The Mississippi Economic Policy Center put out the first in a series of reflections on the state of racial equity in the post-March on Washington era. The full policy brief, assembled and distributed by the Economic Policy Institute, includes more in-depth data.

A couple high(low?)lights:

1. There are only four counties in the state in which the African American unemployment rate is below 12%
   
2. The greatest percentage point disparity occurred at the peak of unemployment for black Mississippians, in the first quarter of 2010.

 As bad as the disparity is in Mississippi, though, it would be irresponsible to ignore the fact that this is a national problem. 

Once again, EPI: Figure C depicts the black unemployment rate in Mississippi compared with the black unemployment rate in each of the other 23 states for which the black population is large enough to measure the unemployment rate with CPS data. It shows that Mississippi has the ninth-highest African American unemployment rate among these states.

From the Daily Yonder:

A few more county-level statistics (stats are # of jobs lost over the past six years):

• Franklin Parish, LA (Winnfield) - 604 jobs
• Philips County, AR (Helena) - 1,293 jobs
• Washington County, MS (Greenville) - 2,493 jobs
• Dallas County, AL (Selma) - 1,865 jobs
• Dillon County, SC (Dillon) - 638 jobs
• Bertie County, NC (Windsor) - 968 jobs

This map and these figures, though jarring, are not terribly surprising. To the average American, there is little that exists to attract him or her to a rural community, much less the rural South, which means that there is certainly little incentive for a company with even minimal mobility to stick around.  Familial ties and isolated schemes simply aren't enough to stop this job loss.

When it comes to stopping the bleeding, I have yet to see any coherent strategies for the instigation of long-term development in the South, though some efforts elsewhere - most notably in Nebraska and in fossil fuel-driven economies like those in the Dakotas and Texas - seem to be making a real dent. In the South, though, there is simply no present rural equivalent to the coalitions devoted to economic growth in towns like Nashville and New Orleans. (No region-wide efforts that would improve quality of life for a similar number of people, that is.)

If that doesn't change - and soon, we can expect the rural South to be much poorer than the rest of the country for a long time to come.

O Centro de Integração de Educação e Saúde, or the Center for Integration of Education and Health, is a Brazilian non-profit with the stated aim of giving the poor greater access to advanced medical examinations (e.g. gynecology, gastroenterology, urology). Since 2008, the organization has leveraged connections with local communities, the private sector, and local government towards the treatment of over 100,000 patients. Being big believers in preventative medicine, they center their work around a foundational "Triad" of TREAT, PREVENT, and EDUCATE.

Their tools include the following:

• the Health Wagon - a truck around the size of a tour bus that widens into a full clinic with room to serve up to ten specialties. It is intended for towns of greater than 150,000.
• the Health Box - an easily transported health station that supports between four and seven specialties; geared towards towns of 50,000 to 150,000
• the Health Van - a smaller truck that can accommodate up to three specialties at one time, including radiology and echocardiology; meant for towns with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.

After learning about this group, my mind obviously wandered to the potential for applying a similar model in the rural South. What if the Health Box came to Lambert, MS? Or if the Health Van visited Plymouth, NC?

This type of intervention would be a great help to boosting the quality of preventative care in areas where diabetes, heart disease, and other preventable disorders have been left unchecked to decimate entire (mostly black, mostly poor) populations. If someone is already out there doing work like this, I'd greatly appreciate hearing about them in the comments, too.

I found a story from Friday's All Things Considered about NC's new voter ID law absolutely fascinating. 

Here's a quick overview, per NPR:

This week, North Carolina's governor signed a new law requiring a state-approved photo ID to cast a vote in a polling place and shortening the period for early voting. The move comes just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had required large parts of the state to get federal approval before changing voting laws.

Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, says the new law will protect the state from voter fraud. Critics say it reverses crucial reforms designed to help protect the rights of African-Americans, young people and the poor.

NPR's Ailsa Chang visited rural areas of North Carolina to report on how the changes could affect poor minority voters who live there.

If left unchallenged, this policy will ultimately have a deeper impact in the state's rural counties; and per her journalism it's easy to see why. Ms. Chang does a terrific job supporting listeners in developing a sense of empathy for what it means to be a newly disenfranchised voter in Bertie County, NC.  Her story is well worth a listen.

This morning, I'm sharing some insights gained from my experience with the 4.0 Schools Cohort in a guest post over at their blog. If you crave a space to consider problems in education in new ways, check them out at 4pt0.org or on Twitter at @4pt0schools.

One perk of joining the Cohort at 4.0 is getting your own freshly cut key to the office. Though I live in Eastern North Carolina now, I bring my key everywhere. It is of little use in the traditional sense; but I’ve found it to be a vital anchor. When you’re someone who regularly tells anyone who will listen that you believe rural Southern communities can and should be leading hubs of innovation, something as simple as a key can be a helpful reminder of how you got to thinking that such an idea is actually quite reasonable.

 I  came to the Cohort in the spring struggling with the problem of education in the rural South. I walked out convinced that education was inextricably linked to health and economic factors. Groundbreaking? Not really, but an important conclusion nonetheless. I left having attempted no prototype; instead, I moved. In a way, though, my career was the prototype; and a complete redesign was in order.

More recently, I’ve found myself revisiting a handful of realizations I came to in the spring:

• Sprint, always – Time is your most precious asset, so don’t waste it. If you’re compelled to go after a specific problem, be ready and willing to rework your entire life to pursue it.
  
• Assume an alternate perspective – Make a habit of assuming uncommon angles with vigor. If that’s hard for you, just repeatedly prime yourself to do so and the habit will follow.
  
• Get in front of people – say hello, ask questions, empathize, ask for guinea pigs. 99% of people will be willing to help in some way if you’re clear and friendly.
  
  

Now that I’m here, hacking on the rural South is no longer a side project, it’s my life. I’m connecting with folks and getting more context, more quickly about problems in this area; I’m blogging and researching to gain more historical and statistical context and to share fascinating work that deserves a spotlight; and I’m taking steps to build a regional platform for social entrepreneurship.

Needless to say, that key is going to be with me for a long time. Now  I just have to make sure they don’t change the locks before I get back for Mardi Gras.

Given how the South lags behind the rest of the country in terms of average credit score and the cyclical nature of wealth accumulation, there is a deep need for products and services that lower barriers to credit and support individuals as they build or rehabilitate their credit histories in this part of the country.

Launched in December of 2011, LendUp aims to disrupt this cycle by providing a friendlier version of payday lending. Their current plan is to make loans of up to $250 for as long as 30 days to people with poor credit. 

In the video below, CEO Sasha Orloff explains how LendUp employs microfunding to reach a vision of broader economic involvement. As of this summer, they can deposit money into a bank account in less than 15 minutes.

There is tremendous potential for providing products such as this in the rural South. Internet access, smartphone usage, and banking rates would pose significant challenges to scaling, though.

If you've ever made a major purchase and you're not a millionaire, you're already familiar with the role that a lengthy, multi-faceted, and pristine credit history plays in bringing about access to new investments.  Right or not, it is ultimately a judgment of how well you can be trusted to handle someone else's money; and unless your cousin is a lender, the rules surrounding that judgment can be mystifying.

A person's credit score is the most central measure of economic trustworthiness. An explanation of the algorithm could fill a book, but suffice it to say that someone who has several carefully-managed credit accounts and significant reserves will have a much higher credit score than a person whose house was foreclosed on or (less severely) has a scant history of credit usage.

Given other topics I've discussed on this blog, it should come as no surprise that borrowers in the South simply aren't that trustworthy on average. Seven of the ten cities with the worst credit scores are located in the South (The remaining three are in Texas.), and state-level data reveals that most Southern states are ranked in the lowest quartile nationally. 

Per Experian, "consumers in the 600-699 range have credit scores that rank higher than 19 percent of U.S consumers. Lenders typically view consumers in this category as higher risk. While many lenders still make credit available, they likely will offer somewhat less favorable terms to compensate for higher default rates in this category."

Though a portion of this can and should be attributed to the recent economic downturn, Mississippi is not Nevada (ranked #50). Nevada was subject to rampant real estate speculation and shady mortgage lending before the bubble burst in 2008. Mississippi has a long-standing history of depriving its poor and black residents from full economic engagement, as do all other Southern states to varying extents.

Given the increasingly urbanized nature of wealth in the South, we can reasonably assume that rural borrowers play a distinct role in the numbers above. To that end, what underlying causes can we target as having played the most significant role in bringing about this current reality? At the risk of oversimplifying a deeply complex regional history, here are four potential causes worth considering:

• PLANTATION-BASED CREDIT SYSTEMS - Into the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of black residents in the rural South had only one source of credit - their white planter bosses. Many sharecroppers had to buy even the most basic items (food, clothes) on credit at the plantation store. Planters also regularly manipulated the "worth" of the work that sharecroppers did in order to fuel a never-ending loop of financial instability. If opting out of this system seems like no-brainer, consider that planters were often friends and had gentlemen's agreements to not hire one another's workers AND that there were few other opportunities in the rural South to get any sort of income.
• LOW TRUST IN BANKS/LENDERS - As fewer and fewer residents of the rural South worked directly in the fields over the course of the 20th century, we can reasonably assume that their trust in financial systems (and that of their children) was quite low, given that the system was stacked against them at every prior turn. This would ultimately contribute to lower rates of banking, especially in the black community.
• FINANCIAL LITERACY - If previous generations in your family have a deep (and well-deserved) mistrust of the credit and banking systems, you will have relatively less knowledge than the average adult re: how to navigate these complicated systems and set yourself up for fruitful pursuits of credit.
• OUTRIGHT RACISM/CLASSISM - Perhaps a no-brainer, but it's logical to assume that amidst a legacy of segregation and caste-based judgment one could find tens of thousands of examples of attempted borrowers who were rejected outright due to their standing in society. It may not have been presented to them in that manner, but there are simply too many first-person accounts of well-to-do whites in power explaining how they took deliberate steps to inhibit the progress of lower classes to believe that this somehow didn't happen.
  

In my next two entries, I'm going to highlight two players in the lending space that are forging new paths to credit - The Neighborhood Trust and LendUp. I believe the work they're already doing sheds light on potential new paths to building strong credit in the rural South.