USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Rural Health and Safety Education Competitive Grants (RHSE) program supports quality of life in rural communities across the United States by addressing the needs of rural Americans’ individual and family health and safety in the context of food, agriculture, natural resources, and human sciences. RHSE fosters, improves, and coordinates education programs among Federal agencies, other levels of government, and institutions and private organizations in rural areas, to disseminate information about rural health and safety. RHSE proposals are expected to be community-based outreach education programs, such as those conducted through Human Science Extension outreach.

Application deadline: April 29. For more information, read the RHSE funding opportunity announcement.

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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) propose policy changes to payment for MA and Part D drug programs for 2023 and seek public comment.  CMS also requests input on including a quality measure in MA and Part D Star Ratings that would assess how often plans are screening for common health-related social needs, such as food insecurity, housing insecurity, and transportation problems and what impact proposed payment changes for enrollees with end stage renal disease would have on rural and urban underserved populations. 

Click here:  Comments Requested: Medicare Advantage (MA) and Part D Advance Notice to provide comments.  Comments are due on March 4.

The lack of service could be particularly dangerous for individuals dependent on their cellphones to get out of domestic violence situations, experts say.

As telecommunications companies prepare to sunset their 3G networks, some activists are worried about what that will mean for residents of rural America, particularly those who may find themselves in situations of domestic violence.

According to the Federal Communications Commission, mobile carriers are shutting down their 3G networks, which rely on older technology, to make room for more advanced network services, including 5G. This means that many older cell phones will be unable to make or receive calls and texts, including calls to 911 or use data services. This will affect 3G mobile phones and certain older 4G mobile phones that do not support Voice over LTE (VoLTE or HD Voice).

The companies are shutting down the services at various times throughout 2022, with AT&T expected to shut down the 3G service by the end of February, while Verizon will wait until the end of the year.

“Access is hard anyway, just due to the remoteness of our communities,” said Lori Jump, director of StrongHearts Native Helpline, a hotline for and by American Indian and Alaska Native peoples in an interview with The Daily Yonder. “We’re not located for the most part in major cities or urban areas. So access has always been an issue for Indian Country.”

StrongHearts is a project of the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.

Jump said certain groups are going to be affected more by the 3G shutdown: People in rural areas, those living on reservations, people who are low-income, and people of color. “These are the people who are going to be most impacted by this,” she said.

Native survivors are twice as likely to experience rape or sexual assault, two and a half times more likely to experience violent crimes, and five times more likely to be victims of homicide in their lifetimes compared to all other races in the country, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

Jump noted that most of the press coverage about the change has been around 5G and its potential to interact with airlines and their ability to communicate.“And so if you’re not really looking into this, you probably don’t even know that your phone isn’t going to work eventually,” she added.

For survivors of domestic violence, there are two ways this could affect them: They may soon not have a working phone to be able to call 911 and ankle monitors for perpetrators may not work sufficiently because they are also on the 3G network and smaller communities may not have the resources to upgrade them, Jump said.

“Both of those are huge safety issues for survivors,” she added.

Verizonhas stated since 2016 that they would decommission the 3G network eventually. It was pushed back from 2019 to 2020 and then 2022.

“We worked for the past several years to help those who still have 3G devices transfer to devices capable of accessing the 4G LTE or 5G networks and continue to actively work with remaining 3G customers to migrate them to new devices and technology,” Vice President Mike Haberman wrote in a post on the carrier’s website. “As a result of those efforts, we can now report that more than 99% of our customers are using the enhanced features of 4G LTE or 5G, with less than 1% still accessing the 3G network.”

A spokesperson for AT&T, meanwhile, said in a statement to The Daily Yonder that the company has  “proactively sent numerous communications via direct mail, bill messaging, emails and text messages to help customers transition to next generation networks before 3G services end on February 22. We are working with customers to make this process easier, including in a substantial majority of cases providing free replacement devices.”

Kelley Weber is the executive director of The Hope Center in Athens, Tennessee.

Though she mentioned that many of her own employees have trouble with getting cell service in the rural areas, many of the survivors she sees at the shelter come in with phones, sometimes phones provided by the abuser as a way to always get a hold of them or monitor their social media use.

Still, she said, the change in 3G will affect some survivors because their phones won’t work. “You’re actually going to have to physically remove yourself and get to a place where you could get help,” Weber said in an interview with The Daily Yonder.

Every survivor who comes to the shelter is provided help to sign up for a government program to get a new phone, if eligible, Weber said. Previously, they might have provided the survivor with a donated phone, but donations have slowed down as people are now allowed to turn in their phones for credit toward a new phone.

Assurance Wireless is a federal Lifeline Assistance program. Lifeline is a government assistance program that provides eligible low-income customers free monthly data, unlimited texting, and free monthly minutes as well as a free phone. 

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Under Secretary for Rural Development Xochitl Torres Small announced that USDA is accepting applications for grants that will advance equity in rural communities through improvements in housing, community facilities, and community and economic development.

USDA is making the grants available under the Rural Community Development Initiative or RCDI program. Qualified intermediaries may use the funds to improve housing and community facilities, and to implement community and economic development projects in rural areas.

USDA is offering priority points to projects that advance key priorities under the Biden-Harris Administration to help communities recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, advance equity and combat climate change. These extra points will increase the likelihood of funding for projects seeking to address these critical challenges in rural America.

Eligible applicants include public bodies and tribal authorities, nonprofit organizations and qualified for-profit organizations.

Grants may be used to train sub-grantees to conduct educational training on homeownership or minority-owned business entrepreneurship. The grants also may be used to provide technical assistance to sub-grantees on the following:

• strategic plan development
• accessing alternative funding sources
• training and resources for board operations, management, financial systems and information technology

Awardees must contribute matching funds equal to the amount of the grant.

Electronic applications will be accepted via Grants.gov. Electronic applications must be submitted by 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on April 19, 2022.

The deadline for paper applications is 4 p.m. local time, April 25, 2022.

Additional information is available on page 7084 of the February 8 Federal Register. In Pennsylvania, please contact Rebecca Hurst at (717) 237-2267 or rebecca.hurst2@usda.gov, the RCDI coordinator, for additional information.

If you’d like to subscribe to USDA Rural Development updates, visit our GovDelivery subscriber page.

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) recently released its much-anticipated annual Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes. Based upon the latest scientific diabetes research and clinical trials, Standards of Care is the gold-standard for professionals in the medical field and includes vital new and updated practice guidelines to care for people with diabetes and prediabetes. Read the full ADA press release and access additional guidelines and tools for health care professionals on their professional website, DiabetesPro.

Rural areas in the U.S. have fewer nurses per capita than urban areas, and those nurses are more likely to have associate’s rather than bachelor’s degrees according to a recent study from the Rural and Minority Health Research Center at the University of South Carolina. Rural nurses, however, often have a broader range of duties and responsibilities because of the lack of specializing nurses. Given the Institute of Medicine’s goal to raise the proportion of registered nurses (RNs) with bachelor’s-level degrees to 80% by 2020, research is needed to examine the educational attainment of RNs across the U.S. and explore registered nurse to Bachelor of Science in nursing (RN-to-BSN) program activities to attract, train and place nurse trainees in rural communities. Listen to a podcast interview with research leader Jan Probst, PhD.