National grantmakers bet this rural education program can scale

The Ballmer Group, Blue Meridian Partners, and others are helping Partners for Rural Impact take a model from Harlem and adapt it for Appalachian Kentucky and beyond

Philanthropy Rural Education

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 breakthrough came that year when Gentry’s group — today called Partners for Rural Impact, or PRI — received a Promise Neighborhood grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The federal effort helps communities design anti-poverty projects modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone’s “cradle-to-career” approach. PRI 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 indicators like 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 funders — the Ballmer Group and Blue Meridian Partners — along with regional grantmakers and individual donors, are supporting PRI to adapt the model it honed in Appalachia for rural places in Texas, Missouri, and beyond.

“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,” says Cecilia Gutierrez, a managing director at Blue Meridian Partners.

The grantmaker gave PRI $2 million in 2023 for its work in Kentucky. Now 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.

Rural areas tend to have fewer and less accessible institutional resources than suburban or urban places, says Jeff Edmondson, executive director of community impact at the Ballmer Group. For that reason, he says, the role of an organization that helps keep a diverse group of community leaders on track to meet common goals is particularly important “to ensure that they’re using very limited resources as efficiently and effectively as possible.”

This year, the Ballmer Group committed $12.5 million over five years to support PRI’s efforts to assist other regions in forging 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, PRI began working in two towns in rural East Texas and Mexico, Missouri, 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 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.’”

No matter where PRI sets up shop, the work is led by locals, Gentry says.

PRI 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 and dental care. “The needs of our students are the greatest they’ve ever been, financially,” says Brett Wilson, the district superintendent. Around 70% 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 philanthropy.

“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, with 78% coming from the government.

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

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

A 2015 U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis found that from 2005 to 2010, rural areas received just 5 to 6% of foundation grant dollars. A 2021 FSG report found that share increased marginally to 7%, even though those communities account for 14 to 20% of the population. depending on the definition of “rural.”

Grantmakers’ focus on how many people they can serve always puts rural groups 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.

“Your scale could be doing the same intervention in multiple rural places around the country,” she says.

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 PRI establish a presence in Diboll and Pineland.

“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 region's largest grantmaker, with wealth from the Temple family, who owned a lumber and paper manufacturing company. 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, PRI 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.”

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Eden Stiffman is a senior writer at the Chronicle of Philanthropy, where you can read the full article. This article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as part of a partnership to cover philanthropy and nonprofits supported by the Lilly Endowment. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.