Thinking and Action Frameworks

The RDP Learning Network's flagship products consist of a series of frameworks for rural development philanthropy thinking and action. These publications are step-by-step guides to help people who lead community foundations think about and act strategically to create and strengthen locally controlled endowment, grantmaking and community programs that can improve rural livelihoods, economies and community vitality.

All four frameworks are based on information and guidance gleaned from the Learning Network's past decade of RDP-focused peer exchanges. While designed to assist community foundations in their efforts, these frameworks can also be utilized by private, corporate and family foundations to design more effective community economic development programs that will have lasting positive impact on the livelihoods of rural individuals, families and communities.

Covering Rural Territory: A Framework of Rural Service Structures for Community Foundations explores six major rural coverage structures and catalogs the characteristics and the pros and cons of each structure. It also includes case studies that illustrate each of the six structure models. Use this framework to compare the potential implications of your community foundation choosing a specific structure.
Building Engines for Rural Endowment: An RDP Thinking and Action Framework helps community foundation leaders think about and act strategically to build more and better permanently endowed assets focused on vitalizing and sustaining rural areas, rural issues, and rural populations. It is a "how-to" workbook on the 13 tactics that are widely believed to be the most important in asset development.
Building Rural Livelihood: A Thinking and Action Framework for Designing RDP Program and Grantmaking Efforts walks the reader through four steps to design more effective program and grantmaking efforts, tailored to the reader's specific region and resources, for improving rural livelihoods. Each successive step can help a foundation's board and staff establish the information and context needed for making challenging but essential program design decisions.
Margins to Mainstream: Community Foundations Advancing Family Economic Success delves a bit more deeply into a roadmap of decision points in your work to improve the economic success of families in your service area. It applies the thinking and action framework introduced in Building Rural Livelihood to the construct of Family Economic Success that has been developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Leading Tactics for Rural Fund Development. Raising endowed assets in a rural setting can be very different from asset development in urban or metropolitan areas. Leading Tactics for Rural Fund Development provides step-by-step guides to a variety of tactics—compiled from on-the-ground experience with rural endowment builders—that rural leaders can use to raise endowments in and for their community.

Building rural assets to build rural livelihoods

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Thinking and Action Frameworks