DONATE TODAY Earlier this year, the Rural Assembly hosted a book discussion group around The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Wall Kimmerer asks, “Can we imagine a system which nurtures a different economic identity and reclaim ourselves as neighbors, with shared investment in mutual well-being?” We must imagine this way of being. For that reason, I am extremely proud of the work my colleagues at the Daily Yonder are doing in nurturing, reclaiming, and investing in rural through their reporting.

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Art Cullen is editor and co-owner of the…

What do queer Appalachians and a serpent-handling preacher have in common? More than you might think. “American culture really wants to deposit us at total opposite ends of the spectrum,” artist Aaron McIntosh says. “But actually, we both are in the same milieu in American culture, of existing at the fringes, whether wanted or not.” McIntosh’s installation, “Invasive Queer Kudzu,” is at the heart of a new exhibit exploring the intersection of place and identity at the Reece Museum on the campus of East Tennessee State University.

My colleague Smmo Ozawa and I spent the past year recording oral histories about immigration in the rural United States. One of my favorite interviews happened at the police station in Fort Morgan, a small, Eastern Colorado town where I spent the first decade of my childhood. Sheriff Dave Martin, who ran as a Republican, talked about a childhood spent working on his grandfather’s Morgan County ranch, struggling to keep up with the Mexican family who migrated there every year to help harvest sugar beets.

October was LGBTQ History month thanks to a history teacher from rural Missouri. Rodney Wilson made history in 1994 when he came out as gay to his St. Louis high school classroom, not far from where he grew up in rural Potosi, Missouri. August 1994 cover of The Riverfront Times,

Editor’s note: The third annual “Best in Rural Writing Contest” was presented by the rural literary journal The Milk House with promotional support from the Daily Yonder. “The Escapee’s Lover” by Dennis McFadden was selected as Best Short Story by judge Jamie Guiney in the 2025 Best in Rural Writing Contest, and “God, Guns, and Baseball” by Lena (Sunada-Matsumura) Newlin…

Editor’s note: The third annual “Best in Rural Writing Contest” was presented by the rural literary journal The Milk House with promotional support from the Daily Yonder. “The Escapee’s Lover” by Dennis McFadden was selected as Best Short Story by judge Jamie Guiney in the 2025 Best in Rural Writing Contest, and “God, Guns, and Baseball” by Lena (Sunada-Matsumura) Newlin…

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it really costs to stay alive in this country. Not in the spiritual sense – in the literal one. The bills. The trade-offs. The quiet math families do when pain meets the price tag. When I was 20, I broke my ankle. I had insurance. I did everything I was supposed to. Still, I’m paying for it – literally – years later.

DONATE TODAY Joe and Helen Pickering, my wife’s parents, were among the first donors to the Daily Yonder. When we were not sure we could get through year two, they were full of enthusiasm and encouragement. In the shaky times you need pals. Joe was in the Navy in World War II. Helen was editor-in-chief of the Stanford Daily when the boys were overseas.

Each year, an estimated 80 million U.S. utility customers have trouble affording their monthly heat and electricity bills. Now, as the cost of energy climbs, experts say more people are at risk of energy insecurity and poverty, defined by the struggle or inability to keep up with electric, heating, and cooling bills. Rural utility customers face unique challenges around access to fuel and affordability programs, and they often live in older, less energy-efficient homes than their urban and suburban counterparts. 

This story was originally published by KFF Health News. The Trump administration is touting its $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program as the largest-ever U.S. investment in rural health care. But the government made minimal mention of Native American tribes in sparsely populated areas and in need of significant improvements to health care access. Federally recognized tribes can’t directly apply for a share of the rural health fund — only states can.

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Alex Seitz-Wald is the Deputy Editor of the…

This story was originally published by ProPublica in collaboration with Anchorage Daily News, KYUK, and NPR’s Station Investigations Team. For more than a decade, the Kuspuk School District asked Alaska’s education department for the money to fix a rotting elementary school. The school, in the small and predominantly Indigenous community of Aniak in western Alaska, was in deep need of repairs.

The release of the Netflix epic's fifth and final season completes a love letter to science fiction, small-town life, and coming of age in the 1980s.

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox. In 2018, I was the manager of an urban farm in Greenville, South Carolina, that employed local teens through a workforce development program. One day, while trying to teach them about the American food system, I asked where they thought the ingredients for bread came from.

This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Distributing food stamps soon could get even harder for Missouri’s food aid system, which a federal judge has already called “broken and inaccessible.” States depend heavily on federal funds to operate their food stamp programs, which help feed about 42 million people nationwide. But a new federal law has restructured the nation’s food assistance, requiring more people to work to qualify for aid and shifting more of the program’s cost onto states over the next decade.

Texas voters approved a constitutional amendment dedicating $1 billion annually for the next 20 years to the Texas Water Fund, a new fund designed to support critical water projects across the state. This vote comes as rural communities face dwindling water supply, infrastructure challenges, and population growth that could affect their water sustainability. “The state’s water infrastructure system is not prepared to handle the efficiency and conservation goals that we need to have in our rural communities,” said Sarah Rountree Schlessinger, the chief executive officer of the…

DONATE TODAY Dear friend, Our mission at the Daily Yonder is to write stories about and for rural America. That means we don’t just write for our own audience – we write for people who may not have heard of us, and in doing so we support local newspapers, radio stations, and other outlets whose coverage is vital to their communities.

Problem-solving is practiced and preached at Bradleyville, a small school district tucked among rolling rural hills in south-central Missouri. When faced with a staffing shortage – due in part to a need for affordable, accessible childcare – the school opened an on-site daycare with subsidized rates. “We don’t get any federal or state funding,” said Gina Norwine, the school’s principal. “We felt like there was a need, and that we really wanted to try and do that for our community.” …

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. The email version of this interview misidentified Sandra as Gage and Gage as Sandra in their respective photos.

As rural areas across the country face worsening provider shortages and reductions in health care services, one community hospital in Billings, Montana, is celebrating the success of two new residency programs training the next generation of rural physicians. Roughly 65% of rural counties face a shortage of primary care physicians, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report.

This story was originally published by ICT. Roughly 25 years ago, only 1 percent of all small businesses on the Cheyenne River Reservation in northwestern South Dakota were Native owned despite Native people making up more than 90 percent of the reservation population. That all changed when Four Bands Community Fund, a Native Community Development Financial Institution, came to town. 

Down a winding dirt road and dense forest canopy in Denmark, Maine, a two-story cabin sits on top of a hill, adorned with moose antlers. Bob Libby, who has owned the property since the late 1990s, refers to the building as his camp in the woods. He and his adult son spend November weekends there during hunting season. Libby’s hope is that the camp will stay in the family for generations to come.

On December 1st, the Dungeness crab season will start in Newport, Oregon. Crab season is a point of pride for the small city of around 10,000 people on Oregon’s central coast, which has declared itself the Dungeness Crab Capitol of the World. But residents are all too aware of the perils that can accompany Dungeness crabbing, which is one of the…

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News. It is unusual to have a utility-scale solar array in Kentucky, and even more unusual that the grounds crew here is a live-in flock of more than a thousand sheep. On a recent afternoon, the sheep lounged beneath the shade created by solar panels, supervised by three dogs: Honey, Junior and Roxy.