Giving Compass' Take:

•  This report chronicles the impact and investments of The Partners for Rural Transformation, a coalition that aims to increase community needs in diverse, rural areas.

• What are the most significant challenges for donors who are considering investing in rural capacity-building? How do collaborative partnerships help drive progress in these initiatives?

• Learn how investing in rural America can spur community development.

Rural areas are places of underappreciated diversity, cultural vitality, and economic innovation, and resiliency. But persistent poverty is holding back about one in seven rural counties. With a goal to transform the fortunes and futures of rural and Native communities, the Partners for Rural Transformation (PRT) centers community needs and hopes in its work.

Covering broad and diverse areas—including parts of Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the Deep South, the Rio Grande Valley, Native American communities, and the rural West—the six partner organizations that make up PRT bring crucial capital and capacity to small communities and towns where persistent poverty was created by design through slavery, genocide, displacement, and resource extraction.

This report details how the six partners are working individually and collectively to make progress toward and meet their shared goals, despite challenges, and lays out a framework for measuring future shared impacts and an agenda for action to build on their successes.

Read the full report about community needs in rural areas by Corianne Payton Scally Brett Theodos, Yipeng Su, Lance Loethen, Ananya Hariharan, and Jorge Morales-Burnett at Urban Institute.