Strategies and Lessons for Reducing Persistent Rural Poverty: A Social Justice Approach to Funding Rural Community Transformation

Abstract

The connection between rural poverty and structural inequities is not accidental or incidental but structural and causal. Achieving equity in strategies to build wealth and move people out of poverty in rural areas will therefore require an explicit focus on race, class, and power and on “triple bottom line” economies that are intentional about eliminating or at least closing the gap on those inequities. This article describes the transformation of the National Rural Flinders Collaborative (NRFC). a ten-year rural funding initiative to reduce rural poverty, from an initiative focused on increasing wealth, family self-sufficiency, and civic participation as necessary strategies for overcoming poverty to an initiative that understands the insufficiency of these strategies alone, without also addressing race, class, and power as structural and historical conditions that must be mitigated, if not eventually eliminated.