The White House Rural Council recently announced that initially $10 billion has been committed by CoBank to create the new Rural Infrastructure Opportunity Fund a vehicle for private entities to invest in job-creating rural projects across the country.
Target investments will include hospitals, schools, broadband expansion, rural water and wastewater systems, energy projects, local and regional food systems, and other rural infrastructure.
HHS will use $9.9 million to improve healthcare quality and to address rural health disparities. Of that amount, $5.5 million will go to the Delta State rural Development Network Grant program investing in the eight states in the Delta region to address health disparities.
Also, $4.3 million will go to the Small Health Care Provider Quality Improvement grant program supporting 29 grants to help rural health clinics, community health centers, and small rural hospitals improve healthcare outcomes for rural residents with chronic diseases.
In addition, the Rural Health Philanthropy Partnership has been established. This partnership between the HHS and their office of Rural Health Policy, Grantmakers in Health, and the National Rural Health Association has been established to improve healthcare in rural communities. In 2015, the Partnership will provide a rural funding Challenge with HHS dedicating $5 million but HHS is also seeking a matched effort from the philanthropic community.
More than 25 cities and 60 national research universities partnered to form US Ignite to create a new wave of services that will extend programmable broadband networks to 100 times the speed of today’s internet.
To further leverage private-sector involvement, a three day Application Summit was conducted this past June at Juniper Networks in Silicon Valley. Many connections were made at this meeting to strengthen rural and urban communities by applying innovative ideas to effectively expand broadband.