Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

During its fourth year, committee members published 22 refereed journal articles and an equal number of policy briefs and outreach articles related to the committee's objectives (see attached publications list). This output represents the committee's extensive on-going, inter-disciplinary research, including several collaborative efforts that have received external funding. In addition to the publications, members made over 60 presentations at international conferences and in sessions at the annual meetings of the Community Development Society, the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Regional Studies Association, the Ecological Society of America, the Rural Sociological Society, the Population Association of America, the Gerontological Society of America, the Association of American Geographers, and several other professional groups. Significant progress was made on the publication of the committee's collaborative research on the causes and consequences of rural aging (in a book titled Rural Aging in 21st Century America) and on the International Handbook on Rural Demography (see attached minutes). The former will be published by Springer in early 2012 and the latter by Springer in November or December of 2011. At the 4th annual meeting in July, the committee made substantial progress in planning next year's policy-research conference in Washington, DC. The two-day event is being hosted by USDA-ERS and will focus on the causes and impacts of rural aging, with race/ethnicity as a major component. It is designed to share the committee's major research findings on rural aging and to receive feedback from rural policy experts representing USDA and several other federal agencies with significant rural policy agendas. An extensive number of outreach and research dissemination efforts were undertaken, including presentations to the White House Council of Economic Advisors, USDA Rural Development Administrators, USDA-NIFA, USDA Rural Development State Directors Meeting, HUD/EPA/DOT's Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the National Academies of Science Geographical Sciences Committee, the ERS-USDA 50th Anniversary Conference, the New York State of Upstate Conference, the Rural Assembly, the New Hampshire Sustainable Research Collaboratory, The New Hampshire Transportation and Land Use Roundtable, the Kansas Rural Electric Cooperatives Meeting, the ACS Data Users Workshop at the U.S. Census Bureau, the North Dakota Planning Conference, and several others.