National grantmakers 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 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.

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.