“We’re just trying to make sure our constituents have the safe water and essential products in their homes that are needed for the health and safety of their families,” said Gary Goosman, Mayor of the village of Amesville, population 180, and president of the Mayors’ Partnership for Progress. “The state has more than enough resources to get this done.”

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Since 2011, TANF caseloads in Ohio have been cut nearly in half, from 99,000 to 53,000 households. The drop isn’t because people are faring better, but largely due to the program’s inflexible work requirement that many struggle to meet when they can’t work, lack needed transportation to get to a job, or can’t get enough hours at the jobs they do have.

As a result, for every 100 families with children in poverty in the state, only about 22 now receive cash assistance—down from 29 in 2013, and 89 prior to bipartisan “welfare reform” in 1996. There are now many more children in Ohio living in households with zero cash income than there are children in families receiving cash assistance. (The Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services declined to provide an exact figure.) This is a problem nationwide, as evident in the rise in the number of households living on less than $2 per person, per day: from 636,000 in 1996 to nearly 1.5 million in 2011. Over the same period, the number of children in the United States living in $2-a-day poverty also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

Goosman said that this drain in assistance is having a significant effect on the local economies of many rural communities in Ohio. In the mayors’ region alone, there is now at least $50 million less annually in cash assistance and SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) benefits compared with 2011. The average SNAP benefit is just $1.40 per person, per meal—and, like TANF, the program has strict work requirements for certain recipients.

“An entire town can be impacted by the amount of money residents have to spend on groceries, or medications, or transportation. People are living closer to the edge,” said Goosman.

And yet, seven months after the mayors’ request, the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services (JFS) would only tell the coalition repeatedly that its proposal remained under consideration.

Finally, on May 4, JFS notified the mayors via email: In September—one year after its initial request—the coalition will receive $500,000 from the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) toward water bill assistance. In all, the grant will provide 2,450 households with a one-time payment of $200 “to ensure service will be maintained for a minimum of 30 days.” This seems a drop in the bucket in a state where 22 percent of neighborhoods have residents who are currently unable to cover their monthly water bill. The average water-sewer rate in Ohio in 2016 was $1,289 annually, which helps explain why the mayors were looking for individual payments of $500 to qualifying families living below 150 percent of the federal poverty line and a total of $8 million toward assistance. There was also no mention of the mayors’ $4 million funding request in support of the purchase of essential household items for cash-poor families.

JFS provided the bipartisan mayors group with no explanation as to how it reached its figure, or why the funds would be drawn from those already earmarked for cash-strapped community action agencies that provide local services like housing assistance, job training, energy assistance, child care, transportation, and more.

“It was a surprise,” said Goosman. “While we appreciate this funding and it will help us get a pilot program going, we weren’t asking for $500,000 from CSBG, we were asking for $12 million out of $570 million in unspent TANF funds.”

A spokesperson for JFS confirmed that there are indeed now $570.7 million in unused TANF funds. However, he said that those monies are committed to increased funding for child care facilities that are able to meet the state’s new quality standards in the future. But the mayors’ towns might not benefit from those funds either.

“In our region, a lot of our child care facilities won’t even be able to afford the quality improvements the state is mandating, so they will shut down,” said Jack Frech, an Americorps VISTA volunteer with the coalition who retired after 33 years as director of the Athens County Department of Jobs and Family Services. “So the TANF money intended for our poor and working-class families will instead go to facilities primarily serving wealthier kids.” (JFS declined to comment.)

It is also notable that a recent Congressional appropriation included an 80 percent increase in discretionary child care funding—enough that one might think the state need not force its mayors to choose between water now and child care in the future.

The bipartisan group of mayors met last week to discuss next steps. “We voted unanimously: We’re happy to have the $500,000 but we’re still requesting the $12 million from the state,” said Goosman.

Today, Colburn works on her brother’s farm and is covered by Medicaid. As a manual laborer, Colburn has developed nerve damage, which flares up in her hands and wrists with overuse. “I cut back my hours to deal with it. I can’t afford to not be able to use my hands,” she says. “That’s how I make all of my money.”

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As a child who grew up in a farming community, Colburn says she observed that pain is just a part of being a farmer. “It’s taken for granted that your body hurts every day, that your back always hurts.” That’s true for workers employed in some of the most dangerous jobs: Many manual laborers with high rates of injury and repetitive stress injuries are also more likely to be uninsured. In fact, a 2015 study found that 65 percent of commercial farmers identified health insurance costs as the most serious threat to their farms.

Alana Knudson, co-director of the Walsh Center for Rural Health at NORC at the University of Chicago, prefers to discuss rural health care in terms of strengths, but she does recognize the real barriers demonstrated by statistics. “Overall, we know that people who live in rural communities are likely to have lower incomes than their urban counterparts,” she says. Rural residents are also more likely to have multiple chronic conditions and lower educational attainment, and they’re more likely to face barriers in accessing transportation to medical care.

But there are also less tangible barriers. Colburn says that many people she knows don’t feel comfortable navigating the complicated web of professional medical interventions when experiencing health issues. And the Medicaid system can often lack efficiency. Colburn says her state’s website often doesn’t work, and she still hasn’t figured out how to find a primary care doctor who takes her insurance. Once, a computer glitch resulted in her being removed from her insurance plan, and she was charged hundreds of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses. Even though it was an error on Medicaid’s part, Colburn was still responsible for the bill. “Generally when we’re talking about rural health care issues, we’re talking about access, as if once you get access that actually means something. But when you get access, it still can be a nightmare,” she says.

Faced with whether to seek medical attention or “make do,” Colburn says many people simply don’t go. She notes that farmers especially have a hard time leaving their farm obligations to take care of themselves. They also spend significant time outdoors, and it’s difficult to imagine a hospital stay. Colburn says, “I have treated myself or not gone a million times.” One spring, she stepped on a potato fork and punctured her foot. Instead of going to the doctor, she spoke with a community herbalist, used an herbal tincture, and soaked her foot in salt water.

“I know for a fact that I need a root canal,” Colburn says, “It used to hurt and now it doesn’t hurt, so I just deal with it.” She pauses. “I know a lot of people who just get their teeth pulled. And the dental piece is important because what your teeth look like has [a] direct impact on what opportunities you have.”

This reality is echoed by rural journalist Sarah Smarsh. “In the past year, the Affordable Care Act, or ‘ObamaCare’, has changed many lives for the better—mine included,” she wrote in an essay for Aeon. “But its omission of dental coverage, a result of political compromise, is a dangerous, absurd compartmentalization of health care, as though teeth are apart from and less important than the rest of the body.”

*          *          *

The fabric of rural America is shifting, in large part due to changes in agriculture. Knudson grew up in North Dakota and says she’s seen that change firsthand. “Our neighbors are farming our land and they seed over 10,000 acres. A lot of the small farms are not there anymore.”

Many children of farmers choose not to take over the farm. Land is then sold or leased to larger farms. Small businesses that once depended on a critical mass of farm families as customers also go out of business. The effects of this rural migration are particularly severe on rural elderly with complex medical needs—and no younger generation remaining in the area to care for them.

Last year, a photographer and I drove across Kansas and Iowa to report on the hidden crisis of farmer suicide. We visited Onaga, Kansas, a small town with a newly renovated hospital. Just blocks from the hospital’s beautiful lobby and squeaky-clean floors were empty streets and boarded up storefronts. One doctor said the hospital had a hard time attracting medical professionals to practice there. The therapist had left months ago, she said, and they were struggling to fill the position.

An online search for “benefits for rural medical professionals” turns up a slew of sites about attracting medical talent to rural communities. Rural medical establishments are advised to advertise the lower cost of living and ability to buy acreage, less traffic, a quieter life, student loan forgiveness in certain underserved areas, “the potential to become the ‘town hero,’” more time spent with patients, and increased proficiency due to physicians seeing “a broader scope of illness.”

Still, rural communities are facing the closure of hospitals and clinics. In 2016, The National Rural Health Association (NRHA) announced that 673 rural hospitals were at risk to close. Of those, 210 were at “extreme risk” of closure. The NRHA warns that “Medical deserts are forming across the nation, significantly adding to the health care workforce shortage in rural communities. Seventy-seven percent of rural U.S. counties are already considered Primary Care Health Professional Shortage Areas.”

Knudson says the health care industry is undergoing a significant transformation in terms of how medical care is being reimbursed. “Our reimbursement system is moving from a volume to value,” she says. ”Historically hospitals have been reimbursed by the number of hospitalizations they provided—you have 10 hospitalizations and you get reimbursed for 10 stays. Our country has really shifted as much as possible to outpatient to make health care more affordable.”

That means a decrease in admissions, more outpatient procedures, and less reimbursable care for hospitals. Additionally, Knudson says many of the rural hospitals closing are in states that have not expanded Medicaid, which has led to a higher number of uninsured patients. “When people are uninsured, it’s difficult to collect payment for that hospitalization.”

Hospital closures can be devastating to rural communities, creating gaps in access to the detriment of residents. “Many of these hospital closures are happening in areas with the highest concentration of heart disease and diabetes, and in some of the poorest communities in the country,” says Maggie Elehwany of the NRHA. “When that hospital closes, it’s like putting a nail in the coffin of that community. You can’t attract businesses or families with kids or keep retirees. So we’re fighting not only for rural hospitals, but also for the economies of these rural communities as well.”

In June 2017, Missouri Congressman Sam Graves introduced the Save Rural Hospitals Act (H.R. 2957). The bill doesn’t increase reimbursements, but it does offer stability for “the closure crisis” by eliminating cuts and Medicare Sequestration for rural hospitals. It also establishes a new Medicare payment designation, called the Community Outpatient Hospital, that would guarantee rural access to emergency care and give hospitals the choice to offer outpatient care. The bill was co-sponsored by 21 representatives (14 Republicans and 7 Democrats), but it is still waiting for a vote.

*          *          *

Rural residents can’t afford to wait, so they are using the assets they have. Rural communities are known for being innovative, self-sufficient, and used to organizing quickly in an emergency. Families may have been rooted in one area for generations, which manifests in a deep knowing of their neighbors, as well as each other’s talents and stressors. And rural communities are often filled with people who want to help one another.

One story Alana Knudson tells me goes like this: One winter, in a northern rural community, an elderly man was treated for chronic urinary tract infections. He was treated and advised by medical staff to flush his kidneys as much as possible by drinking water. But he soon returned with another infection. When a community health worker visited his home, she discovered the man lived in the back of a shed, did not have an indoor toilet, and had to haul his own potable water.

At last, the urinary tract infections made sense. Knudson says, “It was not easy for this elderly man to traverse the snow and the cold in the dark to access the outdoor restroom, so he limited his fluid intake which contributed to reoccurring UTIs.”

To serve the health care needs of the nearly 60 million Americans who live in rural communities, Knudson says “it takes an entire team.” Ideally, Knudson says community health workers are part of that team. As public health workers who are also trusted members of the community, community health workers are particularly equipped to provide valuable connections between health or social services and the community. Primary care providers, pharmacists, social workers, health departments, and even agriculture extensions are critical members of the rural health care team. Knudson says, “A lot of different entities come together and complement each other. We can’t afford the luxury of duplication, so we really work together.”

“People come together to support others,” she says. “In my home community in North Dakota, we had a neighbor who had a heart attack during harvest, and all of us got together and finished the harvest for him. If you needed the help, you could count on your neighbors doing that.”

This frame is important, Knudson says, as much of the media attention about rural communities has been negative. As a result, she says, “There is such dystopia about rural America. We’re hearing from some rural communities that potential businesses are saying ‘we’re not interested in investing in rural America.’”

It was never a secret that Trump’s promises would be hard to keep, but it’s still stunning that his first budget actively attacked the region. Along with a laundry list of other programs slated for elimination, Trump proposed nixing the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which was created to spur economic development in the 420 counties that make up Appalachia.  Since it was founded in 1962, ARC has helped cut Appalachian poverty in half, and has brought more than 300,000 jobs to the region. In the past year alone, its grants have created or retained 23,760 jobs, and provided training or education to nearly 50,000 students and workers.

While Trump is billing himself as coal country’s savior, he is gutting the agency that’s doing the saving.

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I’ve seen what ARC can do for communities. Take, for instance, the town of Mentone, Alabama: nestled in the heart of Appalachia atop Lookout Mountain, and home to an estimated 390 people. It’s where my cousins grew up, and where I spent the better part of every summer from elementary school to high school. Mentone is where I learned to love the outdoors, where I learned to canoe, and where I learned to target shoot with bow and arrow and a .22.

Admittedly, Mentone was never a titan of industry. But nearby Fort Payne, Alabama, was the “Sock Capital of the World” for decades. In the 1990s, an estimated 1 in every 8 socks worldwide—and half of the socks in the United States—came from Fort Payne. Even now, there’s a good chance you own Fort Payne socks. But in the mid-2000s, under President George W. Bush’s free-trade agreements, many of Alabama’s sock manufacturers closed shop and moved overseas for cheaper labor. Over the next decade, the number of people working at the sock mills fell from 8,000 to just 600.

Entire communities were left without their livelihoods. And that’s when the Appalachian Regional Commission stepped in.

As the industry left, ARC invested resources into Fort Payne and the surrounding communities to support transitioning workers and their families. In 2007, it provided $200,000 for access roads to bring new businesses to Fort Payne, and $175,000 for a job training program in Jackson County, Tennessee—just on the other side of Lookout Mountain. In 2009 and 2010, the commission contributed $100,000 to a joint effort between Jackson and DeKalb Counties to enable the counties to update their water systems, along with an additional $400,000 for Fort Payne’s sewer system. From 2009 to 2016, the commission invested almost $1 million in Fort Payne’s education system, so that northeast Alabama’s kids had access to educational and technological resources—buoying the system instead of allowing the shrinking tax base to gut it.

Just last year, the commission funded the bulk of a project to expand Fort Payne’s visitor center for Little River Canyon—the gorge that runs atop Lookout Mountain. The Canyon attracts more than 460,000 visitors each year, along with an estimated $16 million in local economic activity. An expansion could mean more tourists, more jobs, and more income for the surrounding communities.

For towns like Mentone and cities like Fort Payne, a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission is the difference between moving ahead and falling behind.  By attacking the commission, President Trump has turned his back on the communities that trusted him to represent them.

As a young mother, this meant no play groups or coffee meet-ups with other moms. My children rarely experienced playgrounds or library story time. Instead, they caught chickens and climbed tractors. They played with sticks and covered themselves in mud down in the river.

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But once a month, the library bookmobile would park at the end of our property, on the shoulder of the road where the pavement turned to dirt. On those days, I would strap the baby to my chest and take my stepson’s hand, and we would walk down the road to the bookmobile. The converted bus was filled with books, DVDs, magazines, even a pillow in the children’s section for kids to prop on their elbows and read. It felt like a secret special world, curated just for us.

***

In the article “The Bookmobile: Defining the Information Poor,” MSU Philosophy writer Joshua Finnell notes that, while public libraries were created in the mid-1800s to offer equal access to information, they were primarily operated by the white, educated middle class. “Whether intentionally or not, library holdings, furnishings, programs, and even hours of operation all sent a powerful message about who controlled access to information in our society and provided the basis for defining the information rich and the information poor,” writes Finnell.

The non-white and the working poor were systemically left out of the public library structure, and due to the location of most libraries, rural residents also had limited access. In an effort to reach those communities, librarian Mary Titcomb created a horse-drawn wagon to haul books to post offices and stores at the beginning of the 20^th century—the first bookmobile.

By 1912, the horse-drawn library wagon was replaced by a motorized bookmobile. Bookmobiles became part of the larger literacy effort, transporting reading materials to rural communities, schools, and senior centers. In the 1950s and ’60s, bookmobiles reached over 30 million Americans living in rural communities, before fuel shortages in the 1970s and ’80s triggered a decline.

A little over a decade ago, the number of bookmobiles started growing again—according to the American Library Association, they increased by more than 10 percent between 2003 and 2005. Today there are approximately 660 bookmobiles in operation, according to the latest data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services survey.

Ann Plazek, president of the Association for Bookmobile and Outreach Services, says bookmobile numbers fell slightly in 2014 (with a loss of ten nationwide), but she expects that 2015 statistics, which have not yet been released, will reflect an increase.

“There were numerous library systems adding bookmobiles for the first time,” she says. “I think we’re going to see a turnaround —especially as they’re becoming greener and more economical. Some bookmobiles are installing solar panels, which cuts down on the need for generators, and that’s been a huge change.”

***

Judy Calhoun grew up 18 miles from town in rural Arkansas. Once a month, the bookmobile visited her community. “Everyone would come over,” she remembers. “I was a huge reader, and even though they had a rule that you could only check out five books at a time, the librarian would let me check out 30 books. In the summer, I could read one book a day.”

Calhoun grew up to become a librarian herself, managing a branch for 14 years, and currently serves as the president of the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. As the Director of the Southeast Arkansas Regional Library System, she oversees nine libraries in five counties in southeast Arkansas. “Eighty percent of libraries in the United States are small or rural,” she says. “So we’re actually the majority.”

Arkansas is one of the poorest states in the country—ranked 48th in 2016—with an overall poverty rate of 19.1%.  Most of the counties served by Calhoun’s library system have poverty rates more than double the state average, and she says libraries in these areas are especially linked to the well-being of their patrons.

“People are leaving these little communities,” she says. “They’re moving away to seek jobs. Once they lose their school, we see a decline in population. As a result, small and rural libraries are continually battling declining revenues. But there are still people here who can’t afford to move, or who won’t move away, because this is their home. So we keep working to serve those people.”

Recently, three of the smaller branch libraries in southeast Arkansas were forced to close. One was shut down completely because the building was in disrepair, and the other two were donated to the towns and are now being run by volunteers. “We even left the computers for them,” says Calhoun.

“For a lot of these little towns, they can’t afford the permanent site. You’ve got to pay the building fees, electricity, internet, phone. In a lot of these places, the buildings are getting unusable, and there aren’t resources to keep them safe. So we’re seeing a resurgence of bookmobiles,” says Calhoun. “As we should.”

***

Even though bookmobiles are regaining popularity, Plazek says she encounters people shocked that they still exist. “Some people think bookmobiles are these antiquated things,” she says, “But we still exist, and we’re still relevant.”

That’s because mobile and rural library services have adapted to serve as community hubs. My neighbors and I used to lean against our bookmobile’s counter to talk about all strides of our lives—pecan harvests and rainfall predictions, mountain lion sightings, an elderly neighbor in search of large-print mystery novels. We discussed lost dogs, the price of alfalfa, and the latest in the opposition to the high-voltage power lines slated to be built through our valley. The bookmobile was a place of gathering, of communion over the complexities and the intricacies of our lives, for passing time with one another in a tiny air-conditioned bus on the side of a dusty road.

Calhoun acknowledged this personal connection, too. “People love to tell us about their troubles, what’s going on in their lives, what they need. We’re kind of like a bartender. We get to know the people we’re serving in a different way.”

Part of that bond is because bookmobiles, and rural libraries more broadly, meet very real needs. Calhoun’s system doubles as a voter registration site, provides tax form assistance, maintains copy and computer centers, and even has an initiative to help combat hunger in the community. And Plazek notes that bookmobiles are often adjusted so they can cater to day cares, Amish populations, or seniors.

Even so, Calhoun admits: “We’re kind of modest. We don’t toot our own horns, and we’ve got to change that.” She says her job is to advocate for small and rural libraries, so she visits legislators at the state capitol, attends conferences, and talks to donors. “People will ask, ‘Are rural libraries really needed?’ And I just keep saying, ‘Come and see what we’re doing. We’re needed. We’re still so needed.’”

And the driveway, she said, was a rutted, steep rise of dirt, holes, and gravel—a quarter-mile long.  “The first test,” as she put it.

When my 15-year-old Honda and I actually made it to the top, she came out in front of her house and waved at me, impressed.  She lived in a converted garage with piles of empty cans and tools in the yard, a chimney trembling with wood smoke.

“A lot of people,” she said, “just turn back.”

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Rural poverty seems like something out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book—something quaint and distant. Something over. But many of my neighbors and family members in Appalachia grew up—or their parents grew up—in homes without running water or indoor plumbing. That kind of living is not a relic from the past. It’s the life of many people today, some of whom I know and love.

I stopped assuming my friends would have driveways.  Many of them are homesteading in the deep, ridged woods, or squatting in trailers in fields, or just getting by in overcrowded farmhouses. I stopped assuming they would have bathrooms, trash pickup, or even electricity. Not everyone I know has power—either because the bill hasn’t been paid or the house was never on the grid to begin with; wires never reached that far.

And not everyone has the internet.

Not everyone has high-speed or wireless. Not everyone has a computer, or a smart phone. Or a phone phone. The assumption of basic technology, even in the digital age, is just that: an assumption.

I’m fortunate to have internet at home (usually, when I can pay the bill), but living alone with a 5-year-old child means I don’t get to my freelance work at my computer until late at night, after he’s asleep and I’m exhausted.

Until recently, in order to email a W2—which I have to do regularly, to get paid—I had to drive 20 minutes into town to an office store, pay for parking, and pay a few bucks to print out the pages.

Then a friend gave me her old printer so I can print at home.  But I still have to drive across town to the library, which has a free scanner I can use to scan my W2s—and that’s not a process my son will wait patiently through. So I have to pay for a babysitter, and again pay for parking. The privilege of getting paid for my work costs me about $30 in all, and takes up several hours of limited, much-needed, child-free time.

Most people know about the practice of punishing those who are poor with further financial burdens: deposits for utilities, fees on check-cashing and bank accounts, payday loans. All of this is a kind of a poverty tax—it marks you as undesirable and it helps keep you poor.

But there’s a lesser known poverty tax on technology, and it’s paid with your time.

It takes a lot more time and ingenuity to access technology when you’re poor. It takes calling in favors from friends. It takes being at the mercy of parking and babysitters and business hours and irregular internet access at coffee shops and restaurants.

It takes shelling out a few bucks you don’t have for coffee or food for the privilege of sitting at a business with wireless. It takes feeling incredibly nervous that you’ve been there too long, that they’re going to kick you out or make you buy something else, or that the manager at Wendy’s is going to call the cops because you’ve been sitting in the parking lot for hours—as I have done—trying to use their internet for work.

Politicians talk about providing internet to rural, impoverished communities in grand, noble terms. But the reality is simple and harsh: We need the internet to access help.

I need the internet to get help for child support. I need the internet to search for work and apply for more jobs. Once my child starts school, he will need the internet for homework—a common struggle in my community, since children are required to do hours of homework online every night even though over 300 households in my county don’t have any internet access. Public libraries close a few hours after school lets out, and due to budget cuts, they are not open much on the weekend.

Most services for the poor are online. Job ads are online. Housing information is online. Information about food pantries, seed distribution, free meals, parenting classes, job fairs, shelters, health clinics, and free activities to do with children are online. Even accessing my bank account—to make sure I’m not overdrawn, to make sure I’m not racking up a low balance fee—needs to be done online. Every time I ask for a copy of my statement at the bank, I’m told: “Do you know you can do this online?”

Yes, I know. Do you know that not everyone has that luxury?  

Stop assuming that everyone has the same technology, the same new phone, the same fast laptop.

Maybe if you realize that, you will stop assuming everyone has other basics: like a hot shower, like a stove to cook a meal, like a fridge to store fruits and vegetables, like dental care, like money for much-needed medications.

What are taken as givens, including technology, are actually extravagances for many people. When you’re poor, applying for a job online, or finding a doctor, or simply answering an email, often takes extra money, time, and luck that you don’t have.

That steep, rocky climb I had to make to reach my friend’s house? I climb it, in so many ways, every day.

My mother’s words suggested that our circumstances were our fault, as if we were being punished for sins of the past. I know now that we were just poor and doing the best we could to survive—and there were many other families in rural America like us, struggling to make ends meet.

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Substandard Housing

Before my family occupied a tent on a campsite, we lived in substandard housing in rural Magnolia, Illinois. The only house we could afford was in disrepair—the plumbing was a patchwork of burst pipes, some rooms did not have insulation, and all eight of us were crammed into three small bedrooms.

My parents were determined, so they persuaded the owner to allow us to live as rent-paying tenants while my father—a carpenter by trade—worked to make the house livable. My parents invested a lot of money, time, and care to make that house our home, rather than some unit of housing stock: they repaired a leaking toilet, brought running water to the bathroom sink, closed the porch to make a new bedroom, and added insulation. The only time the owner paid for maintenance was when the septic system collapsed and flooded our house with waste.

Though substandard housing is often described in terms of urban blight, suburban and rural families are actually twice as likely to face issues with things like “incomplete plumbing,” like my family did. What’s more, minority families in suburban and rural areas are twice as likely as their white, non-Hispanic counterparts to live in substandard housing—a statistical double whammy for my family.

Eviction

After about a year, my family was served with an eviction notice for “refusal to pay.” The landlord was actually refusing to take payment in order to force us out, but the deck was stacked against us—and against tenants in general—in court. Careful documentation of past rental payments and major investments in the property offered no protection from being evicted without cause. My mother recalls, “we went to court to fight [the eviction], but knew we wouldn’t win.” And we didn’t.

The court determined that we had 30 days to vacate the premises. My parents searched desperately for housing options, but the eviction itself tainted our rental applications. One landlord seemed willing to overlook the risks associated with renting to an evicted family with six children, but when he heard our Latino surname—Oquenda—he suddenly struggled to find available space for us. According to a 2012 HUD report on housing discrimination, that’s fairly common: Hispanic renters are both “told about” and “shown” 12.5 percent and 7.5 percent fewer available units, respectively, than equally qualified white, non-Hispanic renters.

That is how we ended up homeless, living at a campsite in Marseilles, Illinois.

Homelessness

During our time at Marseilles’ Glenwood campgrounds, there were daily torrents of rain that flooded our tent and damaged our belongings. At one point, the runoff was so strong that it carried away our food cooler (we didn’t have a refrigerator), spilling our food out over the campsite and destroying the bread and buns we used for peanut butter and jelly and hot dogs.

Eventually the mud seeped through the tent’s openings, covering our clothes and blankets, and the tent became infested with ants and other insects that were seeking cover from the weather. This was a low-point for my family.

Eventually the rain stopped, and we found another site:  Maple Leaf Park.  Some of my fondest memories took place there: learning to swim, living off the crawdads and fish in the ponds, and singing songs around the fire we built from wood we gathered. We had help from food stamps and the grounds had showers, but most importantly our family’s morale rebounded.

After two more weeks at the campsite, someone offered us help. A friend let us stay with his family. Since resources like shelters and food banks are few and far between in rural areas, many homeless families end up in crowded housing or “doubling-up” with extended family or friends. We lived with that family for a few weeks before we found another home in Henry, Illinois.

Though the house in Henry also was substandard—incomplete plumbing, lack of insulation, and faulty electricity—we made it our home. It certainly beat the rain.

What’s Next

My family’s experience isn’t unique. On any given night in 2015, 32,800 Americans in rural families experienced homelessness. What’s more, the practical challenges of counting homeless people in rural areas means we may be underestimating the true size of the rural homeless population.

Structural issues—such as higher poverty rates; inadequate transportation; and limited access to shelters and services like health, mental health, and child care—make people and families who live in rural areas particularly vulnerable. This helps explain why rural homeless families are disproportionately likely to go without shelter: in 2014, rural families accounted for 15.7 percent of all homeless families, but almost 27 percent of all unsheltered homeless families (families without access to service shelters who usually live in cars, in tents, or on the street).

The rural housing crisis is not intractable. Policymakers should start by improving data collection on rural homelessness, so that they have a complete picture of the issue. They should also increase efforts to document and reduce discrimination in renting, and improve access to affordable legal services so that families stand a fighting chance when they risk losing their homes. To support the families who become homeless, policymakers should improve accessibility to shelters and other services in rural areas. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should reinstate Section 515 grants to build more affordable rural rental housing, and increase the direct loan program funding under USDA Section 502 to provide more assistance for rural homeowners.

These reforms are only possible if we choose to accept housing as a meaningful right for all Americans. Then, campgrounds could remain mainstays of family vacations—not crisis centers for homeless families.

There’s no doubt that these cities, and their schools, face serious problems that deserve our attention. But a set of very different communities are virtually invisible in narratives about education and poverty in America. These are mostly stories about white children in rural, isolated communities from Alabama to Virginia—in Appalachia. As The New York Times reported in its series on the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty, Appalachia is one of the only corners of our country that was virtually untouched by that massive effort. And it shows.

This region has long been among the poorest in the country, and it was hit hard in recent decades by job losses in manufacturing and coal mining. Because those industries, along with agriculture, formed the backbone of Appalachian economies, higher education was a low priority—and that attitude hasn’t changed with the new economy.

Fortunately, new strategies are emerging to improve the prospects of children and families in these communities.

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One of the most pervasive barriers in Appalachia is the isolation.  Towns and homes are far from one another, roads can be treacherous, and public transportation is virtually non-existent. In the northeast corner of Tennessee, Unicoi County High School Principal Chris Bogart describes the challenges of delivering the tutoring, mentoring, and enrichment activities that his students need.

“[One new staff member] suggested just giving the kids bus tokens to get home from afterschool activities, like in her prior district. Sure, I said, that would be great if Unicoi had buses,” Bogart said.

As a way to work around the lack of afterschool transportation, the school piloted an hour-long lunch.   Students eat wherever they want, which gives them the opportunity to visit the media center, get help with math homework, or rehearse a skit with their fine arts teacher, among other activities.  The faculty—who had been skeptical about the change—reports that their relationships with students, and the school climate, improved noticeably.

Isolation and a lack of transportation options also mean that many children—and adults—have never traveled beyond their immediate area. During one Unicoi High School class trip to Nashville—the first time most students had left the region—one student’s parents were so worried that they drove alongside the bus for the entire five hours. Staff at Unicoi are now researching grant possibilities to fund similar trips—including to college campuses and Washington, D.C.—so that their students have a better sense of the world and its possibilities.

According to the teachers, school board members, and social workers whom I spoke with, this kind of exposure is critical to getting their students “across the finish line” in high school and thinking seriously about college. They recounted the challenge of their own relatives having less-than-positive reactions to their declarations that they wanted to be the first in the family to go to college.  “You’re getting above your raisin’,” was one common response.

Just 22 percent of adults in Appalachia have bachelors’ degrees—fewer than in any other area of the country—because working in factories, railroads, and coalmines was the norm. The widespread loss of these employers—including the abrupt shuttering of CSX’s Erwin, TN terminal in October—is devastating Appalachian communities.  And yet, according to several Erwin community leaders I spoke with, many parents still view post-secondary education as unnecessary or even a sign of snobbery.

But educators across Appalachia are trying to change this mindset. At last month’s Appalachian Higher Education Network conference, there was a focus on helping schools create a college-going culture. Innovative ideas include annual trips—beginning as early as elementary school—to both community and four-year colleges; and partnerships that allow students to accrue college credit in their high schools, at a local college, or online. A growing number of schools host college and career festivals where teachers and principals offer testimonials about overcoming their own fears of being the first in their families to make it past high school.

When new strategies like these are bolstered by a higher education institution that is working to address the region’s needs, the impact can be even greater.

Berea College, a small liberal arts school in Kentucky, enrolls only “academically promising” students from low-income families—mostly from Appalachia—who attend entirely tuition-free. It is also home to Partners for Education (PfE), where dozens of outreach and support staff—many of whom are Berea graduates themselves—provide students and their families with a range of supports, such as Skype mentors for at-risk students who are physically isolated, mailing books to students and online book clubs to avert summer learning loss, college preparatory services, and targeted professional development for teachers.  These are exactly the kinds of activities that Unicoi and other schools seek as part of creating a college-going culture.

All of these services are reinforced by smart state policies. Thanks to a well-funded state early childhood education  initiative, one-fourth of Kentucky’s 4-year-olds attend high-quality pre-k programs (compared to fewer than one-fifth in neighboring Virginia, where programs are also of lower quality).  And the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act created Family Resource and Youth Services Centers (FRYSC) across the state to advance the goal of “removing nonacademic barriers to learning” through physical, mental health, academic, and family support services tailored to each community’s needs. For example, the FRYSC in Berea offers afterschool and summer enrichment activities as well as crisis counseling.

All of this creative work and community engagement is paying off. A recent study of the 26-county region served by Berea documented key steps toward making college a reality for many more students: better quality among early childhood education providers, more children participating in arts and tutoring programs, teachers receiving strong professional development, and math and reading scores that are rising faster than the state average.

Unique, place-based challenges require innovative policy solutions. Berea and Unicoi are showing us what some of those solutions look like.  Maybe fifty years from now if journalists return to this region, they will report on this moment, when new policies began to change the prospects of children and their families.