Source: UNIVERSITY OF MAINE submitted to NRP
ENHANCING RURAL CAPACITIES TO STRENGTHEN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNITY RESILIENCE
Sponsoring Institution
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Project Status
ACTIVE
Funding Source
AFRI COMPETITIVE GRANT
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
1030171
Grant No.
2023-67023-39500
Cumulative Award Amt.
$299,625.00
Proposal No.
2022-10205
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Project Start Date
Aug 1, 2023
Project End Date
Jul 31, 2025
Grant Year
2023
Program Code
[A1661]- Innovation for Rural Entrepreneurs and Communities
Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF MAINE
(N/A)
ORONO,ME 04469
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic shifts, and policy changes, rural communities face increasing opportunities to access grant funds, adapt services, and guide major infrastructure investments. Yet, the extent to which rural communities successfully access and leverage these opportunities hinges on community competencies which are not fully understood nor equitably distributed. The goal of this seed project is to strengthen rural development and community resilience by enhancing rural capacity-building. Four project objectives, aligned with Economic Development Program Area Priority (A1661), support this project goal:(1) Improve understanding of rural municipal grant and digital services capacities; (2) Assess variation and inequities in municipal grant and digital services capacities; (3) Collaborate with community-serving organizations to better understand the implications of inequities in municipal capacities for rural economic development and community resilience; and (4) Co-develop outreach communications to share new knowledge about rural community capacities with organizations, policymakers, municipalities, and researchers. Our collaborative work with research partners will call attention to current grant and digital competencies and the implications of inequities in these capacities for rural economic development and community resilience. We will utilize a mixed-methods approach, including analyses of quantitative municipal capacity inventories and interviews of municipal officials, to better understand barriers and opportunities for rural capacity building. We will co-design and disseminate actionable communications and recommendations based on our findings to inform near-term rural capacity building in Maine and beyond. Although we will conduct our research in Maine, we expect the results to be useful in the Northeast and nationally.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
6086050301050%
6086099308050%
Knowledge Area
608 - Community Resource Planning and Development;

Subject Of Investigation
6099 - People and communities, general/other; 6050 - Communities, areas, and regions;

Field Of Science
3010 - Economics; 3080 - Sociology;
Goals / Objectives
Goal: We, in collaboration with research partners from community-serving organizations in Maine, designed this project to strengthen rural development and community resilience by enhancing rural capacity-building.Four project objectives support this goal:(1) Improve understanding of rural municipal grant and digital services capacities;(2) Assess variation and inequities in municipal grant and digital services capacities;(3) Collaborate with community-serving organizations to better understand the implications of inequities in municipal capacities for rural economic development and community resilience; and(4) Co-develop outreach communications to share new knowledge about rural community capacities with organizations, policymakers, municipalities, and researchers.With this seed research project, we strive to enhance rural capacity building by advancing understanding of municipal grant and digital service capacities in Maine. Our collaborative work with research partners from community-serving organizations will improve knowledge of these capacities and call attention to the implications of inequities in these capacities for rural development. Together, we will co-design and disseminate actionable communications and recommendations based on our findings to inform near-term rural capacity building in Maine and beyond. Moreover, through testing of our research approach and engagement with stakeholders and peers, we will strategically identify pathways for scaling this collaborative work to enhance long-term rural capacity building and rural prosperity regionally and nationally.
Project Methods
With this seed research project, we strive to enhance rural capacity building by advancing understanding of municipal grant and digital service capacities in Maine.We willfocus on answering the following questions (1) what are the current grant and digital services capacities of rural municipalities?; (2) what are the variations and inequities in how these capacities are distributed?; (3) what factors affect municipal grant and digital services capacities and explain the variation and inequities in these capacities? ; and (4) what are the implications of variations and inequities in these municipal capacities for rural economic development and community resilience?Study area. Maine provides us with an appropriate study area for our research, exhibiting good variation in municipal governments, community capacities, demographics, local and regional economies,institutions, and community contexts.With relatively limited county governments and extensive home-rule provisions, Maine's 487 municipalities and tribal governments have considerable control over local economic and community development.Research activities. We summarize our plans and activities by objective below.Objective (1) Improve understanding of rural municipal grant and digital services capacities. We will begin by collecting foundational quantitative and qualitative data to inform our assessments of municipal capacities.To assess grant capacity, we will create a quantitative dataset describing municipal participation in multiple grant programs, including several state programs linked to federal funding. We will select the grant programs in consultation with our partners to capture a range of grant opportunities, varying in focus, complexity of the application process, and program administration.To assess digital services capacity, we will expand a quantitative approach we developed based on prior research and piloted with 100 Maine communities in 2021. Visiting municipal and tribal websites, we will document digital services capacity from the perspective of a resident or local business by documenting use of digital platforms, provision of digital information, provision of digital services transactions, and digital participation/democracy. We will create a digital services inventory. Concurrently, we will conduct interviews with municipal officials from a sample of municipalities. Our sample frame for interviews will represent a range of capacity levels identified by the quantitative inventories as well as a representative sample of size, geographical location, and municipal government structure. We will develop the interview protocol following best practices and gain approval from UMaine's Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects. We will code the interview data to reveal themes explaining observed differences in capacities. By integrating insights from both assessments, we will gain a richer understanding of variations in these municipal capacities.Objective (2) Assess variation and inequities in municipal grant and digital services capacities. To contextualize our measures of municipal grant and digital services capacities, we will assess the variation and inequities in these capacities. We will do basic statistical testing to assess differences across community groupings or gradients (e.g., geography (rural, suburban, and urban) and socioeconomics (income, race and ethnicity)). We will supplement these tests with maps and spatial analyses. We will estimate statistical regression models of the two capacities as a function of various predictive factors, including community groupings (e.g., rural, suburban, and urban), community population size, municipal resources (e.g., municipal government structure type, municipal staffing, and municipal budget), community context (e.g., proximity to transportation networks, broadband infrastructure, urban centers, and community organizations); demographics (e.g., age structure, income dist); and economic structure. We will integrate secondary municipal data from various sources, including the US Census Bureau ACS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, ESRI, and Maine Municipal Association. These exploratory regression analyses will reveal associations between our measures of capacity and these other factors. Additional qualitative analysis through coding of the interview data will supplement these exploratory regressions and their descriptive results. We will combine inferences from the qualitative and quantitative analyses to assess the variation and inequities in these competencies and to describe potential barriers and opportunities for capacity-building.Objective (3) Collaborate with community-serving organizations to better understand the implications of inequities in municipal capacities for rural economic development and community resilience. We will host a series of focus group discussions with staff from targeted community-serving organizations to understand the implications of our findings from Objectives 1 and 2. Working with our partners, we will design the protocol for the focus group discussions meetings to get candid feedback on our findings and promote group discussions of the potential implications of these findings for rural development. Target participants for these discussion groups will be staff from economic development corporations, regional planning organizations, rural municipal officials, community-focused non-government organizations including those with an equity focus, and state agency staff. We will analyze qualitative and quantitative data generated from these focus groups to summarize the potential implications of inequities in municipal grant and digital services capacities for rural economic development and community resilience, with an eye towards better understanding ways to strengthen rural capacity building.We will also strategically design next steps to scale up and extend this collaborative seed research to make more significant research and societal contributions. Potential opportunities to expand this seed research include working with researchers and partners from other Northeastern states to conduct regional integrated assessments of the implications of the inequities in municipal capacities in order to better understand and confirm them, and to design and test field experiments of different rural capacity-building programs.Objective (4) Co-develop outreach communications to share new knowledge about rural community capacities with organizations, policymakers, municipalities, and researchers. At all stages in our research, we will co-develop outreach communications with partners to share our knowledge and experiences beyond the core project team. We will be extremely responsive to the suggestions of our partners regarding the design of these materials. In addition, we recognize that our partners, who operate statewide in rural communities, are often in a relatively stronger position to disseminate these materials to state and municipal officials, non-government organizations, and other rural audiences. We expect to develop summary reports (both short and long), audio summaries, video research updates, and interactive data visualizations. We will regularly make presentations and prepare publications. We will present at peer and practitioner conferences to get feedback and network with potential future collaborators. We will publish peer-reviewed publications to communicate our findings with peer and professional audiences. Feedback from our target audiences and uptake of and responses to project outreach materials will inform evaluations of our research and engagement activities and the extent to which these activities increase knowledge of rural capacities, inform strategies to enhance rural capacities, and reduce inequites in grant and digital service capacities.

Progress 08/01/23 to 07/31/24

Outputs
Target Audience: During the reporting period, target audiences for our project included staff from non-profit organizations, state agencies, regionally planning and development organizations, local municipal leaders, community members, and peer researchers. We targeted these distinct audiences to get feedback on our project plans and results to date, increase the relevance and usefulness of our research outputs to efforts aimed at enhancing municipal digital and grant capacities in rural areas, raise awareness of our work, and strengthen networks with practitioners, communities, and scholars. We collaborated with project partners that included staff from the Maine Municipal Association, Island Institute, and the Governor's Office of Policy, Innovation, and the Future. We worked closely with these core project partners as their organizations support and collaborate with rural communities throughout Maine. As we developed project datasets, conducted analyses, developed initial outputs, and engaged with local and state officials, and community members, their guidance informed our work and increased the relevancy and usefulness of our research on municipal digital and grant capacities. We engaged with additional state organizations (Maine Connectivity Authority), regional planning organizations (Hancock County Planning Commission, Midcoast Council of Governments), and community members by presenting and participating at three digital equity and communications events. Engaging directly with community members in digital and in-person settings helped our team better understand digital equity challenges and opportunities for enhancing municipal digital capacities. In addition, we were able to share initial findings with community leaders interested in learning from our assessment of municipal digital services as they develop their own digital tools. By presenting work at the The Rural Sociological Society (RSS) 2023 Conference, we engaged with audiences of peer researchers focused on rural communities to disseminate our ideas, get feedback on proposed plans, and build networks regionally and nationally. Similarly, we presented work at 2 student research symposia, permitting us to reach broader audiences of scholars. Our first publication also allowed us to share findings about digital e-government in rural Maine with an international audience of scholars. By engaging with peers, we strengthen our scholarship and form valuable networks to disseminate findings with other scholars as well as rural community leaders. Lastly, we reached a broader audience of municipal officials, community members, policy practitioners, and researchers by presenting work at the 2023 Maine Sustainability and Water Conference. We targeted this conference to reach and learn from a diverse audience also focused on enhancing the resilience and prosperity of Maine rural communities. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?During the reporting period, we trained eleven students as part of our research team. We shared insights from economics, human dimensions of natural resources, sustainability science, planning, and public policy analysis to help our students advance as researchers and professionals. We designed training and experiences to help them develop as effective interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, and collaborative researchers. Students collected primary data on rural communities, learned about secondary data sources related to community resilience, gained experience analyzing quantitative data, engaged with community-serving organizations, and developed collaborative poster presentations for multiple conferences. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We have disseminated information about our ongoing work and results to multiple audiences, including core project partners who work for community-serving organizations in Maine, regional and municipal leaders, practitioners at other community-serving organizations, community members, and peer researchers. We regularly communicate progress with core project partners via email and Zoom meetings. We have shared links to published papers and let our partners know in advance when we will be sharing results at a state, regional, or community event. Our partners, who operate statewide in rural communities, are often in a relatively stronger position to disseminate materials to state and municipal officials, non-government organizations, and other rural audiences. Working with our partner from the Island Institute who is collaborating with other organizations in Maine around rural broadband and digital equity initiatives, we participated in three different community events: Bell, K.P., Johnson, E.S., Griffith, R., and E. Prescott. 2024. Local digital communications and services in Maine. Hancock/Waldo Digital Inclusion Coalition Meeting, Zoom Call, January 10, 2024. Bell, K.P. 2024. Digital opportunities for municipal communications (panelist). Panel discussion hosted by Hancock County Planning Commission and Island Institute, Ellsworth, ME, March 20, 2024. Bell, K.P. Municipal digital communications and community resilience. Waldo County Municipal Communications Forum, Searsmont, ME, May 29, 2024. Sharing our findings and progress directly with community members, municipal officials, and other leaders has raised awareness of our work and helped us align our work with community needs. As a result of these events, our work and engagement has been featured subsequently in the Maine Municipal Association's Maine Town & City, a magazine for municipal officials: Thorpe, C. and Z. Duffy. 2024. Municipal Digital Capacity - a Dirigo Moment for Maine. Maine Town & City March 2024: 23-26. Gruber, A and C. Thorpe. 2024. Discussing Digital Communications in a Hancock County Barn. Maine Town & City May 2024 33-35. We presented initial findings to peers and practitioners at the 2023 Maine Sustainability and Water Conference and the 2024 National Adaptation Forum. Project team-members delivered two poster presentations and participated in community-resilience break-out discussion groups at the Maine Sustainability and Water Conference. In addition to disseminating our findings, we also learned much from the efforts of other researchers and organizations interested in supporting rural communities. At the 2024 National Adaptation Forum, we presented a poster presentation and shared findings with climate resilience practitioners from across the US. We presented our work to peers at The Rural Sociological Society (RSS) 2023 Conference and at the University of Maine and University of Southern Maine student research symposia. We published one peer-reviewed publication in Government Information Quarterly, a journal with an international audience, and have made great progress on two additional manuscripts. PI Kathleen Bell attended the PD meeting held in New Orleans at the 2024 AAEA Meetings, networked with other grant recipients, and learned from the experiences of other research teams. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?In the next reporting period, we will continue to make progress on all four project objectives and achieve the goals of our two-year seed project. We will continue to refine the quantitative datasets summarizing our measures of municipal grant and digital capacities, with emphasis given to integrating information about additional grant programs. We will collect and analyze qualitative data based on interviews with municipal officials and leaders of community-serving organizations. We will complete our mixed-methods assessment of the variation in municipal grant and digital capacities and the implications of these inequities for community resilience and rural development in Maine. We will continue to partner with staff from community-serving organizations to co-design a portfolio of outreach materials and to disseminate our results to community-serving organizations, state agencies, municipal officials, community leaders, and peer researchers. We will make multiple presentations and submit multiple manuscripts for publication. Lastly, we will engage with peers in the region to broaden the impact of our work and develop plans for impactful research extensions.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? (1) Improve understanding of rural municipal grant and digital services capacities We made progress on developing the foundational quantitative and qualitative data to inform our assessments of municipal capacities. To assess digital services capacity, we updated our quantitative approach we developed and piloted with 100 Maine communities in 2021. Our new approach, grounded in the e-government and digital government literature, centers on tracking 28items that capture a local government's use of digital platforms, digital accessibility, provision of digital information, provision of digital services transactions, and digital participation/democracy. Our team of graduate and undergraduate students visited municipal websites and social media pages for all Maine's municipal governments (n=484) to create a digital services inventory. To assess grant capacity, we developed a quantitative dataset describing municipal participation in multiple grant programs, including several state programs linked to federal funding. We began our work on grant capacity by focusing on Maine's Community Resilience Partnership and Keep Maine Healthy grant programs. We have documented participation or lack of participation in the grant application process, application details (requested funding and proposed activities), and ultimate funding. We also initiated selection of additional grant programs in consultation with our partners to capture a range of grant opportunities, varying in focus, complexity of the application process, and program administration. We also drafted the qualitative interview protocols and plans for conducting interviews with municipal officials from a sample of municipalities. To date, we have drawn insights from a prior set of interviews conducted with municipal officials as part of a different project. We look forward to interviewing municipal officials early in the next reporting period to further strengthen the qualitative basis of our work. Overall, we have made significant progress improving understanding of rural municipal grant and digital capacities in Maine. (2) Assess variation and inequities in municipal grant and digital services capacities To further examine municipal grant and digital services capacities, we have started to assess the variation and inequities in these capacities. We created quantitative databases integrating the information collected to date on digital and grant capacities. We have conducted basic statistical and spatial analyses to assess differences regionally and along socioeconomic gradients (population levels, income, race and ethnicity, educational attainment). We have also started to estimate statistical regression models of the two capacities as a function of various predictive factors, including community population size, municipal resources (e.g., municipal government structure type, municipal staffing, and municipal budget), community context (e.g., proximity to transportation networks, broadband infrastructure, urban centers, and community organizations); demographics (e.g., age structure, income dist); and economic structure. To support these analyses, we have integrated our data on municipal digital and grant capacities with secondary municipal data from various sources, including the US Census Bureau ACS, Maine Municipal Association, US Census Bureau Tiger Files, ESRI, and Maine GeoLibrary Data Catalog. We have completed exploratory regression analyses to reveal associations between our measures of digital and grant capacities and these other factors. (3) Collaborate with community-serving organizations to better understand the implications of inequities in municipal capacities for rural economic development and community resilience; We collaborated with our project partners from state offices and non-profit organizations to get feedback on the overall project plans and to learn more about effective and useful strategies to engage broadly with community-serving organizations. We are continuing to update our plans for understanding the implications of inequities in municipal equities. Multiple partners recommended engaging with these organizations through their events and in rural communities. We are strategically planning and developing connections to support these collaborative networking opportunities and strengthen rural capacity building. (4) Co-develop outreach communications to share new knowledge about rural community capacities with organizations, policymakers, municipalities, and researchers. We have made progress co-developing outreach communications with partners to share our knowledge and experiences beyond the core project team. By design we embrace a collaborative research approach that is extremely responsive to the suggestions of our partners regarding our research and the design of communication materials. Our partners, who operate statewide in rural communities, are often in a relatively stronger position to disseminate materials to state and municipal officials, non-government organizations, and other rural audiences. Working with our partner from the Island Institute who is collaborating with other organizations in Maine around rural broadband and digital equity initiatives, we participated in three different community events. As part of these events, we made oral presentations to diverse audiences and shared links to our team's publications on municipal capacities. In multiple instances, our work and engagement has been featured subsequently in publications for Maine municipal officials (Maine Municipal Association's Maine Town & City magazine). We presented our work to peers at The Rural Sociological Society (RSS) 2023 Conference and to peers and practitioners at the 2023 Maine Sustainability and Water Conference. Our students led the development of multiple poster presentations to share our initial findings with peers at the University of Maine and University of Southern Maine 2023 student research symposia. We also attended the 2023 Maine Broadband Summit to understand information needs and network with community members and community-serving organizations. We published one peer-reviewed publication in Government Information Quarterly, have two advanced manuscripts almost ready for submission, and numerous additional draft manuscripts in the pipeline. In summary, we have made progress on co-developing outreach communications for a range of audiences and look forward to continuing to develop our outreach communications portfolio.

Publications

  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2024 Citation: Levesque, V. R., Bell, K. P., and Johnson, E. S. 2024. The role of municipal digital services in advancing rural resilience. Government Information Quarterly, 41(1): 101883.DOI: 10.1016/j.giq.2023.101883
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2023 Citation: Levesque, V., Johnson. E., and K.P. Bell 2023. Advancing understanding of rural resilience with real-time measures. 85th Annual Meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, Burlington, VT, August 3, 2023.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2024 Citation: Syed, D., Prescott, E., Lopez, J., Stone, A., Frank, C., Parker, K., Olney, E., Levesque, V., Bell, K.P., Johnson, E., and J. Leahy. 2024. Communicating Resilience: Innovative rural municipal digital communication, 2024 Maine Sustainability and Water Conference, Augusta, ME, United States, March 28, 2024 (poster presentation).
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2024 Citation: Griffith, R., Sheahan, C., MacPhee, K., Pellerin, K., Bell, K.P., Leahy, J., Johnson, E., and V. Levesque. 2024. Fostering community resilience: learning from Maine's municipal governments, 2024 Maine Sustainability and Water Conference, Augusta, ME, United States, March 28, 2024 (poster presentation).
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2024 Citation: Stone, A., Prescott, E., Lopez, J., Syed, D., Frank, C., Parker, K., Olney, E., Levesque, V., Bell, K.P., Johnson, E., and J. Leahy. 2024. Communicating Resilience: Innovative rural municipal digital communication, University of Maine Student Symposium, Orono, ME, United States, April 12, 2024 (poster presentation).
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2024 Citation: Griffith, R., Sheahan, C., MacPhee, K., Pellerin, K., Bell, K.P., Leahy, J., Johnson, E., and V. Levesque. 2024. Fostering community resilience: learning from Maine's municipal governments, University of Maine Student Symposium, Orono, ME, United States, April 12, 2024 (poster presentation).
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2024 Citation: MacPhee, K., Griffith, R., Sheahan, C., Pellerin, K., Bell, K.P., Leahy, J., Johnson, E., and V. Levesque. 2024. Fostering community resilience: learning from Maine's municipal governments, University of Southern Maine Thinking Matters Symposium, Portland, ME, United States, April 19, 2024 (poster presentation).
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2024 Citation: Frank, C., Syed, D., Parker, K., Lopez, J., Prescott, E., Stone, A., Olney, E., Levesque, V., Bell, K.P., Johnson, E., and J. Leahy. 2024. Communicating Resilience: Innovative rural municipal digital communication, University of Southern Maine Thinking Matters Symposium, Portland, ME, United States, April 19, 2024 (poster presentation).
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2024 Citation: Ambrette, B., Johnson E.S., Levesque, V, Bell, K.P., Leahy, J. Hertz, E., Bell, J., Frank, C., Griffith, R., Lopez, J., MacPhee, K., Olney, E. Parker, K., Pellerin, K.. Prescott, E., Sheahan, C., Stone, A., Syed, D., West, W. Assessing the Equity Dimensions of Maines Community Resilience Partnership Program. National Adaptation Forum, St. Paul, MN, United States, May 14, 2024.