At Berea College in eastern Kentucky, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that 26 community development organizations will be able to draw on $401 million in funding to reduce rural poverty through building or improving essential facilities and services, such as education and health care. Ninety percent of U.S. counties with long-term poverty—rates above 20 percent for 30 years—are in rural America.
Targeted “game-changing” levels of funding “can have a real impact on reducing poverty,” said Vilsack. Under the Community Facilities program, the 26 development organizations can tap the $401 million to provide long-term, low-interest loans to local groups with projects in some of the poorest and most isolated communities in the nation.
The funding has two unusual features, said the USDA. One is that private lenders will provide guarantees for a portion of the loans. The other is that the community groups that receive the loans also have a chance to win a grant from a $22 million fund, run by the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, “to assist in managing and capacity building.”