RIDER: Systemic Solutions for Rural Prosperity

What does the system that will finally eradicate poverty in America's rural places look like? Starting last fall, SVT Group and Rural Opportunity Institute teamed together to apply systems thinking to unpack the existing forces, opportunities, and challenges that limit economic opportunity and freedom for rural Americans. We call this initiative RIDER– Rural Innovation Done Right– and we've used a systems thinking design process to unpack the forces that explain current levels of support for rural innovations that work. We are now distilling potential solutions and identifying partners to team up with to test them, with the ambition of collectively realizing a self-perpetuating system that, over time, brings the end of poverty in rural America.

To date RIDER reflects hundreds of hours of conversations specifically aimed at understanding the forces that explain the current level of support for proven solutions to address poverty. We've looked at the bright spots and stuck places, and what these point to in the way of potential solutions. With its mission of ‘an economy that works for all,” we have been privileged to collaborate with Federal Reserve Bank of New York , whose region includes parts of Appalachia, and which has recognized our effort as one of its Design Teams focused on “making the missing markets.” On June 28 we convened at the NY Fed with leaders from across the country.

Our 'North Star' for these RIDER sessions is a system that reduces rural child poverty by 50% every 20 years. This system is actually made up of a number of other systems that perform pervasive functions– including our accounting systems that define and measure value; our finance systems that invest in value creation; our incentive systems, both formal like corporate governance, and informal like social status and peer pressure; our education systems that capture and share lessons learned; our health and human services systems that maintain and grow well-being; our homeland security and justice systems that prevent and respond to crisis; and even our systems of making meaning, telling stories, and building relationships that determine how we trust one another. All of these systems contribute to the results we continue to see. And with awareness of the way certain practices deliver better outcomes, and intentional design, they can evolve in the direction of widespread opportunity.?

Our first design session was hosted by the New York FRB's Community Development team last November. This collaboration continued with subsequent sessions facilitated by SVT and ROI exploring themes that explain the level of support for proven rural innovations: systems change, community accountability and governance, learning and adaptation, goal oriented activation, public engagement and inspiration, and how to 'do good while getting paid.' This phase of discovery and design work just culminated with a milestone convening on June 28th at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.?

Watch the recording of the public session during which we explored these themes with an fascinating group of presenters and panelists, including:

• Josh Knauer whose Reseed.farm turns soil carbon into another "crop" for small farmers;
• Nasma Ahmed of Wikimedia Foundation (which stewards Wikipedia, the world's third most-visited website and the largest volunteer-generated pool of knowledge);
• Clara Miller the great philanthropic leader who pioneered 100% for impact at The Heron Foundation ;
• Tris Lumley who is decades into a quest to enable philanthropy to achieve the best outcomes possible at NPC (New Philanthropy Capital) ;
• Jonathan Santos Silva founder of The Liber Institute , who cultivates educational leadership and spaces that prioritize student voice and impact including in indigenous America;
• Johnathan Brunson , founder of Unafraid to be Gifted, who inspires and supports particularly young people of color in rural North Carolina and beyond as a licensed clinical social worker and rapper focused on mental health;
• Stephanie Sowl, Ph.D. of the ECMC Foundation , who focuses on educational access particularly for rural learners;
• our team of Graham Palmer and Vichi Jagannathan , who work to end generational trauma in rural North Carolina, and Sara Olsen , founder of SVT Group , which works to make the value enterprises create for people and the planet tangible for a world in which it pays to do good.??

If you are involved in work to shift the systems that can end poverty, please connect with us! SVT Group is the liaison for this ongoing Design Team with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and will host the RIDER initiative going forward with advisory input from ROI and others. It was the extreme poverty in rural America that formed the original impetus for Sara Olsen to start SVT, to enable the "social return" on any investment to be understood and learned from. This combination of social purpose and business discipline is key to solving seemingly intractable societal problems.

RIDERs believe that America is capable of designing a system that can eradicate rural poverty over time. This effort can succeed when we cultivate and harvest both the knowledge of rural innovators and communities, and also the knowledge of innovators addressing the systems of how we learn, share knowledge, account for value, and invest.

Watch the recording of the public event, and check out the slides we shared summarizing RIDER’s work here.

Schedule a conversation with us about RIDER here.