Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection

The Sandhills AGInnovation Center works to nurture rural farmers in Richmond and Montgomery counties, while connecting them to urban markets.

Music has helped power the revival of downtown (or uptown, as the locals call it) Shelby. The Earl Scruggs Center and Don Gibson Theatre draw on the town’s musical history.

Can philanthropy foster greater regional connection? Yes, according to our research for the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection project. But it’s not just the movement of money that matters, say local leaders: it’s the regional exchange of ideas about how to put that money to work that seems to make a difference. Community foundations, by definition, have […]

Charitable giving is an invisible thread binding people and communities together across the 32-county Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection study region — but how much people give, and what resources are available, varies from place to place. The Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection A special project from the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute Read about the project here Introduction: Strengthening […]

To better understand commuters in the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection region down to the individual level, we studied anonymized cell phone tracking data at select employment locations, seeking to determine how commuter connections differ between types of business districts and types of firms. By mapping the residential location of workers at a broad range of employment […]

An array of environmental, cultural and economic connections together give rise to the interdependence of the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection study region. But none of these connections are more economically significant than the flow of workers within our regional economy. Counties within the region relied on out-of-county commuters for their workforces more in 2015 than at […]

In telephone calls, emails and chats over coffee or dinner, dozens of business and community leaders in Charlotte and the surrounding suburban and rural communities regularly communicate — sometimes discussing local issues and sometimes not, in conversations that are happening deliberately. For two decades, the non-profit Lee Institute, which promotes civic engagement, has focused on […]

Are rural leaders different than their urban counterparts? And how can programs that develop leaders bridge the gap between them, if indeed there is one? With leadership emerging as a key issue in research for the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connections project, we asked several leadership programs in the Carolinas about their experiences working with leaders from […]

“The more successful towns have a champion. The really successful ones have multiple champions.” We visited Liz Parham, director of North Carolina’s Main Street Program, to learn about how communities across the state are capitalizing on their cultural and natural assets to revitalize local economies. But it was a different type of asset – people […]

To move up the ladder of opportunity, there’s generally consensus that people need jobs that pay a living wage, where they can grow their earnings over time. But what’s the best way to get workers, especially low-income workers with barriers such as low educational attainment, connected to those jobs? That’s the focus of the ReCONNECT […]