National grantmakers bet this rural education program can scale WSOC TV [Video]

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 …