Why rural communities matter across every issue area and what this moment asks of funders
By: Amanda Ahern and Kyla Kasharian, Senior Knowledge and Impact Associates at Siegel Family Endowment
Too often in philanthropy rural funding is treated as a niche issue. Something handled by a small number of foundations with explicit rural missions.
Yet, the future of the country’s energy systems, food systems, workforce, and digital infrastructure is deeply tied to rural communities. Last year, Meta alone acquired nearly 3,000 acres of farmland for its largest ever data center built over rice fields in rural Mississippi. This rapid reindustrialization reshapes economic development, land use, and food systems—areas where philanthropy has often struggled to keep pace.
Between 2014 and 2021, private foundations funneled an average of $8.2 million annually to urban-based food and agriculture organizations. Yet, this funding often overlooks the source of that food: rural areas, where competition for land and resources is intensifying.
Somewhere in each foundation’s impact or in the systems they are trying to influence, rural ecosystems played a role. In that sense, every foundation is already a rural funder.
In 2025, we convened a series of consultations with rural practitioners to better understand how philanthropy can engage with these communities more effectively. The resulting online series, including Rural Innovation Is Happening. Why Don’t We Hear More About It? and Shaping AI on Rural Terms, surfaced a common theme: rural communities are not passive recipients of technological change. They are sites of experimentation, ingenuity, and innovation, actively shaping the future on their own terms.
This moment represents an opportunity to more intentionally engage with rural communities through strategies that learn from the past as we seek to build better futures.
The Story We Tell Shapes the Investments We Make
For decades, the dominant story about rural America has been narrow, outdated, and misleading. Rural places are often portrayed as monolithic, economically stagnant, or resistant to change.
Folks living and working in rural communities know that story is incomplete. What is missing is not innovation. It is awareness, infrastructure, transfers of power, and flows of capital so that rural communities can shape how technology shows up in their lives—and have a hand in who benefits from it. Across the country, rural entrepreneurs, educators, farmers, and civic leaders are already experimenting with new technologies, new ownership models, and new ways of building local economies. But those stories rarely break through national narratives.
That matters because narratives shape capital flows. When rural communities are seen as peripheral to innovation, investment follows that assumption. Philanthropy, venture capital, and public funding cluster in the same regions and funnel dollars to the same networks again and again. Per the USDA’s recent assessment of rural philanthropy, “Between 2014 and 2021, just over half of all grantmaking organizations were based in just 9 states and half of rural-based grantmaking organizations were located in just 13 states.” This matters because “91 percent of all grants by volume, and 96 percent by dollar amount, are accounted for in this urban-to-urban geographic flow.”
Changing that narrative goes beyond a communications exercise. It means adapting the mental models that guide investment decisions, recognizing rural communities as places where the future is already being built.
Short-Term Funding Cannot Build Long-Term Systems
Redirecting funding to meet the moment is also not the answer. Many rural leaders are understandably skeptical of new waves of interest from funders and investors.
They have seen this pattern before: a burst of attention, an influx of capital, and then a quiet exit when priorities shift. Whether from philanthropy or venture capital, these cycles often leave communities worse off, having invested time and local trust into partnerships that disappear when the next trend emerges.
Year over year, only a small share of philanthropic dollars reach rural communities, and much of that funding is directed toward urgent needs like disaster recovery, economic shocks, crisis intervention, or emergency services. In many regions, philanthropy has stepped in to fill gaps left by delayed or insufficient federal support. Those investments are necessary, but they often leave little room for longer-term strategy.
Rural communities do not see themselves as places that need to be “saved.” What they consistently ask for is something far simpler: the sustained resources to build on the innovation capacity that already exists.
The potential for innovation and more importantly, rural thriving, is real. What is missing is long-term investments that recognize rural communities as true partners, core to their mission and values, rather than temporary opportunities.
Capacity and Metrics Are Core Constraints
Despite their strengths, many rural organizations face severe capacity constraints. These challenges are further compounded because the philanthropic sector often uses the wrong yardsticks for success.
Small nonprofit teams are routinely responsible for communications, fundraising, programming, and community engagement all at once. Writing complex grant proposals, conducting economic analyses, or navigating national funding networks can be difficult when staff and time are limited. Traditional philanthropic metrics that heavily favor massive reach and scale inherently screen out and disadvantage rural organizations simply because their target populations are smaller. A smaller denominator does not mean the depth, nuance, or ultimate impact of the work is weak.
Schools and community institutions face similar systemic hurdles. Funding formulas often rely on population density rather than community need, leaving rural schools with fewer resources for professional development, technical support, and strategic planning.
This reality reflects a rigid funding ecosystem. There is a clear opportunity to reframe how we measure success and collaboratively assess impact in ways that are more innovative and inclusive of rural realities.
Philanthropy can play a crucial role here by shifting away from rigid, transactional metrics and toward flexible funding and general operations support. By investing in local intermediaries, capacity-building organizations, and peer networks, funders can help rural leaders develop and sustain their ideas on their own terms. You do not have to be a self-identified rural funder to do this. Any funder who cares about a specific issue, from education to healthcare to food security, must recognize how that issue plays out in rural space and trade narrow metrics for authentic, impactful partnership.
Co-Design Is Essential
The most consistent message we heard from rural practitioners is straightforward: solutions designed elsewhere rarely translate cleanly into rural contexts.
Place matters. Local histories matter. Informal networks of trust and leadership matter.
Philanthropy can help shift this dynamic by investing in long-term relationships, convening coalitions across stakeholders, and making co-design with rural communities the default approach rather than the exception.
A Window of Opportunity
The full picture of AI’s impact is still coming into focus. Much remains uncertain, and the future of work, education, and land use is being reshaped in real time. That creates a rare window to influence how benefits of this emerging technology are distributed and who has a voice in shaping innovations.
At Siegel, our mission is to understand and shape the role of technology on society, and we believe that rural ecosystems are core to our mission. We ask our peers in philanthropy to consider how rural systems, leaders, grassroots organizations are influencing the sectors and fields that you care about and in kind, how the systems you care about play out in rural communities.
If philanthropy continues to rural areas as external to their strategies or approach rural communities through cycles of short-term attention and extractive investment, we risk repeating familiar mistakes. At Siegel, we believe if we invest in rural capacity, infrastructure, and leadership, and treat rural practitioners as partners in shaping the future, then rural communities could become some of the most important anchors for building a more inclusive technology economy.
How could investing in rural systems lend a new perspective to your own work?
