The White House has named 10 communities as rural IMPACT Demonstration Sites and Blytheville is one of them.
"Mississippi County has been selected as one of the sites for this project, which deals with poverty reduction," Sam Scruggs, director of the Mississippi County Arkansas EOC said. "We along with several local partners have been working on poverty reduction in Mississippi County for the last four years. Two key people working with us (MCAEOC) will be Dr. Blanche Hunt representing Arkansas Northeastern College, and Tamika Jenkins, representing Great River Economic Development. This is going to really be a combined effort and we will have other stakeholders at the table to help bring about an overall change. This will be a yearlong program with the first six months being spent planning and developing a combined strategy. The six months following that we will implement a pilot program based on the first six months' research. This program is about providing a holistic plan for poverty reduction."
Over six million Americans in rural areas live in poverty, including about 1.5 million children. And in many of these communities, high rates of poverty have persisted for generations: over 300 rural counties have had poverty rates of over 20 percent in every Census since 1980. As President Obama has stated, "A child's course in life should be determined not by the Zip code she's born in, but by the strength of her work ethic and the scope of her dreams." In many rural places, the Zip code equates to decreased access to critical services, fewer educational opportunities, and limited job choices.
Recognizing that every child, no matter where she is born, should have an opportunity to succeed, in April the White House Rural Council launched "Rural Impact," a cross-agency effort to combat poverty and improve upward mobility in rural and tribal places. And in August, HHS announced a new demonstration project, Rural Integration Models for Parents and Children to Thrive (IMPACT), to help communities adopt a two-generation approach to addressing the needs of both vulnerable children and their parents, with the goal of increasing parents' employment and education and improving the health and well-being of their children and families. Often, programs are structured to serve either adults or children, rather than focusing on the entire family to improve outcomes. The Rural IMPACT Demonstration will help communities adopt a comprehensive, whole-family framework for addressing child poverty, such as through facilitating physical colocation of services, universal "no wrong door" intake, referral networks, shared measurement systems, and use of technology to deliver services.
Following a process led by HHS that included communities submitting letters of interest to participate in the Demonstration, the Administration has announced 10 rural and tribal communities from across the country that will participate in the Rural IMPACT Demonstration: Berea, Ky., Partners for Education at Berea College; Blanding, Utah, The San Juan Foundation; Blytheville, Ark., Mississippi County, the Mississippi County Arkansas Economic Opportunity Commission, Inc.; Hillsboro, Ohio, Highland County Community Action Organization, Inc.; Hugo, Okla., Little Dixie Community Action Agency, Inc.; Jackson, Miss., Friends of Children of Mississippi, Inc.; Machias, Maine, Community Caring Collaborative; Marshalltown, Iowa, Mid-Iowa Community Action, Inc.; Oakland, Md., Garrett County Community Action Committee and the Allegany Human Resources Commission; and White Earth, Minn., White Earth Reservation Tribal Council.