Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity News and Events

June 4, 2025

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CARHE was very pleased to host a special screening of Just Getting By at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center on Wednesday, June 4, 2025, to an audience of healthcare providers, educators, and community members.

The film is a sweeping, yet intimate look at the lives of Vermonters who are struggling with food and housing insecurity. It tells the stories of working families, folks who are homeless and accessing food shelves and soup kitchens, and people who are living in temporary hotel/motel programs. 

After the film, there was a panel moderated by director Bess O’Brien from Kingdom County Productions, with:

• Michael Redmond (Executive Director, Upper Valley Haven)
• Terri Lewinson (Associate Professor, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth)
• Lynne Goodwin (Human Services Director, City of Lebanon)
• Jayne Hufferdine (Community Health Worker, Dartmouth Health)

Audience members asked about how we as a community can take action on housing and food insecurity in the current policy landscape.

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May 8 to 9, 2025

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At Dartmouth Health’s inaugural Rural Health Symposium on May 8 to 9, 2025, the Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity (CARHE) played a leading role in bringing a community engagement lens: 

• CARHE led two Community Engagement Breakout Sessions on Friday May 9, featuring facilitators Dr. Jack Westfall (University of Colorado School of Medicine) and Angy Zhang (CARHE). They presented the principles of participatory research, and led conversations among participants about how community members and researchers can better engage with one another. Read a summary of those conversations in the Rural Health Symposium Summary & Report Out (PDF).

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• Three of our project partners presented posters during the poster session. Little Rivers Health Care’s Fresh Food Farmacy poster was a finalist for the Wennberg prize!
• CARHE and Synergy partnered to offer a Storytelling Booth, a continuation of the Storytelling Training workshop from 2024 led by M. Barney, with new opportunities to record stories of rural health.

Many thanks to the Community Engagement Planning Team that worked hard to deliver an exceptional experience and highlight community voices in rural health work.

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In spring 2025, CARHE and Better Behavior Health Outcomes sponsored an Authentic Community Engagement 3-part virtual workshop series. We were fortunate to have Emerald Anderson-Ford and Erin Allgood from Liberation Nexus Lab lead these trainings on how to strengthen community engagement practices to better serve our communities. We had 45 participants representing a wide range of organizations and sectors join us for lively and enriching conversations.

Though this series has ended, here are some resources from Liberation Nexus Lab that you can use in your community engagement work:

• 5 Characteristics of Authentic Community Engagement (PDF)
• Authentic Community Engagement Session #3 Worksheet (PDF)
• Equitable Board Recruitment and Engagement (PDF)

We also encourage you to check out the Community Engaged Scholarship Hub, which was launched in February 2025. This set of resources was created to provide a foundation for academic colleagues working in our communities, and offers a common set of principles, practices, and shared language to promote trusting and sustained partnerships.

A message from Sally Kraft, MD, MPH, Population Health Officer
November 21, 2024

Happy Rural Health Day,

Rural populations are older, sicker, and die younger than urban counterparts. Rural populations have higher rates of chronic disease and higher rates of risks for chronic disease (smoking, obesity). Rural populations have greater difficulty accessing healthcare services. But we believe that the nature of rural living provides an anti-dote to these trends.

The increasing disparities between rural and urban populations is particularly important for our Northern New England communities. Across the US, rural populations have a 20% higher mortality rate compared to urban populations and that gap tripled between 1999-2019 (Cross S, Califf R, Warraich H. JAMA June 8, 2021). Nationally, 20% of the population lives in rural areas, but in the Northern New England states of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, 54% of the population is rural (2020 Decennial Census). Furthermore, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire are home to some of the oldest populations in our country, and high care needs increase with age. These factors contribute to the vulnerability of our Northern New England communities.

Despite these challenges, rural communities have strengths that can change the trajectory of the past decades and point the way for solutions to healthcare disparities. In a small community, people know each other. There is a sense of responsibility to care for each other. Neighbors help neighbors.

This shared responsibility was highlighted during the pandemic. In the Upper Valley, community organizations resurrected a committee, Upper Valley Strong, which had been created in years past when confronted with threats such as Hurricane Irene. Dartmouth Health joined the Upper Valley Strong coalition to support communities immediately after the state of emergency was declared in March 2020. The history of working together, being neighbors and colleagues, and shared responsibility helped to create a robust system of support for health and social needs in the early months of the pandemic (Yang Y, et al. Stronger Together: A Successful Model of Health system-Community Collective Action During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Progress in Community Health Partnership 2023).

Fueled by the experience of Upper Valley Strong came the idea of creating a system to bring people together that would endure after the pandemic. There was a growing realization of the relationship between community conditions and health outcomes, between health and economic prosperity, and the need to create communities where everyone can be as healthy as possible. In 2022, the Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity (CARHE) was designed by community members, researchers, educators and clinicians working together to focus on developing partnerships that would improve health for all.

On Rural Health Day, we celebrate the accomplishments of our partners at CARHE.

• Implementing new programs to get healthy food to rural communities
• Enhancing early childhood programming in rural libraries
• Educating children and their families about the health impacts of climate change
• Forming a community coalition to support the needs of our neighbors
• Laying the foundation for a recovery community organization in an underserved area
• Helping to bring oral health services to people in rural areas
• Bringing people together to learn about political drivers of health

These recent achievements are just a fraction of the whole list of actions that are teaching us how we can learn from each other and work together to make sure that people in rural areas have the chance to live healthy lives by learning and acting together in our rural communities.

Sally Kraft, MD, MPH
Population Health Officer, Dartmouth Health

October 2024

CARHE partnered with Murphy Barney to host storytelling training in October 2024. These virtual trainings were designed for care workers who serve rural communities—including providers and clinical staff, researchers, educators, and human service providers—to help them engage with the process of telling the story of the important work they do.

We believe your stories can help us move toward better care for everyone. We recognize the crucial role you play day in and day out in the lives of the people you serve. Data alone can't illustrate the depth of your work and impact.

Read the event report (PDF) to learn more about this training and the stories we hope to tell.

Wednesday, September 4, 2024

With NH Congressional District 2 candidates Colin Van Ostern and Maggie Goodlander

Recognizing that political drivers of health, including federal legislative activity, shape health outcomes and access to healthcare, the Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity and the Dartmouth Health Office of Government Relations are partnering to cohost the Rural Health Equity Policy Forum. 

You are invited to hear from candidates running for the NH Congressional District 2 seat. This seat has been held by Congresswoman Annie Kuster for the last decade, but she announced her retirement from Congress in late March. Two candidates, Maggie Goodlander and Colin Van Ostern, will join us for this policy forum.

At the Forum, community members—including clinicians, researchers, students, nonprofit leaders, and more—will ask health equity centered questions of the candidates with rich context and background information. This Forum will provide an opportunity for participating candidates to learn about rural challenges and share their political strategies to tackle health disparities.

Recognizing and Maximizing the Impact of Consumer and Community Member Experience to Advance Health Equity
November 7, 2023

CARHE hosted this virtual workshop, where over 50 people representing various community-based organizations and health system partners explored ways to nurture community engagement in all levels of governance, care, and leadership for positive community change.

The workshop learning objectives were:

• Participants will identify barriers to genuine consumer/community engagement.
• Participants will identify a variety of models for consumer/community engagement.
• Participants will consider ways that consumer/community engagement can be meaningfully included within their own work.

Community engagement workshop resources

• NHCHC Presentation Slides - November 7, 2023: Genuine Community Engagement (PDF)
  Reprinted with permission from the National Health Care for the Homeless Council.
• Community Engagement Toolkit (PDF): This comprehensive, interactive toolkit was designed by the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) to support groups to plan for building community engagement strategies into their work.
• We Asked, You Said (PDF): This worksheet, also developed by BPHC, is a template for documenting community engagement activities, outcomes, and follow-up.
  Reprinted with permission from the BPHC.

Learning and Acting Together in our Communities
October 30, 2023
Lake Morey Resort, Fairlee, Vermont

Keynote address by Dr. Yvonne Goldsberry, MPH, PhD
President, The Endowment for Health

The Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity Fall Gathering created a space for members from community services, health care delivery, research, and education to bring about transformational change by working together to eliminate unfair conditions and helping people in our rural New England communities to be as healthy as possible.

Participants enhanced their understanding of health equity challenges and solutions in our region, network with likeminded people, and came away better equipped to engage in partnerships for health equity in our communities.

Read a summary of the event (PDF).

September 18, 2023

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This event featured a panel conversation about obstacles to health equity faced by the LGBTQ+ community and the way forward. The conversation was moderated by Murphy Barney of StoryCorps and included representatives from community service organizations, health care, and the public sector. In addition to the speakers, several groups and organizations were present to share information about services and resources for LGBTQ+ community members.

Read the event summary (PDF).

The panel event was followed by the 37th Annual Schumann Lecture for Healthful Living, "Queering the outdoors: A Journey up my own personal mountain," presented by Perry Cohen, MEd, Founder of the Venture Out Project.

Working Together to Improve Health for Rural New England Communities
November 7, 2022

The Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity held its first gathering on an unseasonably warm day on November 7, 2022, at Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee, Vermont. Approximately 150 people came together to learn from one another about health disparities in our region and to participate in meaningful dialogue about how to advance health equity in our communities through partnership and collective action.

Across various breakout sessions focused on health challenges, skill building, and partnership, several key themes emerged throughout the day.

• Summary of key themes from the event (PDF)
• Summary of key themes from the Open Space Idea Generation session (PDF)
• Event program (PDF)
• Speaker bios (PDF)
• Resources shared:
  • Trusted 10 exercise and guidance
  • University of Minnesota Community Social Capacity model
  • AAMC Principles of Trustworthiness
  • BARHII Public Health Framework for Reducing Health Inequities