Building Rural America's Next 250 Years
How investing in entrepreneurship, local partnerships, and community systems creates opportunity across rural west central Missouri.
For 250 years, rural Americans have built businesses, solved problems, and strengthened the communities they call home.
That story is still being written today.
Rural residents are more likely to start businesses than their urban counterparts. Those businesses do far more than create a paycheck. They create local jobs, provide essential goods and services, support schools and community organizations, and help keep small towns vibrant. Today, small businesses make up nearly 85% of all establishments in rural counties and employ more than half of the rural workforce.
But thriving rural communities don't happen through entrepreneurship alone.
Businesses succeed when the communities around them are strong. That means reliable transportation, quality child care, access to capital, healthy local food systems, and regional partnerships that help communities solve challenges together. Each of those pieces strengthens the others.
What Is a Rural Development Hub?
That's why we're honored to have New Growth recognized by the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group as one of Missouri's Rural Development Hubs.
A Rural Development Hub isn't a building or a location. It's an organization rooted in its region that works across communities to bring together partners, resources, and local leadership to help move shared priorities into action.
Putting That Work into Practice
At New Growth, that work happens every day and always alongside partners who share a commitment to stronger rural communities.
The New Growth Women's Business Center helps entrepreneurs and small businesses start, grow, and succeed while working with partners to strengthen child care systems that support families, employers, and local economies. Through New Growth Capital, we're expanding access to credit building, responsible financing, and business capital while working to become a certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) so rural entrepreneurs have greater access to the financial resources they need to grow.
New Growth Food Systems, including our leadership of the Heartland Food Business Coalition, helps farmers and food businesses achieve sustainable growth by expanding access to local and regional markets, strengthening the regional food system in the process.
Through New Growth Transit, we coordinate a volunteer driver network that connects rural residents with work, health care, shopping, and other essential destinations.
Together with local, regional, and national partners, we help connect ideas, resources, and opportunities that no single organization could accomplish alone.
Building the Next Chapter
As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, we have an opportunity to honor the legacy of those who came before us by building on the strengths that already exist in our rural communities. By investing in rural regions, including places like west-central Missouri, and in the systems that create opportunity close to home, we can help ensure the next chapter of rural America's story is one where our children and grandchildren have the opportunity to build businesses, careers, raise families, and pursue their dreams in the rural communities they call home.
To learn more about Rural Development Hubs and why they matter, visit the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group's overview of Rural Development Hubs and explore its national map featuring organizations, including New Growth, that are helping rural regions build stronger futures.
Help Create Opportunity Close to Home
Creating opportunity close to home takes all of us. If you'd like to help strengthen entrepreneurship, transportation, child care, local food systems, and other community solutions that help rural communities thrive, we invite you to support New Growth's work across west-central Missouri.
You can be part of supporting the rural communities you call home. Support the work and invest in rural.