Chase Reece, BSHP '24

Today, I continued to work on securing letters of support for the grant application. As previously mentioned, this grant aims to improve workforce development and labor force participation in three rural Georgia communities. The labor force participation rate is often a good indicator of the overall health of a community’s economy. This rate is calculated by taking the number of people actively in the workforce and dividing it by the number of people eligible to be in the workforce. Those who are eligible to be in the workforce are the civilian non-institutional population. According to the U.S. Department of labor, the civilian institutional population includes those 16 years or older, who are not inmates of institutions, and who are not actively serving in the Armed Forces. The labor-force participation rate is helpful for analyzing the health of local economies because it tells us the relative amount of labor resources available for the production of goods and services in a certain area. There are many things that can influence this rate, including the age of the population, educational attainment, and salaries being offered by employers.