Pullman, Washington, is the county seat of Whitman County. It’s not the largest or smallest place out there; it’s a Main Street community that seems to sit about right. The city of about 33,500 residents has grown over the past 25 years, as has the county, at a faster or slower rate like much of the Inland Northwest.
Yet beyond the usual indicators—population, employment, personal income—how well is the community doing? What better ways do we have to measure the community’s success?
The Center on Rural Innovation (CORI), a nonprofit organization focused on closing the rural opportunity gap, has developed some handy tools designed for local economic developers, grant writers, community leaders, and researchers who need credible county‑ and region‑level data without having to be expert analysts.
Their Rural Economic Development Tool is a resource to better understand your local development landscape. It offers county and regional profiles, standardized metrics, peer comparisons, and narrative guidance.
For Whitman County, CORI’s key takeaways highlight the area’s quality of life and high educational attainment—not surprising given Pullman’s proximity to the University of Idaho just across the state line. Yet the tool also indicates opportunities to encourage business growth, and improve broadband service.
This handy data tool explores in-depth indicators across key drivers impacting rural communities, such as:
- Workforce: Employment, wages, education, and occupational trends
- Entrepreneurship: Business growth, private investment, self-employment, industry mix, and remote work
- Infrastructure: Broadband availability and adoption, and computer access
- Demographics: Population change, age, race and ethnicity, and income distribution
- Quality of Life: Housing supply and cost-burdened renters and homeowners
These are useful because they combine comparative data with interpretation. Communities do not only need numbers; they need ways to make sense of them in context.
What do the numbers indicate for your home town? Do you think they get it right or is there room for improvement? Our good friends at CORI are constantly asking questions about their data and how well these tools work for real people out in rural communities. I’m excited to see what they do next.
Cover photo: Palouse Hills (CC BY-SA) Lynn Suckow (2006) on Wikimedia.
I am speaking at the Inland Northwest Partner’s summer conference on campus at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, this week, Thursday 9 July 2026. We have a packed agenda discussing Main Street Strategies focused on this dynamic region. Find out all about it here.