Rural Narratives is a podcast about public health, power, and storytelling in North Carolina’s rural communities.
In this series, we explore how trust is built, how narratives take shape, and how communities shape the systems meant to serve them.
Through conversations with organizers, strategists, cultural leaders, and public health thinkers, Rural Narratives examines who gets to define rural communities – and what it means to reclaim those stories from the inside out.
Across western North Carolina, residents are working alongside local government, churches and other organizations to identify where people are being left offline and find ways to connect them. In...
What does it take to participate fully in community life when so much of it happens online? In rural western North Carolina, digital access can shape whether someone can...
In Columbus County in rural North Carolina, the COVID-19 pandemic changed how Lisa Richey thought about public health. Lisa came to Columbus County as a banker nearly 40 years...
Vicki Wiggins worries about what happens when young people grow up surrounded by violence and become “unfortunately unfazed” by it. In Hertford County, Mayors Weyling White and Yahmale Vaughan...
How do we build strong public health systems? In rural Hertford County, North Carolina, the answer begins with people. These stories emerged from community story circles, where neighbors gathered...
What does health look like in a rural community? In Columbus County, North Carolina, it looks like a long drive to specialized medical care. It looks like a neighbor...
Agriculture contributes billions of dollars to North Carolina’s economy and helps put food on tables across the country. Yet many of the workers who plant, harvest and process that...
Across this series, we’ve explored the stories told about rural communities. This episode examines how rural health is framed — and what those narratives reveal about who belongs, who...
Public health depends on science. But science alone doesn’t build trust. In rural eastern North Carolina, trust is shaped by lived experience — by whether systems have shown up,...
To receive ongoing updates and notifications on new episodes, please sign up to our Newsletter and we’ll make sure to keep you in the loop!
