Building Community Capacity in Rural East Texas

In East Texas, the “long lift” approach to civic infrastructure is taking shape through ConnectRURAL, a five-year partnership between the T.L.L. Temple Foundation and Communities Unlimited. Faced with decades of economic stagnation and underinvestment, the initiative anchors locally embedded community resource managers who link bottom-up action with technical expertise across water, broadband, small business, and more. By pairing trust-based local engagement with pooled philanthropic and federal resources, ConnectRURAL is helping historically excluded communities—from Black and Latinx towns to the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe—gain access to opportunity and momentum for renewal. It reflects the kind of sustained, systems-level investment Aspen CSG champions to move rural regions from scarcity toward long-term civic and economic strength.