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Rural AmeriCorps: Building Communities from the Inside Out 

— Dreama Gentry, President and CEO, Partners for Rural Impact 

AmeriCorps is often framed as an urban program, where young people travel to unfamiliar cities to serve and strengthen those urban places. As a result, the current conversation about defunding AmeriCorps centers on the devastating impact that cutting AmeriCorps programs would have in urban places. All true. 

Defunding AmeriCorps, however, would deal an equally devastating blow to rural America.  

Here in Appalachia, AmeriCorps has delivered solid results, because AmeriCorps’ bedrock principle is something rural folks witness daily: communities thrive when the people who live there have the opportunity to serve their nation through real, hard work.  

AmeriCorps members from Leslie County, KY shared their experiences in and the impact of the program on their lives with local leaders, AmeriCorps and PRI staff. November, 2023.

PartnerCorps, an AmeriCorps program my organization developed a decade ago, has built the strength and future success of our rural communities by tapping the wisdom of service — and we’ve done so with a difference. Instead of inviting outsiders to help, we called on our own community members to serve and opened the opportunity to people of all ages. Many of our unemployed or under-employed community members were looking for a pathway to meaningful work and AmeriCorps has provided that pathway. We trained and supported them, and we provided opportunities to teach, mentor, tutor, and support students and families.

PartnerCorps recruits locally in four rural Kentucky counties: Knox, Bell, Leslie and Perry. Full-time PartnerCorps members are mentors who tutor students in math classes, lead afterschool activities, and provide opportunities for students and their families to explore career pathways.  

As we know, by strengthening communities, people strengthen themselves. We’ve seen PartnerCorps members find their own careers as they help students navigate high school.  They used the opportunity to become teachers, guidance counselors, mental health counselors, pharmacists — and the list goes on.  Importantly, they find these careers here at home in Appalachia. 

Kendra Bailey, who is a guidance counselor at Leslie County High School, got her start in education as a PartnerCorps member. She wanted the opportunity to serve the young people in her place, “I wanted to figure out the barriers between the kids and why they weren’t making the GPAs that they could,” she said. And she has continued to build on that experience, serving as a district social worker for six years and as a counselor since 2020. 

We’ve seen our students be inspired by their PartnerCorps members, believing they, too, can be the architects of their own success. By serving as role models, our members encourage our young people to build their own future here in the rural counties of Appalachia. 

And there are many other examples of successful rural AmeriCorps programs. Notably, Operation Unite, founded by Congressman Harold “Hal” Rogers, has used AmeriCorps members to coordinate drug education programs and teacher training throughout the region. It has been and remains a national model for building back communities impacted by the drug epidemic. 

Programs like these are how we respect place and build our rural communities’ self-sufficiency. From the inside out. 

Service is in the DNA of rural people and rural places. We serve our communities. AmeriCorps is a tool we can use to strengthen Appalachia and rural places across the nation.  

Each one of our members pledged these words: “I will bring Americans together to strengthen our communities. Faced with apathy, I will take action. . . . Faced with adversity, I will persevere.” And that’s exactly what our members have done and will continue to do.  

PartnerCorps members are evidence that AmeriCorps works in rural places.  They deliver tangible results that opened doors for themselves and for the students they serve. For so many reasons, it would be a tragedy to lose them.  

Congress should protect the program. Our rural communities need AmeriCorps.  

Partners for Rural Impact (PRI) is the leading organization working to ensure that all rural youth ages 0-24 years are on a path to upward mobility. Using a cradle-to-career and place-based approach, we operate at the local, state, and national levels to accelerate outcomes for the 14 million children and youth living in rural America.