Always Picked Last: Animal Welfare's Rural Funding Problem
I thought it would be an interesting data point. What proportion of grant money is awarded to rural organizations? My gut feeling was that rural areas were not receiving an equitable portion of resources. The numbers I came up with confirmed that suspicion and showed that the problem was worse than I thought. However, before we get to the numbers, I want to make a few points.
1) My intention is to call attention to this underrepresented equity issue. I am not seeking to condemn, judge, or shame. I am not naming the organizations whose information I used for this reason. This is a systemic industry (and beyond) issue.
2) I am not suggesting that anyone who received grants didn’t need them or deserve them. There are struggles everywhere.
3) I am not seeking to assign blame. Everything from the current philanthropic impact efficiency obsession to the metro-centered nature of most major grant-making staff to the lack of rural institutional development likely contributes to this issue. It is complicated (and not isolated to animal welfare).
I used publicly available 990 data from four major animal welfare grantmakers. From those 990s, I compiled data on 729 grants totaling $23.350,518. I assigned each grant a USDA Rural-Urban continuum code (RUCC) based upon the zip code of the receiving agency. I am not a data scientist. I pulled all this together using various sources while doing everything else with running a humane society. I acknowledge that this information likely undercounts rural grants since some metro organizations may have received grant money for rural projects, and some funders didn’t report grants under $5,000. However, this possible undercount would not likely cover the dramatic gap outlined below. I would encourage any data people out there to take a deeper, more scientific look at this issue.
Of the $23,350,518 in grants awarded, agencies in metro areas (RUCC 1,2,3) received $22,049,261, micropolitan agencies (RUCC 4,5) received $849,600,000, and rural agencies received $451,657 (RUCC 6,7,8,9). When this breakdown is compared to population figures, that systemic inequity becomes apparent.
Areas classified as rural in this data represent 10% of the United States population. Yet those areas only received 2%(!) of funds. In fact, micropolitan areas represented less of the total population but still received more grant funding than rural areas! Whatever the well-intended reasoning behind current funding priorities, it is leaving a large group of pets and people behind. This has been persistent and systemic and needs to change.
Notes on data:
Some grants were removed from the data set. This included grants to other organizations in the data set and grants unrelated to direct animal welfare work. I also removed grants for conference funding and academic institutions.
The “micropolitan” and “rural” labels for the RUCC data are my invention.
Info on RUCC: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-continuum-codes/
I am not a data scientist, and this data is not comprehensive.
