In 2010, Dreama Gentry met Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children's Zone, a nonprofit that supports youth from birth through college in 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.
She and her staff soon began to modify their approach.
A breakthrough came that year when Gentry's group, Partners for Rural Impact, received a Promise Neighborhood grant from the US.
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.
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 Read the Entire Article
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