Sharing a clapboard house with her boyfriend’s family, Bunch lives on a dead-end street north of downtown in one of the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods in Oklahoma. This isn’t Tulsa or Oklahoma City, or even Muskogee or Lawton. A five-minute walk could put Bunch in the middle of a cow pasture…”
Tag: Rural households
Rural Poverty Initiatives
- Obama administration announces new rural poverty initiatives, By Jackie Mader, February 24, 2016, Education Week: “Rural children living in poverty will receive more attention under several new initiatives announced by the Obama administration during a Tuesday meeting of the White House Rural Council. The programs will encourage communities to prioritize rural child poverty, offer loans to community development projects in rural areas, and provide funding for a ‘two-generation’ approach to rural poverty…”
- Fighting poverty and opiate addiction in rural communities, By Lizzie O’Leary, February 24, 2016, Marketplace: “In America’s rural communities, poverty, health and education gaps, and a striking increase in opiate addiction are challenging social services and the budget. News of the increasing numbers of deaths among middle-aged Americans and the high rates of opiate overdoses are in the news, and since 2011, the Obama administration’s Rural Poverty Coalition has been tackling the multi-generational issues that come with providing social services to rural America…”
Rural Hospitals
To survive, rural hospitals join forces, By Michael Ollove, August 17, 2015, Stateline: “Ask Sam Lindsey about the importance of Northern Cochise Community Hospital and he’ll give you a wry grin. You might as well be asking the 77-year-old city councilman to choose between playing pickup basketball—as he still does most Fridays—and being planted six feet under the Arizona dust. Lindsey believes he’s above ground, and still playing point guard down at the Mormon church, because of Northern Cochise. Last Christmas, he suffered a severe stroke in his home. He survived, he said, because his wife, Zenita, got him to the hospital within minutes. If it hadn’t been there, she would have had to drive him 85 miles to Tucson Medical Center. There are approximately 2,300 rural hospitals in the U.S., most of them concentrated in the Midwest and the South. For a variety of reasons, many of them are struggling to survive…”