Throughout Appalachia, entrepreneurs are forging a new economic model — one based on local investment and local ownership — and their impact is already being felt in some of the Region’s evolving economic sectors, including energy, manufacturing, health care, and local food production. Prompted in part by Appalachia’s need for economic diversification, the Appalachian Regional […]
Rural Support Partners conducted an in-depth study of collective impact networks working to create wealth that sticks in rural communities. We conducted interviews with 24 practitioners in six different rural networks across the United States. Learn about our findings.
RSP developed a toolkit to guide groups of organizations intending to build effective and sustainable collective impact networks. Start your journey with this toolkit.
In 2011, RSP set out to learn about networks of rural-based organizations that are using collective strategies to build local assets and create wealth that stays local. Their findings are detailed in the publication Rural Networks for Wealth Creation. The central themes we learned were the building blocks of a successful network. In the years […]
Social enterprise is about solving old problems in new ways. In persistently distressed communities, social enterprises can explore and grow market opportunities that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
When nonprofits in rural places receive far less funding per capita than their urban counterparts, they get have to get by doing more with less. Nonprofit leadership in these organizations bear the brunt of that stress. The Annie E. Casey Foundation wanted to understand the state of nonprofit executive leadership in the rural Southeast, so […]