Rural America faces plenty of challenges, but access to healthcare is among the most pressing. One big problem is distance: A 2018 analysis by Pew Research Center found that on average, rural Americans live 10.5 miles from the nearest hospital compared to 4.4 miles for those who live in urban areas. Many rural areas also lack ambulances or public transit to transport patients during emergencies.
In addition, rural hospitals have also been closing at an alarming rate over the past decade. A report from the American Hospital Association found that between 2010 and 2021, 136 rural hospitals closed, with 19 closing in 2020 alone. Rural areas also struggle with workforce shortages, cost of care, health literacy and issues around social stigma.
In an effort to make a difference, the Barr-Campbell Family Foundation is backing UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health with $10 million, the foundation’s first major gift. It’ll launch the school’s Rural Health Innovation program, offering an online master’s degree in public health (MPH) focused on rural healthcare. The program will also offer 25 fully paid scholarships a year for four years, and will cover everything from program fees to required textbooks. During summers, a select number of students will travel to Washington, D.C., as Rural Policy Fellows to receive additional training in rural policy and advocacy.
Lynn Barr, director of the Barr-Campbell Family Foundation, is an entrepreneur and a former student of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. She graduated in 2010 with an MPH degree and began working to improve rural healthcare. After selling her company, Caravan Health, in 2022, Barr took part of the proceeds from the sale to create the foundation alongside her husband Bob Campbell. Providing UC Berkeley with funding to support students who want to make a difference in rural healthcare has been a key aim for the new grantmaker. Other foundation interests include parks and open spaces, supporting the disabled and underserved, and suicide prevention.
“Getting the greatest public university in the country focused on rural health issues is a huge win, so I’m super excited about that and how we can potentially help rural Americans going forward and getting those professionals in rural communities as fast as we can,” Barr said.
Professor Kimberley MacPherson, faculty director for the Health Policy and Management program at UC Berkeley, said that this gift is transformational.
“We’re trying to equip people to be changemakers, and we’re very intentional about calling this rural health innovation,” MacPherson said. “We want to equip [students] with all the skills that they need, but to also have that innovation mindset. We need fresh thinking. We need people who really deeply understand the challenges in their communities.”
How it came together
Barr’s dedication to improving rural healthcare began while she was a student at UC Berkeley. While she brings to the table more than 30 years working in roles spanning drugs, information systems and medical devices, she said she had little knowledge about rural healthcare prior to her time at Berkeley.
Her capstone project involved rural hospitals in California and how to improve rural health in general. “I learned so much from the university as being part of that program… To make a long story short, I kind of fell in love with this space,” Barr said.
After graduating, Barr started Caravan Health to help rural providers adapt and adopt the technologies, programs and systems they need to give rural America the same level of care that is available elsewhere, she said.
“When I did that, I kind of made in my mind a pledge to the University of California that if I ever sold that company… I would give 5% to the university. I sold the company and then sat down with the School of Public Health, and talked about what we could do that would really make a difference in rural America.”
According to MacPherson, Barr credits her education at Berkeley for her realization of the difference one person could make in a policy environment, and that made her want to give back to the school.
But nevertheless, Barr and Campbell wanted to ensure that the funds would be effective. “It’s really hard to give money to academia and not let it just get sort of lost,” Barr said.
“We’re both business people. We come from that environment, so it was value and also accountability,” Campbell said. “We’re giving you a lot of money. We want to see the results. We want to be able to measure that. Otherwise, it just goes into a black hole. And did you really make a difference? Or do you just give them a bunch of money?”
Barr added, “And that goes across all charitable giving, right? I mean, if you’re going to make a big gift, how do you make it? How do you make it stick and do something important?”
So far, though, the school appears to be passing the test. According to Barr, Berkeley exceeded all their expectations in putting the program together, and Barr and Campbell will have something tangible to measure the results of their grant. Not only will the money directly support students, the program will result in a total of 100 MPH graduates in rural counties.
“If you think about how impactful that is, there’s only 2,000 rural hospitals in the country,” Barr said. “And none of them have a public health person, I can tell you. I’ve been in almost every one of them… So 100 out of 2,000, that’s 5%. That’s a big change. That’s something worth doing.”
Making the policy case for rural health
While a number of factors contribute to rural America’s healthcare access challenges, one of the biggest is the limited attention rural America often receives among policymakers in Washington, D.C.
“From a societal perspective, rural just doesn’t have a voice in Washington… there’s not a lot of trust between Washington and rural America,” Barr said. “That was really one of the main reasons that this program has a policy focus.”
According to MacPherson, the program is intended to help scholars be changemakers in their communities as well as to equip them to advocate for the funding and policy changes needed to improve rural healthcare.
One of the big benefits of this program is that it will be mostly online. “We know that cost is a barrier to higher education, and also having to relocate to go to school in person,” MacPherson said. “Our online degree allows people to educate in place.”
“What we’re looking for are people who currently live and work in rural communities and want to gain more knowledge and skill sets to be changemakers in advancing rural health… We don’t want to pull these rural folks out of where they live and work. We want them to stay where they are, but to also be able to advance their education,” MacPherson said.
Barr herself will be taking a number of students in the Rural Health Innovations program to Washington, D.C., every summer as part of the previously mentioned Rural Policy Fellows initiative.
A call to philanthropy
The new program has been met with enthusiasm. According to Barr, Berkeley received 175 letters of interest within a few weeks of its announcement. The first cohort of MPH students will start in January of next year.
Barr hopes more funders will support Berkeley’s Rural Health Innovation program. “All the infrastructure will be in place… It would just be a matter of extending it to more students and creating more opportunities,” she said, adding that interested funders don’t need to go through the Barr-Campbell Family Foundation and can support the program directly through Berkeley.
Barr hopes that over the long term, rural disparities in healthcare can be eliminated. “Life expectancy in rural America has been dropping faster than the difference between rural and urban life expectancy,” Barr said. “And so we need to change in the long term. That’s the goal. We can do better than that, but we’ve got to fix our problems and address these problems head-on, and not continue to ignore them like we have.”
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