The Rural Promise: Pathways to Opportunity for Every Student

Dreama Gentry grew up in Appalachian Kentucky, in a community often defined by outsiders for what it lacked. But what she saw was strength, connection, and possibility. Today, as the founder and CEO of Partners for Rural Impact, she’s working to make sure the 14 million young people growing up in rural America can see those same possibilities for themselves.

“What I see in Appalachia is that a lot of young folks have lost hope. And they've lost the ability to dream of a future and of a path. And some of that is because their parents also have lost that hope. And some parents are afraid to have dreams for their young folks,” Gentry says. “And I think that's why programs, schools, community systems have to wrap around the whole family and support the whole family in learning how to dream again, holding the hope of a better future, and providing them with those supports.”

Despite rural students often graduating high school at higher levels than their peers, they have lower enrollment rates at college. Part of Gentry’s work is developing that path for students. She explains how “place-based partnerships” are transforming rural schools by bringing together educators, families, and community leaders around one goal: every child supported, from cradle to career.

“Career pathways for rural students are the same as career pathways for students in urban areas and other areas. And I think sometimes, we don't make that distinction,” she says. “I think we have a responsibility and a duty, when working with young folks, to help them actualize and develop a dream, a goal that they want to work toward, and then to make sure that they're leaving high school with the skills to achieve that, if possible. And they're college ready. They're career ready. And so, the pathways are unlimited for young people in rural places, just like they are in others.”

She says there are many surprising connections between rural and urban education. In fact, Gentry notes how her work with Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone changed her perspective. Now, she emphasizes that while the settings may differ, the core work of supporting children and families is universal. Rural and urban educators, she says, have much to learn from one another if they’re willing to move beyond perceived divides and recognize their shared mission to create opportunity for every child.

In this episode, Gentry — a By All Means senior fellow at EdRedesign for 2025-27 — challenges assumptions about rural life, reminding us that the challenges and outcomes facing small towns are deeply tied to the nation’s future.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. 

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Dreama Gentry knows conversations about preparing young people for college and careers often leave out rural students. She's working to change that. As founder and CEO of Partners for Rural Impact, Dreama has spent years building partnerships that create more opportunities in the education pipeline. High school graduation rates in rural areas are strong, yet far fewer students go on to college, and career options can be limited by geography or local industry. At the same time, close-knit schools, families, and communities working together can be powerful drivers of opportunity for the nearly 14 million youth living in rural America. I asked Dreama to define what a cradle-to-career pathway looks like and why it's so vital in rural America.

DREAMA GENTRY: So, I have to start with a story. So, I'm from Appalachia. And we do a lot of storytelling. And so, I think it's important to know and understand the cradle-to-career pathway and why it's important to me is to really understand my own journey.

So, I grew up in Appalachian Kentucky. And I often say, I still live here. I wouldn't live anywhere else. And it's interesting, because Appalachia is a region plagued by stereotypes and mental models around what it is and what it isn't. But what I see and what I've experienced in Appalachia is community and people that are connected to one another and the land. And my parents, they hadn't gone to college, but they wanted what was best for me. And they surrounded me with love, with opportunity. I realized now that I was living in a community of poverty, but I didn't feel that. My grandma, I call her Ma, she's one of my people. And I always bring her up. She would take me to the library all the time. Public libraries were like the core piece where I really started to dream. And she also encouraged me to dream.

But in high school, I was surrounded by folks who saw me. I was the quiet, introverted kid from the part of the county where people didn't expect folks who grew up there to be successful. But they saw me. They helped me. They got me into college track courses. And they actually saw that I could do more. 

I had an opportunity to attend an upper bound program, a Governor's Scholars program, which was six weeks on a college campus. And during that six weeks, it was the first time I had been with a diverse community of folks. And the majority of the folks there knew they were going to college. And they knew what it took. And I came home and I was like, ‘I'm going to college. I'm going to do this.’ And my parents, even though they would have chosen a different path for me than college, because they really wanted what they thought would be a secure path. And there was a new manufacturing plant opening, and they thought I could get a job in the office and make a career there. But they're like, ‘OK, if you want to do this, we'll help you. We'll do this.’ And I ended up at Berea College in Kentucky. And Berea is very unique in that it serves only low-income students. And it provides them with a liberal arts education at no cost. And we all worked on campus.

So, Berea led me to law school. And again, it was the folks that believed in me, that actually supported me that helped me have those opportunities in that pathway. I practiced law for a few years and then realized that wasn't the fulfilling career I wanted. And I also realized that I could have a vocation, I could have a calling. And I think we forget that when we work with young people in poverty. So, I came back to Berea College. And the president at the time became a great mentor, allowed me to be entrepreneurial. I started out working in one small school. My office was there at the high school, but I built the work up. 

And what I realized was rural communities wanted the strategies and the practices to move outcomes for kids. What they needed was the investment. And they needed the models. And I did that for 27 years. 

And then three years ago, through mentorship again, with folks like Jennifer Blatz, who leads Strive Together, Jim Shelton at Blue Meridian, and Geoff Canada, who is a mentor and leads Harlem Children's Zone, I was inspired to, OK, I could go national. We can do this work nationally.

My whole journey has been a journey around how if you support a young person where they are at that moment, if you support an adult where they are at that moment, you can help them develop that pathway that will not only lead them to upward mobility, economic mobility, but also creating the world of work that they want that fulfills them. So, it really is personal to me. And it really is cradle to career. I think any of us, if we look at where we are now, it started in the home. And it was built on at each stage. So, I don't know if I answered your question, but I told you a story.

JILL ANDERSON: I love the personal story, because I think that a lot of people could potentially relate to that. I'm wondering if you see a lot of that in students today, where they maybe don't have that nurturing from a young age to follow a different path, they just don't see the opportunity.

DREAMA GENTRY: What I see in Appalachia is that a lot of young folks have lost hope. And they've lost the ability to dream of a future and of a path. And some of that is because their parents also have lost that hope. And some parents are afraid to have dreams for their young folks. And I think that's why programs, schools, community systems have to wrap around the whole family and support the whole family in learning how to dream again, holding the hope of a better future, and providing them with those supports. I'm a big believer in community schools as a holistic model that works in K-12, that provides opportunities for families to be engaged authentically by someone at the school, provides opportunities for young folks to actually have experiences out of school, in school, have a mentor. Huge believer in AmeriCorps. We have a program called Partner Corps that works throughout rural America. It's very similar to City Year, which works in urban places, where you have full-time members in a school providing tutoring, and mentoring, and connection, and hope.

In our work, those AmeriCorps members, those community school coordinators, they're all residents of the local place. And they then have that connection. So young people see them, they see what they're doing, they see what they're accomplishing or have already accomplished, and they're learning to hope and dream again.

That's the biggest piece I think we have to continue to do on that cradle-to-career trajectory is put those caring adults, like my guidance counselor, in close proximity to young folks. And then we also need to recognize that we're still recovering from COVID. And even before COVID, too many young people were not proficient in English language arts, in math. They did not have the supports they needed, especially in high poverty schools.

So, we also have to ensure that we're putting capable individuals in schools to support teachers, because teachers have a hard job. And teaching is a full-time job. And teachers need those tutors, those assistants in their classrooms, the volunteers in the classrooms that can actually lean in and support them. I am seeing that now in rural communities, there are still young people that are being left behind that are falling out of the system. Chronic absenteeism is also rampant in rural places and in urban places, particularly since COVID. And if young people are not coming to school, they're not having the opportunity to be around those folks, to really start to dream and think about their career path.

JILL ANDERSON: Rural students graduate high school at similar rates or even higher than their peers, but not as many go on to college. Can you talk a little about that and what we know about why fewer students are going to college?

DREAMA GENTRY: I think there's multiple factors. One is proximity. Often, in rural places, to go on to college, you have to actually leave home. Whereas you can be in non-rural areas and actually stay at home and go to college. And so, it increases the cost. But also, you lose, when you go away to college, that deep connection to family. And when we think about persistent poverty rural regions like Appalachia, often, the young people are the ones that are also pitching in and helping the family and the extended family. And so, their leaving and going to college may be a boon for them and something they want to do, but it's a loss for the family. And with that distance, they can't do both. I think we also see cost as a prohibitive factor, especially young folks that are coming from places and families that are struggling to survive, not even thrive, but survive. And it's getting more and more difficult to finance and for them to think about the financing of college. So multiple factors, the proximity, the distance, the loss of connection to family, and cost are three of the ones that come to mind for me.

And I do want to add one additional. One of the things that we really work to do is to ensure that young folks start to think about is their career and their life, do they want to stay at home? Do they want to go somewhere else? What career do they want to do? And part of that is that real talk with them. Because if you want to be a ballet dancer, you probably can't stay in Owsley County, Kentucky. And so, it doesn't make sense to follow that career path if staying in Owsley County, Kentucky is so important. But if you're willing and you're interested in leaving and going to a large city, that could work.

There's the lack of the real talk with students from middle school on where we actually help young people start to prioritize. Is it staying here? Is it leaving? What's the different careers that I could achieve? What's the degrees that I could have that would give me the life that I want? If you have young people who want to stay at home, and that's where they want to have their career, but they're not seeing jobs around locally that require a college degree, then it becomes, why go to college? And so, I do think we have to get more sophisticated in our counseling and guidance to young people.

JILL ANDERSON: What do rural career pathways look like right now?

DREAMA GENTRY: Career pathways for rural students are the same as career pathways for students in urban areas and other areas. And I think sometimes, we don't make that distinction. I think we have a responsibility and a duty, when working with young folks, to help them actualize and develop a dream, a goal that they want to work toward, and then to make sure that they're leaving high school with the skills to achieve that, if possible. And they're college ready. They're career ready. And so, the pathways are unlimited for young people in rural places, just like they are in others. We often focus on what are the career pathways that are in local communities. Where if young people want to stay at home and work, what are the opportunities? That's where you see pockets of rural America with persistent poverty and with a collapsed economy that there really is-- if I think about, again, Owsley County, Kentucky, there's not a lot of job opportunities where you can stay in Booneville, Kentucky, and drive to a job, and make a meaningful income.

However, in this world there also are remote opportunities. So, part of what we're trying to do is work with our partners in economic development to say, how do we actually bring in remote opportunities, and how do we prepare young people for those? And then how do we also work with community and economic development to convince industry and employers to prioritize hiring young people from rural areas through those remote work pieces?

JILL ANDERSON: That is so interesting. And I want to dig a little bit more into some of the work that you've done, which is championing this place-based work model, bringing schools, businesses, and community partners together. Tell me a little bit more about what that collaboration looks like on the ground.

DREAMA GENTRY: Yeah, so one of the things I learned after-- and it took me a long time, it took me like 15 years to learn it, was that programs alone are not going to change the trajectory for a community and the young people in a community. They can provide opportunities for the lucky ones like me that have the chance to do those programs to be successful. But what will it take to actually create communities where they have pathways for all kids? So I'm a big believer in what I call place-based partnerships. That's where you bring together a cross-sector table of leaders. They're using data. They're listening to community and resident voice. And they're actually working together to ensure that every young person is meeting certain metrics, that they're entering kindergarten ready to learn, reading at grade level at third grade, math at eighth grade, they're at grade level, graduating high school college and career ready, and obtaining post-secondary certifications and degrees. And that all of this leads to them being able to obtain meaningful work. So that cradle-to-career perspective of a place-based partnership is, to me, critical. So, what it looks like in practice, so in Appalachia, we have the Appalachian cradle-to-career partnership. And we actually look at the region versus just one county, like Owsley County. Because in rural places, regionalism is critical. You often have to go two counties over to a hospital, or to get to the unemployment office, or to — public libraries are everywhere. I love my public libraries. And that's one thing we have locally. But the table of the Appalachian cradle-to-career partnership is comprised of regional community and economic development, superintendents, health department, governmental agencies, nonprofits.

They're all coming together regularly to talk about what they're individually doing, but then also thinking about how do they align their services, their funding to actually move some shared indicators. So, a great example is how do we ensure that all kids in Appalachia and Kentucky are kindergarten ready, they're entering kindergarten ready to learn?

So, we have early childhood partners at the table. That includes the head starts. We have Save The Children that does phenomenal home visiting programs. They're a nonprofit. We have the school systems, because they care about those incoming kindergartners. And they're really looking at maps and data to think about where are the kids’ birth to three. And how do we get books in their home? The Dolly Parton Imagination Library, we can get books in every home. And research shows that's important. How do we actually think about who's going to need more services? How do we prepare the school for how many kindergartners are coming in? And so, they develop a strategic plan. And they implement that plan by aligning resources, so that they're thinking about every young person and ensuring that in all neighborhoods and all places within that footprint, young people are being supported. And so that's how a place-based partnership works. And so, if you're doing that and you have a working group thinking about early childhood, you have one thinking about K through 12, you have one thinking about rural pathways. What are the jobs in our community and our region? And how do we ensure that the students throughout high school and even middle school are aware of those jobs?

We do a lot of internships, summer internships. Where we're placing young people in jobs, so they can test jobs out and learn about the local jobs. So, I really think that place-based partnership framework works in rural places. We've seen outcomes in our Appalachian cradle-to-career partnership footprint increase across multiple indicators because everyone's pulling together and we're all working toward those same outcomes. And we're all thinking about every child and making sure that every child is covered.

JILL ANDERSON: Can you talk a little bit about the outcomes that you've seen increase? I'd love to hear success stories. We don't often get to hear those as much in education.

DREAMA GENTRY: So, I will talk about Leslie County, which is one of the counties. Because in Kentucky, we talk counties. And so, our partnership covers multiple counties. But in Leslie County — and I'll also talk about time. I think the other thing about place and these outcomes, and especially places of high poverty, is it took generations to get here. And we're not going to fix it overnight. We started working when we were Partners for Education, back before we became Partners for Rural Impact. We had a different name back then. In 2010, 2011, we started working in Leslie County, Kentucky. And I went down and visited because the superintendent was a graduate of Berea College. And he had reached out. And Leslie County Schools were under state takeover. So, they were in turnaround. And he was like, we want to figure out what we can do, especially at this high school, to actually create opportunity for all students. And we're serious about this. And so, they were in state takeover. There were some resources coming in. And what we were able to do with them is start to develop a plan of what they really thought the problems were.

So, we looked at data. They looked at data. We looked at what could move the data, what type of interventions. And those interventions were some in school. How do you increase rigor in the classroom? How do you actually increase instructional rigor? But also, how do you work with families? How do you target kids who are behind and bring them up to grade level? So, in 2010, we started partnering with Leslie County. We brought in a community school in 2011. And so, Leslie became a community school, which meant there were community school coordinators there at the middle and high school.

There was an opportunity for them to engage families and also to provide and support out-of-school learning and in-school rigor. We brought in AmeriCorps. Our Partner Corps program started there in 2011. So, at the high school, we had 20 full-time adults now that were in the school. And I'm smiling because they were these green fuzzy vests that I thought were really cool back in 2010. And so, the students called them their green fuzzies. So, the green fuzzies were there. And that program was designed so that every young person in the school had a green fuzzy. So, there was no stigma. It wasn't like, oh, you got a green fuzzy, so there must be something wrong with you. It was like, cool, this is for everybody. And so, they were in math classrooms, tutoring in math and supporting math instructors. But they were also connecting with the family and doing the career pathway work.

We started partnering with community colleges and four-year colleges around dual enrollment, just lots of things. And so fast forward, this was 2010, 2011. Around 2018, before COVID, the school had went from being at the bottom of the list of high schools in the state to within the top 10%. And even post-COVID, we were able to still maintain that progress. And the school is still usually in the top 20%, depending on the year. 
And so, we're seeing some of those green fuzzies that were doing that volunteer work, we required two years of college, some of them have went on to get their degree. We have one that's a teacher. We have one that's a guidance counselor there in Leslie County. So, it's just been really, really interesting to see the long-term trajectory.

But it wouldn't have happened without that table of folks coming together, thinking about the problems, and having the answers to the problems. And just like two weeks ago, one of my team members who was at that, he was the assistant principal at the high school back in 2010, he sent me a picture. And it was of a pair of broken glasses sitting on a desk. And they were all taped up. And then the next picture was the back of this young girl choosing new glasses. And he said, I know you're busy, he said, but you'll want to know this, that what we're doing is working still. And this young woman, middle school age, her grandparents were raising her, partly because of the opioid epidemic and some justice involvement on her family's side. And her grandma had just passed.

And so, the school had been watching. They had been trying to figure out how to wrap around and support. So, she had come to school. And she had broken her glasses. And her grandpa didn't know how to fix them. They didn't have the money to fix them. He had taped them up. So, she came in, and they could tell the embarrassment, the hair around her face. But by the end of the day, they were able to take her to one county over to an eye doctor, and she was able to pick out new glasses, new frames. And that's because they had formed relationships with the optometrist in the region. They had the protocol already in place. Because if that hadn't happened that day, would she have come back to school the next day? But it's also that she had somebody thinking about her, and her family, and they knew the story. They knew the history. So yeah, Leslie County is a great example of how this approach works. And it works in rural places.

JILL ANDERSON: When I listen to you talk, I feel like there's so many parallels between rural education and urban education. There's some overlap. It's very different, but there's some similar challenges that exist because you hear that urban side talking so much about the cradle to career, the pathways, the nurturing. And so, it's just interesting to me.

DREAMA GENTRY: It is interesting. And one of my learning journeys was around 2010 when I met Geoff Canada for the first time. So, Geoff leads the Harlem Children's Zone. And our work in Owsley County and there in Kentucky was the nation's first rural promise neighborhood, which was modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone. So, part of getting that federal funding was we had mentoring from Geoff. So that was phenomenal. So, I got to know him. And I remember, I was bringing in this mental model that I do my work in Appalachia, I can't learn anything from urban places.

I even told him at one point, I was like, ‘Geoff, I don't think there's much I can learn from you because you just don't understand rural places.’ And he was like, ‘Dreama, I really think that what you're doing in rural could inform what I'm doing in Harlem, and I think what I'm doing can inform you.’ And we started talking. 

And through the years, I realized that how I was limiting myself so much by thinking it had to be different in rural, or that rural was a unicorn that had to be treated differently. And actually, the evidence-based practices and frameworks that work in urban places work in rural places if they're implemented with a rural context and a rural lens. And so there are some differences, but the key piece is if you hire local people to do the work, they're going to bring the lens and the evidence and the framework is very similar. And so yes, I think there's a lot that rural practitioners can learn from those working in non-rural places. And there's a lot that folks working in non-rural places can learn from rural practitioners. And I do think we have to create the rooms and the opportunities for folks to get together and see past the differences, because we all are doing the same work.

JILL ANDERSON: On that note, if you could shift one policy or one resource to better support the rural college and career pathways, what would that be?

DREAMA GENTRY: So, when I think what's needed to support more rural young folks thriving and ending up in a career that's meaningful for them, I think it is the investment in schools and communities to be able to provide those opportunities. Many rural schools are very cash strapped, especially with population declines and funding models. So there needs to be investment.

There also needs to be investment from philanthropic and corporate America, because that type of investment has less strings to it. It actually allows rural practitioners to do what works and to really lean in, and support, and design the program that will fit, or to bring the program in that will fit. 

And philanthropic America, for the most part, has forgotten about rural America. $0.07 on $1 comes into rural America. And that's even less in areas of persistent poverty. So, in Appalachian Kentucky, it's more like 3.5 cents per philanthropic dollar going into the Appalachian region. And these are regions that have some of the highest poverty in the nation.

I guess what I would want to be shifting is this piece around a lot of corporate and philanthropic funders actually have practices or protocols that say, we do our work in places where we have employees, or we have a corporate entity or an office. And how do we actually change that to recognize that we're all part of this great nation, and those systems should really be America? And that what happens in Owsley County, Kentucky does impact what happens in Washington, DC or New York City. And what happens in those places definitely impacts Owsley County, Kentucky. And so it would be that. It would be the folks who have the power, and the influence, and the dollars, recognizing that rural America is theirs, too.

JILL ANDERSON: I do get the sense that a lot of America kind of has forgotten rural America. Why is it so important that we pay attention?

DREAMA GENTRY: So, I think it's important that America as a whole remember rural America. But it's also important that rural America realizes that we're a part of America as a whole. So, it's this sense of belonging. And how do we create a sense of belonging in this nation and move past the polarization? And the polarization is geographic, but it's polarization in multiple facets. And so how do we actually create opportunities for young folks to come together with folks across other rural places. That's one of the things we're trying to do, because not only do my young people in Appalachia feel disconnected from kids in New York, they feel disconnected from young people in the delta. So how do we create opportunities for young folks to come together across differences and really start to think, and share, and connect? While we're taping this today, we have a group of young folks at the Alex Haley Farm. So, Alex Haley is the author of “Roots,” advocate for rural America. He's Appalachian. A lot of people don't know that Alex Haley is from Appalachia. The Alex Haley Farm, which is managed by the Children's Defense Fund. And we have young folks from Appalachian Tennessee, from Alaska that are Indigenous young folks, from Iowa, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and maybe one other place together.

And what they all have in common is they are connected in their place to the culture and roots of their place. And they have a cultural steward or someone who's actually helped them be artistic and think about place and their own story. But they're coming together as part of a year-long fellowship, and this is their first gathering, to start thinking about what is the things that bind them together as rural young people. These are 18 to 24-year-olds. What is really binding them together? And what is the narrative they want to see in rural America and the nation as a whole? And they'll come together with us at our rural summit in April. We do a National Summit every April. And they're going to share back with us what they've learned, and what we should learn from that experience. And I think we need to do the same thing with adults, which is why we started the Rural Summit, because we need to have adults from parts of the country coming together. And we need them to also come together with our friends from non-rural areas. How do we keep doing that? How do we foster that sense of belonging in the nation is really critical.

JILL ANDERSON: Well, thank you so much, Dreama. There's so much to think about. And you really are enlightening to something I think a lot of people just don't know anything about, which is what's going on in rural America.

DREAMA GENTRY: Thanks for inviting me and wanting to talk about rural because that's the first step.

JILL ANDERSON: Dreama Gentry is the founder and CEO of Partners for Rural Impact. She is also a By-All-Means Senior Fellow at the Ed Redesign Lab. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.