NATIONAL RURAL FUNDERS COLLABORATIVE
First-Round Funding Decisions Made
The National Rural Funders Collaborative (NRFC) was created in 2001 as a funding and learning initiative to support and expand the resource base for rural American communities and rural families, especially where persistent poverty exists. NRFC's ten-year goal is to leverage $100 million in public and private funding to help achieve the following three objectives:
- to fund strategic opportunities for impacting poverty in rural communities;
- to share best practices identified through these and other strategic opportunities; and
- to influence rural policy at the local, state, regional and federal levels through elevation of policy implications of these and other strategic opportunities and best practices.
To begin this work, NRFC issued an initial call for letters of intent in July of 2001. 284 responses were received at the end of September, with 20 finalists selected by mid-November. From then until now, these 20 regional collaborations of funders, practitioners and community leaders have worked to demonstrate - through full proposals and individual site visits -the strategic impact and leverage of their work within their geographic region and the value of that work for identifying best practices in rural development and funding, as well as policy implications at every level.
NRFC's final decisions for this round were made with the sense of creating an initial "rural portfolio" that includes diverse geographies, community-based strategies, and regional collaborations that together make up a broad spectrum of effective responses to rural poverty. This portfolio, seen collectively, comprises the foundation for NRFC's learning network and a laboratory for framing policy issues and recommendations arising from rural practice itself. At the same time, the portfolio is comprised of twenty noteworthy rural collaborations - all endorsed by NRFC as sound investment opportunities, even if limited first-round NRFC funds do not allow for strategic or venture funding of all.
NRFC First-Round Portfolio
In establishing this foundational portfolio for NRFC's work, the overarching goal has been to maintain the right balance among three, potentially competing claims:
- to fund a few opportunities deeply enough to inspire, though not necessarily ensure, measurable leverage and impact over the next 2-3 years;
- to fund a broader array of opportunities, if only at a level of seeding the work, that represent key elements of a more comprehensive approach to supporting and strengthening rural communities and families; and
- to provide all twenty finalists the opportunity to participate in our learning network, in order both to promote learning among these diverse collaborations, and to provide all twenty with greater access to other resources.
Consequently, the portfolio is divided into three categories of opportunity: strategic opportunities; emerging or learning opportunities and opportunities to watch.
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