Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Accomplishments

Recent crises—the Great Recession, the pandemic, and natural disasters—highlight the urgent need for sustainable systems in the U.S., especially in rural communities, to protect human rights and resilience. Rural areas face unique vulnerabilities, including poverty, limited access to healthcare, education, broadband, and healthy food, with disparities especially affecting racial and ethnic minority groups. Sustainability requires balancing environmental, economic, and social systems, and rural population growth intensifies this need. Families, as core social systems, play a critical role in resilience and well-being. Family systems theory emphasizes adaptability and stability, making families essential to sustainability efforts. Understanding how family systems interact with broader sustainable systems is key to promoting health and equity in rural communities.

Through this current project, we aim to examine environmental, economic, and social sustainable systems and individual, family, and community resilience across the rural United States. To begin meeting our 5-year objectives, our team has had the following accomplishments:

Objective 1: Examine Rural, Low-Income Family Systems Functioning and Resilience

We have begun examining variations family system functioning of diverse rural, low-income families across the US and multilevel factors and processes associated with individual, family, and community resilience in rural areas. This effort continues to build justification from data collected during our most recent past RFSR project of data collection. We are exploring data from community key informants (CKIs) across five family-serving sectors: food security, community actions, education, direct service NOS, and health care. Additionally, we have cleaned and begun exploring data collected from rural low-income female caregivers across the US via Qualtrics surveys. Data encompasses variety of indicators of individual, family, and community resilience, including adverse or stressful experiences in the past year or ever (e.g., job loss), financial well-being, food security, family relationships, access to community resources and connection, social support, family relationships, and female caregivers’ mental and physical health. Team members are exploring and disseminating findings in presentations and publications (see Outputs and Section VI. below).

Objective 2: Investigate the Implications of Rural Sustainability for Family Systems Functioning and Resilience
We began to investigate the implications of the three pillars of sustainability (environment, economic, and social sustainable systems), separately and system-to-system interactions—for variations in family system functioning and individual, family, and community resilience. To provide broader context the quantitative Qualtrics data analyses above, a small group, led by Dr. Lori Yancura and graduate students, provided initial integration of data from the Community Health Rankings and Roadmaps collated by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute to further understand sustainability factors related to individual families. Additionally, multiple research papers have begun to explore these both environmental (recent adverse experiences relative to natural disasters as led by Dr. Heidi Radanovich) and economic (household economic wellbeing as led by Dr. Carolyn Bird) pillars related to social systems within our Qualtrics data to begin to understand where connections to broader national data may be beneficial.

Objective 3: Strengthen Rural Sustainable Systems, Family Functioning, and Resilience

We began efforts to translate research to practice and its dissemination through collaboration with rural family-serving professionals to identify strategies to strengthen rural sustainability systems, family functioning, and multilevel resilience. While it was not funded, an accomplishment of this year was submitting a Western Region Development Center grant, “Best Practices for Extension Science Communication in Rural Communities”. This collaboration, led by Dr. Brianna Routh and Ms. Carrie Ashe in MT, across western state RFSS partners as well as 6 additional member states began efforts to systematically form an advisory council to inform lived-experience within the project scope and to consider how data could be collected from Extension professionals. Further, the led to a pilot project within Montana to collect data from Extension agents on delivery of research-based outreach to adults in rural areas, collected Fall 2025 and anticipated dissemination and dissertation publication in 2026. Additionally, the webinar team led by Dr. Maggie Magoon has been exploring strategies to further understand needs and opportunities of professional participants engaging in these regular translational outreach opportunities.

 Meeting these objectives helped us achieve the five impacts listed below.

Impact 1: Improved knowledge of rural, low-income family functioning and individual, family and community resilience.

The CKI interviews and Qualtrics data (see Objective 1) have provided great insight into expanding knowledge and insights of sustainable resilience. For example, one recently published paper explored how rural community food systems were able to navigate and adapt during times of community stress, particularly the pandemic, to still meet needs of families in their communities. Disseminating findings from the data we collected to diverse audiences will continue to contribute to moving from a deficit- to a strengths-based perspective.

Impact 2: Improved understanding of the impact of rural environmental, economic, and social sustainability on family system functioning and individual, family, and community resilience. Further highlight strengths and opportunities rural communities might plan to undertake in support of rural family well-being.

The webinar continues to facilitate new partnerships and educate audiences from across the country. We continued our quarterly national webinar series entitled Relying on Rural Sustainability (formerly Resilience): Translating 30+ years of research into practice to expand understanding and impact of our translational dissemination efforts. Each series installment generates interest from professionals across the country, regularly ranging from 25-90 registrants. Although not all registrants attend the live event (usually 20-50 live participants), all receive the research presentation recording, cited resources, and a newly developed handout that captures action ideas brainstormed by their participating peers.

Impact 3: Development of undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral trained researchers in multimethod data collection, analysis, and dissemination focused on rural, low-income families.

Our team prioritizes training students at all levels. We engage student researchers by training and engaging them in the data cleaning process, mentoring students as co-authors/data analysts on our manuscripts, and guiding them in theses and dissertations. In the past year, we used Rural Families Speak about Health and Resilience project data and dissemination in graduate methods courses—both quantitative and qualitative. This year, graduate students working with RFSS team members in both Hawaii and Florida worked on data the family Qualtrics cleaning efforts for further analysis, with Dr. Lori Yancura leading a student in merging Qualtrics data with the Community Health Rankings data. Additionally, multiple faculty from Oregon, Washington, and North Carolina are supporting graduate students at various stages of their thesis or doctoral studies in analyzing research questions from the Qualtrics family data, including “To what extent is sense of purpose associated with individual resilience?” And “Does access to childcare moderate the relation between financial well-being and mental health?”. As further noted in objective 3, Montana faculty is working with a PhD graduate student to expand translational efforts with rural families through Extension outreach by piloting the collection and analysis of new professional data.

Impact 4: New and strengthened partnerships with county and state stakeholders and organizations to improve sustainable systems and promote family functioning and resilience of rural families and communities.

While we have yet to form an official advisory group, we have taken steps to move this process forward. Namely, through a multi-state collaborative grant application, we were able to think through a process for what the goals of this group might be in partnership with our RFSS team and what characteristics ideal group members might have. Additionally, we further brainstormed what stakeholders and partnerships might be most beneficial to regularly invite to our webinar series as an opportunity to further spread reach and impact of our translational research on systems and family functioning to broader audiences.

Impact 5: Informed extension educators and community partners via presentations, publications, and locally based curricula, to mobilize rural community capacity in a strengths-based manner.

In addition to previously mentioned dissemination through presentations and publications to research and outreach professional audiences, multiple states have continued to develop locally based curricula highlighting rural strengths and opportunities aligning with research from this project. For example, Tennessee Extension partners developed new resources for eating well on a budget and Montana Extension developed Meals in Minutes providing local food-based recipes for use with pressure cookers, provided through SNAP-Ed classes.

Impact 6: Improved policy considering the multi-level systems associated with the health, well-being, and resilience of rural low-income families.

We began initial conversations of how to ensure that family policy implications were a prominent part of our work moving forward. One strategy discussed was developing policy briefs on topic areas of RFSS research as well as continuing to ensure policy implications are a part of all relevant dissemination pieces produced from this project moving forward.

Short-Term Outcomes

In the past year, we reached approximately 133 webinar registrants with our Relying on Rural Sustainability webinars with evidence-based practices to support rural, low-income families—from our research as well as from the professional attendees. In addition, we also reached professionals with 13 publications at various stages, 5 juried and international presentations, and 4 other types of outreach. We aim to continue building on these successes and have additional measurable benefits to rural, low-income families by disseminating research to family-serving organizations and legislators about how to promote resilience in health, finances, food security, and family relationships.

Outputs

Our team continued to clean and analyze qualitative community and quantitative family survey datasets collected during NC1171 (2019-24) as well as create a new combine data set with Community Health Rankings data from national sources. Additionally, we continue to be productive in disseminating our research via a variety of outputs. We are reaching different audiences via publishing in peer-reviewed journals, presenting at national and local conferences and webinars, advising and educating the next generation of rural family scholars and practitioners. Our outputs demonstrate that we continue to elevate the needs of rural, low-income families, who are persistently overlooked, and, importantly, that we take a strengths-based approach in our dissemination. We anticipate that expanding dissemination will allow us to communicate the needs, protective factors, and resilience of rural, low-income families to policymakers and practitioners.

The Rural Families Speak about Sustainability team of scholars with both research and Extension appointments have been productive this year addressing the challenges faced by low-income rural families.

Collaborative teams have published five journal articles, one publication is in press, three under review, and at least four manuscripts in preparation. Our team excelled in disseminating our research via 5 juried local and national presentations. We had three successful webinars on tobacco prevention programs, rural food systems, and sense of purpose related to work-family conflict. In addition, members were awarded a total of $1.6 million to conduct research on the physical and mental health needs of rural families. All are listed below, as well as data and documentation outputs.

Data and Documentation

The Qualtrics dataset of 1,133 rural female caregivers across the United States includes measures of adversity, individual and family resilience, food security, financial well-being, family relationships, and community resources and constraints. Thus far, we have further improved two outputs: a cleaned dataset with added national data measures from County Health Rankings and an accompanying detailed measures book. The dataset is now available to researchers in multiple platforms (SPSS, STATA, Excel) for easier analysis.

Publications

Published Journal Articles and White Papers (5)

1. Routh, B., Sano, Y., Pylate, L., Contreras, D., Feeney, S., Greder, K., Cancel-Tirado, D., and Wiles, B. (2025). Supporting resilient food systems: Navigating challenges in U.S. rural communities. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 14(3), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2025.143.038 .
2. Pylate, L., Hardman, A. M., Staton, L., Downey, L., & Wilmoth, J. D. (2025). College Students and Families Navigate Recovery from Alcohol and Other Drugs. Journal of Rural Social Sciences, 40(1), 3.
3. Greder, K., Zhang, D., Peng, C., & Oswald, R. F. (2025). Relationship between coparent communication and teamwork, food insecurity, and depressive symptoms among rural low-income mothers. Journal of Rural Mental Health, 49(1). Published online December, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1037/rmh0000282.
4. Dyk, P.H., Radunovich, H., Pylate, L., & Sano, Y. (2025). Rural Low-Income Families Navigating the Healthcare Landscape. Family Focus.
5. Somerfeld, H.*, Vaterlaus, JM., Wanago, NC., Routh, B., and Brennan, A. (2025) COVID-19 Pandemic and Recovery Experiences: A Case Study with Montana Family and Consumer Science Cooperative Extension Agents. Journal of Human Sciences and Extension.

Journal Publications in Press (1)

Routh, B., Christiaens, H.*, & Shirley, B. (Accepted 2025). Enhancing Digital Outreach through Service-Learning: An Extension and English Department Collaboration. Journal of Extension.

Publications under Review (3)

1. Feeney, S.L., Chandler, K. D. Cancel-Tirado, D. I., Alexander, J. (under review) Work-family conflict among rural low-income mothers in the United States: Striving for financial security and family well-being. In A.M. Claridge and M. Tammelin (Eds), Parenting and Family Life: Economic Disadvantage and Poverty in Global Perspective. Edward Elgar Publishing.

2. Routh, B., Greder, K., Reina, A., Katras, M.J., and Dyk, P. (under review) Striving to Be Healthy: Experiences of Rural Low-income Mothers. Journal of Extension.

3. McKibbin, C. Routh, B. Hemphill, L., Teply. A., Dabrowski, B., Burns, K., and Koltz. D, (Submit 2025) A Quasi-Experimental Design Protocol to Evaluate a Two-State Rural Kinship Navigator Program. Families in Society.