Rural businesses struggle with population losses and lack of qualified staffing, nonprofit's study finds

Rural small businesses continue to report more negative consequences from population loss and a shrinking market of skilled labor. "With rural America losing population, rural entrepreneurs (45.3%) are significantly more likely than non-rural entrepreneurs (25.5%) to say that population trends impact their business," reveals a newly released research study of rural businesses by Score, a nonprofit organization that fosters small businesses and started life as the Service Corps of Retired Executives. The research also showed that "rural businesses are hurting for workers: population shifts create challenges for small rural employers, over a third of which (35.9%) say there are few qualified workers in their area."

Rural Vermont and New Hampshire grapple with
staffing shortages. (Image fromThe Directory.Org)

In South Royalton, Vt., pop. 600, rural labor challenges have reduced the town's ability to provide school children's dental care. The town had been utilizing HealthHub, a non-profit mobile dental-hygiene clinic, but HealthHub had to reduce its care schedule due to staffing shortages, reports Nora Doyle-Burr of  the Valley News in West Lebanon, N.H., and White River Junction, Vt. HealthHub's president told Doyle-Burr, "HealthHub now has funds and equipment sufficient to double the dental care it was providing to school children in the White River Valley last year, but instead it has reduced the amount of care it is providing to just 20% of what it was last year." Doyle-Burr reports, "The mobile clinic’s full-time hygienist retired this summer and the nonprofit has been unable to find someone to replace her. As part of a planned expansion, the clinic also had hoped to hire a dentist or dental therapist to staff another mobile unit, as well as another mental health provider, but has so far been unable to do so."

Across the Connecticut River, "The Ammonoosuc Community Health Services dental clinic in Littleton, N.H., has closed due to staffing shortages," Doyle-Burr reports. "And the Mascoma Community Health Center in Canaan suspended its dental service indefinitely in July after the dentist there left and it was unable to recruit a dentist or a hygienist."

John Mozena, president of the Center for Economic Accountability, a think tank that promotes free-market ideas, who was not involved in the report’s methodology, told Kristi Eaton of The Daily Yonder, “The single biggest challenge for rural communities in the modern era is the fact that the very nature of a rural community is that there just aren’t a lot of people.”