When the federal government started offering grants to communities to help them deal with the opioid crisis, Tara Kunkel, who at the time worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, noticed that rural communities were not submitting as many grant applications as their suburban and urban counterparts. This, despite the fact that rural communities were "being disproportionately impacted by the opioid epidemic," Kunkel says.
"We were having trouble getting money to where we needed to get it to," she recalls.
Around the same time, Kristina Bryant and her colleagues at the National Center for State Courts were having an increasing number of conversations about what kinds of federal resources rural justice systems can access, and making sure they were aware of them.
When Kunkel left DOJ in March 2020 and formed Rulo Strategies, her firm connected with the NCSC, and they embarked on an effort to learn as much as they could about what obstacles officials in rural areas face, and what kinds of solutions could be effective. Rulo and the NCSC formed the Rural Justice Collaborative, which focuses on educating people about which solutions they might be able to adopt, and also on encouraging the development of new solutions.
The problem with the lack of grant submissions stemmed from rural communities not having enough people to devote the time to prepare and submit the applications, Kunkel says. "They didn't have the luxury of having grant writers on staff the way that larger communities often do,” she explains. “They didn't have the same capacity in terms of staffing."
The lack of enough people also affects how rural communities can implement programs when they do receive grants, says Bryant, principal court management consultant at the NCSC. "In a suburban or urban community, the work that goes along with actually using that money is typically spread out among multiple departments and people,” she says. “Rural communities don't have that depth of resources available to them. There are some barriers beyond just being successful in getting the money."
The RJC has conducted numerous interviews with officials from rural communities to get a sense of what their biggest concerns are. The group's work is "strength based," Bryant notes. "We often talk about rural communities from a place of, what they do not have available to them? One of the pillars of the work we're trying to do is identifying programming or implementations of work that is being done in rural communities that appear to be working.
“Let's start shining a spotlight on that work and sharing that from community to community."
Toward that end, in October 2021, the RJC identified nine noteworthy innovation sites; one of these is South Dakota’s well-known Rural Attorney Recruitment Program, a partnership between the State Bar of South Dakota and the South Dakota Unified Judicial System. The RJC’s goals for 2022 include identifying more innovation sites, helping leaders in rural justice efforts connect with each other, and developing a research agenda.
The problem of access to justice in rural areas is not new, but some see it as becoming more serious in recent years. Interviews with bars and other organizations reveal a range of efforts designed to get a greater handle on how big the problem is, and also how to help solve or reduce it.