More than one in five people in the United States lives in a rural place. The financial life of rural residents looks different than it does in urban America—and that’s because rural economies are different. Historically, wealth-building opportunities for households in rural America have focused on traditional homeownership and business ownership pathways. But skyrocketing home prices have made homeownership increasingly difficult to access, and rural economies face unique dynamics such as lower customer density, access to capital, and shallower labor pools, making it more crucial than ever to build a more diversified household balance sheet for rural residents.
The good news is that in recent years, a groundswell of ownership innovation in America is enabling more people to access the diverse assets they need, from fractional commercial and residential real estate, to shared employee ownership, to new retirement and early wealth building accounts that allow for capital markets investing with no cost of entry. These exciting new models—which exist in both urban and rural contexts—hold promise for increasing wealth-building opportunities in rural America.
The Aspen Institute Financial Security Program (Aspen FSP) and the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group (Aspen CSG) are excited to build on this momentum through a multi-year effort to accelerate rural wealth-building strategies. This brief shares findings and insights from this project’s initial research phase. What we learned continues to inform our efforts to foster wealth-building partnerships in a diverse set of rural communities across the United States. Through those partnerships we seek to accelerate access to innovative wealth-building strategies tailored to the realities of rural life so that thousands of families can benefit from increased asset values and more sustainable wealth.
We are taking an inclusive approach to this project, engaging not only with rural residents but also with those leading wealth-building strategies in Tribal nations and micropolitan areas (Census-defined urban centers with 10,000-50,000 residents and the surrounding rural counties). Many of the innovators whose work informs this report live in or are from rural places, and they have community-level knowledge, social and historical context, and the experience necessary to develop successful strategies that reflect their communities’ needs and preferences. To spread these strategies to additional rural communities and families, urban and national institutions and resources—such as philanthropic and catalytic investors, financial services providers, nonprofit capacity builders, business advisors, public sector leaders, and others—are essential partners alongside local leadership.
Rural households’ net worth reflects their economic context
The existing household wealth of rural Americans is a reflection of the opportunities and challenges they face when building assets. Rural households’ median net worth in 2022 was $146,400. That is enough to provide most families with financial stability and deliver some of the other benefits of wealth, but it is 24 percent less than the national median. Understanding how labor markets, housing markets, retirement savings policy, and macroeconomic trends have shaped rural residents’ financial choices is critical to understanding the balance sheets of rural households today.
Some of the most consequential factors include:
Lower costs of living have historically meant that lower median incomes in rural areas can stretch farther, but the affordability crisis driving up the cost of housing, food, gas, and utilities is hitting rural America particularly hard. While the cost of living in rural places remains somewhat lower than in urban places, the difference is shrinking.
Rural residents are more likely to be homeowners, with 68 percent of rural households owning their homes compared to 61 percent of urban households. But rural housing is quickly becoming unaffordable for median-income families, reducing homeownership rural opportunities.
Workers in rural areas are less likely to have access to a workplace retirement plan. Rural households have just two-thirds the median retirement account balance compared to urban households. They are also ten percentage points less likely to own stocks than urban households.
Rural residents hold more of their wealth in small businesses than other Americans. Diversifying these rural residents’ balance sheets with different kinds of assets would support their entrepreneurial spirit by mitigating risk and introducing additional liquidity and flexibility.
Banking activities are more likely to happen in person in rural areas, partly due to residents’ preference. There are, however, fewer nearby financial institutions and access to credit is constrained, so residents may struggle to fulfil their financial needs.
Interview insights
Interviews with experts revealed that rural household wealth is exposed to high levels of risk and several demographic groups face substantial barriers. Structural economic and historical factors limit wealth-building opportunities in many rural places, especially Tribal nations and Black communities in the Deep South. Repeated cycles of extractive development and long-term lack of public investment have created barriers that continue to impact residents. Throughout rural America, key infrastructure that facilitates wealth-building is weaker than in more densely populated places. This includes broadband internet and cell phone connectivity, nearby financial institutions, and access to capital, credit, and outside investment.
Interviewees also shared their knowledge of innovative wealth-building initiatives that have emerged within rural communities. They identified several things that have supported these initiatives’ success:
Efforts to support rural wealth-building opportunities have the greatest likelihood of success when outside stakeholders intentionally build trust with residents and leaders of rural communities. Building trust is a relational process, rather than transactional, that requires meaningful, ongoing investment of time and effort.
Proximity to public institutions of higher education, decent quality housing stock, and local hubs of economic activity, such as towns and micropolitan areas, facilitates active engagement with as many rural residents as possible. Communities with these characteristics are well-positioned to implement successful wealth-building efforts.
Connections to industries that are growing and investing in rural areas—particularly renewable energy, artificial intelligence, and technology infrastructure—attract leaders and resources to support rural wealth-building initiatives.
Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), which serve low- and moderate-income (LMI) as well as low-wealth people and communities, are critical infrastructure in rural areas and are important partners. They provide financial services in places where few traditional banks operate.
Interviewees’ insights helped to surface three strategies that have the potential to enable all rural households to build sustainable wealth:
1. Expand Access to Investing
Connect rural residents at all life stages to capital markets so that they benefit from the rates of return produced by large, publicly owned U.S. and global firms as well as from the risk mitigation offered by diversified investing.
2. Strengthen Homeownership
Address housing quality concerns and help homeowners reduce their homes’ operating costs. This approach ensures that people’s homes appreciate in value over time and frees up cash for families to save and invest.
3. Grow Employee Ownership
Foster employee ownership of rural businesses to spread the benefits of wealth to more workers, simultaneously stabilizing rural employment opportunities even as businesses change hands.
The Functions of Wealth: Value Beyond Dollars and Cents
Wealth is more than just money. It is a critical tool people use to ensure their well-being and achieve their goals. Aspen FSP has identified five core functions of wealth in people’s lives, which we refer to throughout this brief. People need access to all five functions of wealth to truly thrive.
Having modest amounts of wealth, such as emergency savings, protects people’s ability to meet their needs when they experience income and expense shocks.
People use their assets to make investments that boost their incomes, reduce their costs of living, and grow their net worth. Wealth unlocks economic mobility.
People share their wealth with their families and others both during their lifetimes and through inheritances. This enables people they care about to experience the functions of wealth as well.
While financial insecurity is associated with reduced health, having wealth enables people to care for their health. It supports well-being by providing people with options that meet their needs and reducing the need to make unwanted tradeoffs.
Rural populations are distinct and diverse
One in five U.S. residents lives in a rural place, which the Census Bureau defines as “all population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area.” That broad definition includes places that are primarily agricultural, exurbs with thousands of people and clusters of institutions and employers, small urban centers within otherwise sparsely populated counties, many Tribal nations and Native American communities, and more.
Rural life is accordingly diverse; there is no monolithic rural community, rural economy, rural lifestyle, or rural resident. Demographically, at the national level, rural residents are older and less likely to be people of color compared to the general population. Their median age is 43, compared to urban residents’ median age of 39. One in four rural residents are people of color, though this rises to one in three among children (with important regional differences, such as the larger presence of Black children in the South).
Rural residents have ties to urban centers. About half live in or adjacent to a county that contains a small city (population of 10,000-49,999). These counties are known as micropolitan areas, and their small urban centers serve as the central location for goods and services, employment, education, healthcare, and other amenities for residents of the surrounding rural areas.
Rural households’ wealth is precarious due to asset concentration and limited liquidity
American rural households’ median net worth in 2022 was $146,400. That is enough to provide most families with financial stability and deliver some of the other benefits of wealth, but it is 24 percent less than the national median of $192,900—and that net worth is much less diversified than the national median, exposing rural households to greater risk. Thus, the wealth of today’s rural households may not be sustainable in the face of rapidly changing economic conditions.
Source: Aspen FSP analysis of Survey of Income and Program Participation data.
Rural balance sheets show several strengths. Notably, more than half of rural homeowners own their home outright, with no mortgage. Rural business owners are also able to generate substantial wealth through their enterprises, as well as create jobs that can enable workers’ wealth-building endeavors.
Despite those strengths, asset ownership patterns also suggest reasons for concern:
Some regions and populations do not experience these strengths to the same degree as others. Rural incomes and wealth are notably lower in the South, for example, and wealth is disproportionately held by households aged 65 years and older. Black rural young adults face the highest likelihood of having negative net worth because they own fewer assets than other rural young adults. And Native people living on Tribal lands have few opportunities to build wealth through homeownership and business ownership, due to federal restrictions on Tribal governments’ land use and the lack of financial institutions operating in those places.
When it comes to specific assets, circumstances unique to rural areas raise concerns about the sustainability of household net worth. Although homeownership is high and mortgage debt is low, the deteriorating quality of rural housing puts homeownership opportunities and home value appreciation at risk, as well as harming residents’ health.
Business equity varies substantially as local and national economic conditions change and business ownership is concentrated among people who are close to retirement.
Low levels of investment in capital markets mean that rural households do not benefit from the assets with the highest rates of return over time, have less diversified and resilient portfolios, and are more likely to face financial insecurity in retirement.
Rural households’ assets are less liquid than other households’ assets, which can make it difficult to draw on wealth when it is needed.
Innovative strategies connect people to capital markets, address housing quality and costs, and foster employee ownership of local businesses
In our interviews, leaders living in rural areas emphasized that people want to build wealth in ways that support their community and rural lifestyle rather than leaving it behind. Innovators focused on the preservation of local homes, local businesses, and jobs demonstrate that it is possible for rural individuals and families to grow their wealth while supporting their priorities for their community.
In addition to wealth-building strategies focused on local communities, efforts to connect rural residents to capital markets are needed because investments in these markets offer the highest rates of return over time with the least risk, due to diversification across industries. This section identifies emerging efforts to help rural households build wealth through balanced investment in both global markets and their local communities.
Connect rural residents to capital markets and help them establish investor identities
One of the most consequential differences between rural households’ and others’ balance sheets is the relative lack of exposure rural households have to capital markets, like the bond market and both US and global stock markets. Rural residents are less likely to own retirement accounts (which, due to stock markets’ performance over decades, are now worth as much in aggregate as residential real estate), have lower average balances, and are less likely to own stocks through non-retirement channels. This means that rural households do not benefit as much as others from the economic value that national and global firms generate, and their wealth is more precarious due to asset concentration.
We identified three strategies that enable rural residents to start investing and build the experience, skills, and confidence to thrive as investors. These strategies are tailored to the needs and goals of specific populations: workers, children, and people whose needs have not been met by financial institutions or public policies.
Boost retirement participation and savings for rural workers
Rural businesses are less likely to offer tax-advantaged, paycheck deduction retirement savings accounts to workers because these firms tend to be small enough that benefits are expensive and limited. Twenty-two states have active, low-cost public platforms that small businesses can use to automatically enroll workers in a retirement plan, and seventeen of these states require employers to automatically enroll their employees into a private retirement plan or the state-facilitated option.
These Automatic IRA programs have led to millions of new accounts and have enabled millions of workers to use a critical benefit typically available through the workplace. One interviewee in the financial industry shared that rural small business owners have actually expressed higher levels of interest in one state’s Automatic IRA, as compared to business owners in non-rural areas. They view the program as an affordable employee retention tool and an important resource to workers that is otherwise out of reach.
Another interviewee, whose firm provides workplace benefits to several firms operating in rural places, emphasized the importance of tailoring engagement to meet rural workers’ needs and offering emergency savings accounts connected to or alongside retirement accounts.
Ensure that rural children benefit from early wealth building initiatives
Early wealth building accounts are investment accounts seeded with money by the government or other organizations, ideally at a child’s birth, whose funds can be used for wealth-building purposes in adulthood (usually education, homeownership, and small business ownership).
In 2025, Congress created America’s first universally available wealth-building program for children. Known as Trump Accounts, these 530A investment accounts are currently being rolled out nationwide, offering every child in America a chance to invest in a broad-based index of US stocks from birth that parents can manage with well-designed digital tools. Children born between 2025-2028 are eligible for a $1,000 initial deposit from the federal government; all children under 18 can receive contributions from family, parents’ employers, state and local governments, and philanthropic institutions. Philanthropic and state leaders have pledged billions of dollars to seed these accounts.
Tailored outreach strategies and financial literacy resources are necessary to ensure that these accounts truly provide rural children with a baseline of wealth and the skills and mindset needed to grow those resources over their lifetimes. Maine, for example,is the only state thatoffers a universal, seeded 529 account program, made possible through a philanthropic partnership that includes a rural outreach strategy. The Alfond Scholarship Foundation automatically deposits $500 seed funding into an account for every child born in the state. When parents create and activate a Maine 529 college savings account, that account is linked with the child’s My Alfond Grant. The program leverages partnerships with rural institutions such as local libraries and hospitals and provides culturally appropriate resources in several languages to ensure that rural parents know about their children’s My Alfond Grants and create 529 accounts for their children so they receive the funds.
Create on-ramps to retail investing for financially underserved consumers
A large body of research demonstrates that low- and moderate-income people prefer saving to investing because of low risk tolerance; among investors, people who earn low or moderate incomes tend to make more conservative investments to limit the risk of loss, and a tax-advantaged retirement account might feel overly restrictive, given the potential penalties for early withdrawal.
When people know that they will likely need access to their savings and investments to cover financial shocks and other needs, it makes sense to prioritize an account offering liquidity and lower risk. Market research reveals that many LMI consumers do not feel confident in their ability to make wise investment decisions and feel that investing is not for people like them.
For these consumers, one key to accelerating wealth-building is creating appropriate on-ramps to investing paired with seed funds and tailored, culturally appropriate financial education resources. The Local Initiatives Support Coalition (LISC), a national nonprofit community and economic development organization, created a program to help rural residents learn about and begin investing. It is delivered through financial coaches to their clients, who are typically LMI women with little wealth. Because LISC financial coaches are not registered investment advisors, they do not directly assist clients in opening accounts or selecting investments, but they support clients in developing investor identities and the confidence to act independently.
One innovative private firm, Stackwell, goes further by focusing on the market of financially underserved people, providing retail brokerage accounts, and seeding accounts with philanthropic dollars that they can invest. Clients have access to tailored financial education materials in the Stackwell app and support from community ambassadors who work in person. Through partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and nonprofit service providers, hundreds of rural young adults have opened seeded investment accounts since launching in 2022.
In our interviews, experts said that seed funds supported by philanthropy, ideally about $1,000 per accountholder, help new investors gain confidence by reducing the risks of participation, while illustrating the power of returns on investment.
Unlock investments in housing quality and reduce housing operating costs
Rural housing stock is older than housing in urban and suburban places, and many rural homes are in disrepair. Old homes and those needing significant repairs and maintenance lose value rather than appreciating. So, while homebuyers might be able to purchase rural homes due to their lower values, they might not be able to afford to care for the home—and thus they won’t be able to generate wealth through home equity over time. Plus, many of these older, substandard homes are disappearing from the market and will no longer be available to the next generation of homebuyers.
We identified two strategies that can help rural households build wealth through homeownership, experience the benefits of wealth, and contribute to maintaining a healthy, abundant stock of local housing.
Source: Aspen FSP analysis of American Housing Survey data, using 2013 geographic divisions
Create the next generation of home repair and rehabilitation contractors
Contractors are essential for maintaining the value of homeowners’ assets and for the overall health of the housing stock in every community. But licensed, bonded, and insured construction and repair contractors are thin on the ground in much of rural America because they face challenges such as high transportation costs, limited access to supplies, and capital constraints.
Innovative initiatives have emerged in recent years to train new rural contractors and support skilled trade professionals. For example, Communities Unlimited, which serves rural places in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, trains new developers through its Develop the Developer Academy. The organization has dual focuses on housing preservation and developing new modular homes. They also run a community development financial institution (CDFI) that provides financing to both business owners and homeowners.
The Urban League of Louisiana has contractor resources programs serving the greater New Orleans and greater Baton Rouge areas. These prepare skilled trade professionals to become business owners, secure licensing, meet regulatory requirements, and connect with banking and lending services. Several participants have developed a valuable niche providing home rehabilitation services in rural Louisiana.
Manufactured and modular homes are built in factories and then transported to and installed on land that the buyer owns or leases. Their construction methods are faster and less wasteful, which lowers the cost of purchase, and offer precision and quality control that lower the cost of purchasing and operating these homes.
Today’s factory-built housing is distinct from the mobile homes that were common from the 1950s until 1976, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) established a nationwide code with standards for construction and siting. Now, factory-built homes can be indistinguishable from site-built homes, and, when set on permanent foundations on land owned by the homebuyers, these homes appreciate at a rate similar to site-built homes.
An additional benefit of modern factory-built housing is its energy efficiency; standardized construction, indoor conditions, and systemic quality control processes all contribute to relatively low heating and cooling costs. When paired with energy efficient appliances, factory-built homes can have exceptionally affordable operating costs. This, in turn, makes it more likely that a household has routinely positive cash flow, which bolsters financial resilience and allows people to build up savings and investable sums of money.
Empower owners living in manufactured home parks to maintain community affordability and improve infrastructure
Homeowners living in manufactured home parks typically rent the land beneath their homes from a business that owns the community—a significant cost and drag on their home’s appreciation.
Since 2008, ROC USA has helped residents of manufactured home parks organize and secure financing to buy their communities and turn them into limited equity cooperatives. Although homeowners do not directly gain wealth by owning a share in a limited equity co-op, they gain benefits of wealth that were out of reach when a corporation owned the land beneath their homes, including greater home value appreciation and local ownership.
ROC residents ensure that their land leases remain affordable over time, supporting their financial stability. They are able to invest in community infrastructure and amenities that are often neglected by private equity firms, supporting their well-being. And ROC USA
Spread wealth through employee ownership of rural businesses
In recent years, innovative investors, technical assistance providers, membership organizations, and advocacy campaigns have raised awareness of the benefits of employee ownership of businesses. As the movement has gained momentum, the resources and capital available to these firms have significantly increased. Employee ownership can be especially beneficial in rural places because workers are able to contribute more to local economic activity and ensure businesses’ survival after the present owners retire.
Enable rural business owners nearing retirement to transition their firms to employee ownership
In rural places, 27 percent of small employer businessowners are 65 or older (compared to 22 percent of urban small employer business owners). As these owners prepare to retire, they often want to convert their business equity into more liquid forms of wealth by selling part or all of their business, but many are unable to do so.
Nationwide, only eight percent of small business owner exits occur when a new owner buys or takes over the firm, largely due to timing and financing constraints. Industry research indicates that it is difficult for owners of businesses valued at less than $2 million to successfully sell to new owners, and that available financing mechanisms work best for firms with valuations of at least $25 million.
Rural business owners face elevated barriers to transitioning their firms to new owners: Fewer local residents typically means fewer potential buyers; experts who broker sales are concentrated in urban areas; and financing constraints make it harder for interested buyers to close a sale. Taken together, these factors imply that the “silver tsunami” of retiring business owners is having a deep impact on rural communities and workers.
Employee ownership is a promising strategy to help older rural business owners retire securely while preserving the value of their firms, maintaining rural jobs, and providing workers with valuable ownership stakes. Business owners selling their firms to their employees have several options, each of which provides workers with financial assets that can generate capital income and appreciate over time based on company performance. Employees can be granted stock or the cash value of stock through Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOPs) and Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). An Employee Ownership Trust can also hold a company’s stock on employees’ behalf in order to share profits. Ownership Capital Lab and Ownership Works, for example, partner with investors and others to expand financing for transitions to employee ownership.
Shared business ownership can take several forms, each of which has different implications for workers’ wealth. Employee ownership structures include:
Worker cooperatives are one of the oldest employee ownership structures in the world. In the United States, worker co-ops can be nonprofit organizations or for-profit businesses. A share in a worker co-op is not a financial asset. It confers voting rights and the ability to serve on the board of directors (if elected). When worker co-ops generate profits, some of the money is typically distributed to workers through patronage dividends. Works best for: nonprofits and businesses of all sizes, including startups and microbusinesses.
Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) are, in the United States, tax-advantaged, defined contribution retirement plans. The firm establishes a trust that purchases and manages the firm’s stock on workers’ behalf, with funds allocated by formula. Workers receive stock or cash payouts when they leave the business. At that time, they can roll the money into an Individual Retirement Plan or pay income taxes on the funds (plus early withdrawal penalties, when applicable). Works best for: S-corporations and C-corporations with dozens of employees and valuations of at least two million dollars.
Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) give workers a direct ownership stake alongside other investors in the business. The stock is restricted until workers complete a vesting period by meeting tenure or performance requirements, at which time they can hold or sell it. Unlike ESOPs, RSUs do not have tax advantages, so employees pay ordinary income taxes on the value of their stock when it vests and pay capital gains when they sell it. Works best for: well-established, profitable C-corporations, including those with annual revenues below two million dollars.
Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs) are perpetual purpose trusts established by companies’ owners to hold all or some of their business’ equity. An EOT purchases a company’s stock from the owner(s) in a leveraged buyout and holds it on workers’ behalf. Workers do not have an ownership stake in their company, but the trust shares profits with them (after paying off debt from the ownership transition). EOTs are relatively new in the United States but have a long history in the United Kingdom. They are relatively simple and inexpensive to establish. Works best for: established S-corporations and C-corporations with at least 10 employees and the ability to meet ongoing annual costs of up to $20,000.
Expand employee ownership of rural startups
Many growth-oriented startups in a variety of industries—energy, logistics, data centers, and healthcare—are now locating in rural areas, and as those areas’ populations grow, residents are also opening main street businesses such as cafes and salons. Facilitating employee ownership from the start can make it easier to hire talented workers, reduce costs through lower turnover rates, and ensure that local communities experience the financial upside of these businesses’ success. Worker cooperatives are an appropriate employee ownership structure for startups and businesses of any size. Although worker cooperatives do not provide employees with a financial asset, they do confer autonomy and agency and enable workers to build valuable transferable skills by participating in management decisions.
There are dozens of organizations and public agencies that support worker cooperatives. The Department of Agriculture offers a library of resources that are relevant to rural cooperatives and a grant program for rural cooperative startups. For well-capitalized startups with scalable business models, stock options offer another alternative that can enable employee ownership once the firm has attracted additional investment and achieved a target valuation.
Rural wealth-building efforts succeed when they are built on trust, partnerships, and local economic advantages
“You cannot simply drop in with a new program,” one rural leader told us in an interview, explaining the importance of trust and partnerships. Many rural leaders have personal experiences of their community being a site of extraction by an outside business, or a place where people with resources position themselves as doing favors for the disadvantaged. Interviewees shared a conviction that building trust takes more time and requires more face-to-face engagement in rural places than elsewhere, in order to overcome skepticism based on these negative experiences.
With this in mind, external stakeholders, including philanthropic institutions, corporations, and national nonprofits, may need to take a different approach than they typically use. One way to navigate this process is to work with rural development hubs, regionally focused intermediaries that coordinate among partners, marshal resources, and strengthen local systems to create shared prosperity. This model for rural economic development is established and effective, and leaders have a clear interest in increasing families’ financial well-being.
Finally, where rural wealth-building efforts are based matters. Our interviewees emphasized the importance of locating in regional centers of economic activity. This enables partnership development, provides a familiar setting for in-person engagement with residents, and takes advantage of anchor institutions like state colleges, healthcare providers, tribal governments, and locally significant employers.
Innovation is already happening in rural places connected to emerging engines of growth, especially renewable energy, artificial intelligence, and technology infrastructure. For example, Launch Tennessee provides technical assistance and investment into rural startups connected to logistics and AI. One California business is creating “distributed data centers” by installing small units (about the size of HVAC condensers) at people’s homes and connecting them into a distributed network that does not require hyperscale infrastructure. There is a real opportunity to extend and build on this kind of innovation, ensuring that the gains from rural economic innovation extend all the way to the balance sheets of households in those communities.
We’re just getting started
Over time, this work is intended to contribute to a stronger, more connected ecosystem for inclusive wealth building and ownership in rural communities throughout the United States. Aspen FSP and Aspen CSG have identified numerous opportunities for more rural households to build wealth through appreciating assets, especially market investments, housing, employee ownership of businesses. Many of the strategies currently in implementation are led by rural leaders, ensuring that they are grounded in an understanding of rural people’s specific needs and preferences. National firms and organizations are also accelerating rural wealth building through active engagement with rural leaders and residents. And we identified some promising new strategies emerging from urban areas that could be effectively translated to rural contexts.
These stakeholders have much to learn from each other; facilitating networking, peer learning, and partnerships among them can help rural wealth-building efforts replicate, scale, and maximize their impact. To that end, we are continuing to engage with established and newly formed partnerships among rural communities, investors, and innovators, with the goal of catalyzing investment in rural wealth-building strategies.
We welcome connection and collaboration from everyone with an interest in helping rural households build sustainable wealth, especially through investments in housing quality and affordability, shared ownership of land and businesses, and capital markets. And we especially encourage rural leaders to get in touch to discuss how we can work together to support your community members’ financial well-being and wealth.
Acknowledgements
This brief is a product of the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program (Aspen FSP). Aspen FSP and the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group thank the Nasdaq Foundation for their generous support for this report. We also thank our colleagues Bonita Robertson-Hardy, Tyler Bowders, and Erin Cahill at the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group for their collaboration and partnership. The author is grateful to Karen Biddle Andres, Nisha Baliga, Bianca Lopez, Joanna Smith-Ramani, and Steven Brown for their contributions to the brief. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this report—as well as any errors—are Aspen FSP’s alone and do not necessarily represent the views of our funders or other participants in our research process.
Appendix: List of interviewees
We conducted 17 in-depth interviews with leaders who have helped rural residents build wealth. We are thankful to everyone who contributed by sharing their expertise and experience.
Interviewees had the option to be acknowledged in this report or remain anonymous. Those who agreed to being publicly acknowledged are:
Don Baylor, Founder and CEO, Worker Solutions
Lindsey Cox, CEO, Launch Tennessee
Laura D’Alessandro, Director of Financial Health, Local Initiatives Support Corporation
Klassi R. Duncan, Vice President, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Urban League of Louisiana
Julianne Dunn, Senior Program Officer, Rural LISC, Local Initiatives Support Corporation
Matt Dunne, Chief Executive Officer, Center on Rural Innovation
Stacey Epperson, President and CEO, Next Step
Eller Kelliher, Chief Investment Officer, Launch Tennessee
Alison Lingane, Founder & CEO, Ownership Capital Lab
Colleen Quint, President and CEO, Alfond Scholarship Foundation
Trevor Rozier-Byrd, Founder and CEO, Stackwell
Nicholas Salerno, Chief Program Officer, ROC USA
Danielle Samalin, Chief Growth Officer, Center on Rural Innovation
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