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A research team led by Northeast Center Director Stephan Goetz will receive $500,000 over three years to study innovation in rural communities and find ways for communities to support rural entrepreneurs.

World Cup football teams with a higher proportion of players smiling in their official portraits have scored more goals on average in all group phases since 1970. The authors of this study argue that smiling is a reflection of confidence. Greater confidence results in a greater capacity to overcome complex situations and score more goals. Center Director Stephan Goetz and his colleague David A. Fleming-Muñoz decided to explore whether this same smiling-creativity link holds for entire societies by looking at the relationship between happiness and creative capacity. (Links to article published in The Conversation.)

Wineries, breweries, fall festivals, hiking, camping….these are just some of the joys of the great outdoors and the bucolic beauty of visiting a thriving farm. Activities such as these are important economic drivers to many business owners living in rural America, and represent an arena of potential for the Land Grant system. A national group of Extension-affiliated professionals is interested in creating best practices to better help rural communities develop resilient businesses and advance Extension work under the tourism umbrella.

From entrepreneurs' use of Twitter to the impacts of a popular Extension program, several newly published manuscripts co-authored by NERCRD staff shed light on a wide range of community and economic development topics.

A multi-disciplinary team of Penn State Extension staff, faculty and researchers, along with NERCRD staff, worked together to create a new publication on industrial hemp production that explores the production practices, economics, and policies around this crop.

Western PA has experienced a recent boom in local breweries and distilleries, but the supply chain supporting these businesses is not well understood. A Penn State Extension team including NERCRD Associate Director Heather Manzo conducted research in 2017 to assess current and future production levels and supply chain actors and to identify future potential for local and regional sourcing of ingredients. While the study focused on Western PA, some findings may be useful to other Northeast states.

In 2016, NERCRD Technical Advisory Committee Chair Paul Gottlieb launched a strategic planning effort on the Center's behalf aimed at understanding the economic development issues that are especially important to the rural areas of the Northeast. Last month, he took this effort on the road, sharing his findings at the National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals (NACDEP) annual conference in order to garner feedback from state-based experts.

A new interactive feature on the USDA rural opioid misuse webpage allows visitors to learn about actions rural leaders are taking to address the opioid epidemic.

The Extension Opioid Crisis Response Workgroup is hosting an ongoing series of webinars on Extension substance abuse programming that could be shared quickly across state lines and used to help address the growing opioid crisis. Although several webinars have already taken place, recordings and other resources are available online. Mark Skidmore, Director of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development, is coordinating the working group.

As part of a five-year, multi-state research project, researchers at Cornell University conducted a national survey to learn more about how well informed Americans thought their local leaders were, how levels of trust might vary when the issues at hand are controversial, and what local leaders should base their decisions on when those issues are controversial. The researchers summarized their findings in a recent policy brief published by the Cornell University Community and Regional Development Institute. (Links to PDF.)

A new research brief titled "Domestic Migration and Fewer Births Reshaping America" was released by the University of New Hampshire Carsey Institute for Public Policy earlier this year and shows that population migration patterns "are reverting to those common before the recession."

To explore the impacts of economic, demographic, and social issues in rural communities and to learn about asset-based approaches to addressing the associated challenges, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop on June 13, 2017. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

Congratulations to our colleagues who were recognized with awards from the National Association for Community Development Extension Professionals (NACDEP) in Cleveland last month! Award winners from the Northeast include Michael Dougherty and Daniel Eades, West Virginia University (WVU), and Neal Fogle, Penn State.

Northeast Center Director Stephan Goetz traveled to Edinboro, Scotland this spring to attend the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) conference on rural innovation, where he learned about the UK's strong ties between rural development and tourism.

Several trainings are being held throughout the US for potential applicants to the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program. The Northeast trainings are being held in Pennsylvania (Altoona, Lancaster, and Scranton) and in Moorefield, WV.

Investing in education may help boost economic opportunities for the next generation, according to a team of economists including Northeast Center Director Stephan Goetz.

Case studies are a valuable way to synthesize and share lessons learned to create new knowledge and enhanced applications in practice. The National Extension Tourism (NET) Design Team is inviting submissions of case studies that highlight innovative and promising practices in sustainable tourism.

We are pleased to announce that Heather Manzo has joined the Northeast Center as its Associate Director for Extension, effective January 2018. In this role, Heather will work with Extension Educators across the region to identify opportunities for cross-state collaborations and sharing of programs, and will help document the impact of Community and Economic Development Extension programs across the region.

In 2017, the Northeast Center continued its work of growing strong, collaborative networks with our land-grant partners, numerous federal agencies, and private institutions. We worked on a number of research and outreach projects that reached thousands of people. Read all about it in our latest annual report!

A paper titled "The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and beyond" was published this month in a special issue of Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy and was authored by Center Director Stephan Goetz, Mark Partridge (Ohio State University), and Heather Stephens (West Virginia University). The special issue is a collection of papers around the theme “The Future of Agricultural and Applied Economics,” and is the culmination of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Agenda and Priorities initiative. The authors review the current economic conditions of rural America and the current literature, in order to set the stage for future research aimed at developing public policies that support economic prosperity in rural areas.