Rural development works best when it is locally driven, regionally connected, and built for the long term. We strengthen regional capacity so communities and Native nations can navigate change, align resources, and sustain progress.
What We Do
Our approach may include multi-year peer-learning cohorts, regional strategy sessions, cross-place research on emerging trends, or technical support to help partners coordinate funding and measure progress. Each effort is shaped by local context and informed by shared learning across regions.
Design and Facilitate Peer Learning
We create structured learning networks that connect practitioners across regions. These cohorts and convenings provide space to compare strategies, troubleshoot challenges, and adapt lessons from other places. Learning is grounded in real-world experience and sustained over time.
Support Regional Backbone Organizations
We work with Rural Development Hubs and other regional organizations that coordinate cross-sector efforts. This includes helping partners clarify shared priorities, strengthen governance and staffing models, and align public, private, and philanthropic resources around long-term goals.
Conduct Practice-Informed Research
We produce research, tools, and field guides grounded in practitioner experience. By identifying patterns across regions, we surface shared barriers and promising approaches that can inform strategy, funding design, and policy implementation.
Convene Cross-Sector Partners
We bring together leaders from economic development, workforce, health, housing, philanthropy, and government to strengthen coordination at the regional level. These conversations help reduce fragmentation and improve alignment across systems that shape rural opportunity.
Advance Wealth-Building and Well-Being Frameworks
We apply and refine WealthWorks, the Thrive Rural Framework, and the Rural Development Hubs model in partnership with regions. These frameworks guide how regions define wealth, address structural barriers, and organize for long-term impact.
Strengthen the Field
Beyond individual regions, we contribute to the broader rural development field by sharing insights across networks, informing funders and national partners, and elevating practitioner-led solutions. Our goal is to improve how systems function so rural communities and Native nations can sustain progress over time.
How Our Frameworks Fit Together
Our three core frameworks ground our work and build on one another: WealthWorks, the Thrive Rural Framework, and the Rural Development Hubs model. Together, these frameworks shape what regions build, how they build it, and who benefits.
WealthWorks
Guides regions in defining and building multiple forms of wealth so that the value created locally benefits residents.
Thrive Rural Framework
Defines the conditions for long-term rural well-being and centers belonging by identifying and addressing practices that disadvantage people based on place, race, or class.
Rural Development Hubs model
Strengthens regional backbone organizations that coordinate partners, align resources, and sustain shared strategy.
How We Work
We partner with regional leaders rooted in place. Regions define priorities; we support coordination and shared learning.
We connect practitioners across geographies through structured peer learning. We identify patterns across places to surface shared barriers and effective strategies. We help align cross-sector partners so investments reinforce long-term regional goals rather than isolated projects.
Grounded in the Thrive Rural Framework, we also support regions in examining funding criteria, decision-making structures, and participation barriers that may limit who benefits from development.
Why Regional Scale Matters
Rural challenges and opportunities rarely align with town or county boundaries. Economies, labor markets, infrastructure systems, and natural resources cross geographic boundaries. Regional coordination allows communities to respond to these realities more effectively. It’s important to remember that rural and urban communities are deeply interconnected and interdependent. Decisions made in one place shape opportunity in another.
Workers commute across counties. Urban markets depend on rural land, energy, food systems, and manufacturing. Rural businesses rely on metropolitan capital and supply chains.
Regional coordination reflects these realities. It helps align workforce systems, infrastructure investments, and service delivery across jurisdictions.
Strong regions recognize this interdependence. They coordinate across jurisdictions to align priorities, reduce fragmentation, and build systems that work for all communities. Our role is to support that coordination so rural communities and Native nations can engage as full partners in regional development and long-term prosperity.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Regions clarify shared priorities across counties and sectors. Partners coordinate instead of competing. Governance and staffing structures are strengthened, ensuring strategy continues across funding cycles and leadership transitions.
Regions use WealthWorks to examine where value flows and how to keep more benefits local. They apply the Thrive Rural Framework to identify structural barriers tied to place, race, or class. Backbone organizations, such as Rural Development Hubs, strengthen their capacity to sustain cross-sector coordination.
The result is clearer strategy, stronger relationships, and durable regional capacity that supports belonging and shared prosperity over time.