National Grant Makers Bet This Rural Education Program Can Scale

In 2010, Dreama Gentry met Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children’s Zone, a much-lauded nonprofit that supports youth from birth through college in a roughly 100-block area of central Harlem. The program was an inspiration for Gentry, who had launched a college-access program in rural eastern Kentucky about a decade earlier.

“We realized that college access actually starts at birth,” Gentry says. “It starts with the family, and it starts with the place.” She and her staff soon began to modify their approach.

A major breakthrough came that year when Gentry’s group — today called Partners for Rural Impact — received a Promise Neighborhood grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The federal effort helps communities design anti-poverty projects modeled after Harlem Children’s Zone’s “cradle-to-career” approach. Partners for Rural Impact became one of the first organizations, and the first rural effort, to receive the grant.

Today, the organization helps leaders in rural towns and districts identify programming gaps and tap into comprehensive educational, medical, and social services — largely funded by federal grants. It measures community progress across a range of indicators, including kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading, eighth-grade math, and high school graduation rates. Many of those areas saw substantial improvement over the past decade, although the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted progress.

Now two big-bet funders — Ballmer Group and Blue Meridian Partners — along with regional grant makers and individual donors, are supporting Partners for Rural Impact to adapt the model it honed in Appalachia for rural places in Texas, Missouri, and beyond.

Cecilia Gutierrez, a managing director at Blue Meridian Partners who leads the grant maker’s Place Matters portfolio, is a big fan of Gentry’s work. “She made it possible for us to all imagine what this work could look like in rural America.”

Partners for Rural Impact

A Broad Vision

When Blue Meridian launched its place-based funding strategy in 2020, Partners for Rural Impact was one of 12 groups to receive support — a $2 million grant in 2023.

While Blue Meridian’s first investment supported the group’s work in eastern Kentucky, “it quickly became clear to us that Dreama’s vision for this field and this work was much broader than what she was doing in Appalachia,” Gutierrez says. A second, two-year grant of $5 million is helping the nonprofit assist other rural communities to develop partnerships among schools, local governments, health-care systems, and other sectors to improve the lives of students.

Early on, Gentry also connected with Jeff Edmondson, who led the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati. That effort brought together a diverse group of community leaders to work on common goals for improving educational outcomes. As part of the approach, which became known as “collective impact,” partners adopt a common set of metrics to track progress and coordinate with a “backbone organization” that helps keep everyone on track.

At Berea College, which incubated Partners for Rural Education (the group’s previous name) during its first 23 years, Gentry’s organization played a similar backbone role, Edmondson says, and was determined to “apply those learnings to rural environments.”

Rural areas tend to have fewer and less accessible institutional resources than suburban or urban places, whether in kindergarten readiness, high-school graduation, or college enrollment, Edmondson says. For that reason, the role of the backbone organization is particularly important “to ensure that they’re using very limited resources as efficiently and effectively as possible.”

Related Content

1. Rural Philanthropy

   Rural America Is Struggling. Where’s Philanthropy?

2. Rural Philanthropy

   Native American Group Gives to Individuals to Build Community Wealth

Edmondson went on to lead StriveTogether, a network of cradle-to-career collective-impact endeavors. Today he’s executive director of community impact at the Ballmer Group, which this year committed $12.5 million over five years to support Partners for Rural Impact’s efforts to coach and assist other regions to forge community partnerships that help improve the lives of students. That’s in addition to the $2.58 million the Ballmer Group has contributed to PRI since 2022.

In the past year, Partners for Rural Impact has begun working in two towns in rural East Texas and Mexico, Mo., the hometown of Tyronn Lue, head coach of the Los Angeles Clippers. Lue provided $2.5 million to support that work alongside Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO and Ballmer Group founder who owns the NBA team.

Over the next four and a half years, PRI plans to identify two more regions or small towns to launch locally led partnerships. The idea is that these communities, along with those in Kentucky, Missouri, and Texas, will serve as “proof of concept” for what can work to improve education outcomes for rural families, says Gentry. “Our goal is that a superintendent in a rural place who’s really considering doing a collective impact, place-based partnership could say, ‘Hey, we see ourself in one of those five places and recognize that works in rural America.’”

Beyond that, PRI is working to position itself as a national intermediary, helping to spur more investment in rural America and support communities that take on these cross-sector partnerships.

Filling Funding Gaps

No matter where Partners for Rural Impact sets up shop, the work is led by people with a connection to the place, Gentry says.

Partners for Rural Impact Appalachia has a service area that spans 31 counties and 42 school districts. In Leslie County, where executive director Amon Couch was born and his father worked in the coal mines, the population is declining as people leave for better economic opportunities. The school system serves around 1,500 students, down from more than 3,500 students 30 years ago.

Transportation is a major challenge as population density declines, and the area is a resource desert in terms of health care and dental care. “The needs of our students are the greatest they’ve ever been, financially,” says Brett Wilson, the district superintendent. Around 70 percent of students receive some type of public assistance.

Last year, the district transported hundreds of students to dental checkups through a partnership with a local health system and using money from a grant through the Department of Education’s Full-Service Community Schools program and a local philanthropic funder.

“You can’t learn English or math or anything else when your teeth are throbbing,” Couch says.

Federal and state grants will always be PRI’s bread and butter, Gentry says. “Public dollars should support education,” she says. Today Partners for Rural Impact’s budget is around $78.2 million, about 78 percent of which comes from government.

But philanthropy, roughly 12 percent of its current budget, helps fill in the gaps.

It’s often a challenge for rural communities to come up with the matching funds some federal grants require. That’s one of the ways philanthropy steps in, providing matching dollars to pay the 60 or so AmeriCorps members who work with PRI in a given year.

Smaller Populations, Bigger Impact

Rural areas are still at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting philanthropy.

A 2015 U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis of foundation grants to rural areas between 2005 and 2010 found that those places received just 5 to 6 percent of foundation dollars. A 2021 FSG report found that share had increased only marginally, to 7 percent of all foundation giving, even though they account for 14 to 20 percent of the population. (The wide range is due to varying definitions of “rural.”)

Grant makers’ focus on scale or how many people they can serve always puts rural organizations at a disadvantage, Gentry says. But she’s successfully made the case that while total population numbers may be lower, donors can have a deeper impact outside of urban areas.

“If you’re really committed to moving population-level outcomes in a rural place, you can actually do that at saturation and actually transform a community,” she says. “Your scale could be doing the same intervention in multiple rural places around the country.”

In rural East Texas, the T.L.L. Temple Foundation has committed $2 million over five years with an additional $1 million in matching funds to help Partners for Rural Impact establish a presence in Diboll (population 4,500) and Pineland (population 1,100).

“The issues we deal with in rural communities are very similar to what you see in urban communities — transportation, access to health care, access to child care, food deserts, lack of broadband,” says Wynn Rosser, the foundation’s president. “The issues just express themselves differently when the context is rural and remote.”

The foundation is the largest grant maker in the rural East Texas region, with wealth from the Temple family, who owned a lumber and paper manufacturing company. It serves a 22-county area that’s larger than the entire state of South Carolina. It has long funded efforts to increase rates of third-grade literacy and math and help more high-school students earn postsecondary credentials aligned to the region’s labor market.

Already, Partners for Rural Impact has helped bring together schools, colleges, nonprofits, and other community programs to work toward common goals and attract new federal funding, Rosser says. “Their method works, their leadership works, their belief in rural people and rural communities, all those things are already coming through.”

Partners for Rural Impact

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.