Building Rural Communities Collaborative
The Building Rural Communities Collaborative is an emerging collaborative that is an outgrowth of Southern Mutual Help Association's long-term relationships with several organizations active in Louisiana and, more broadly, the 13 southern states. The BRCC is not a grantmaking organization, and in fact must seek funding for its own projects. Historically, SMHA has been the "hub" or initial connector between the groups; for example:- SMHA helped co-found the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (Southern SAWG) and our Assistant Executive Director is a co-representative from Louisiana;
- SMHA created Southern Mutual Financial Services as an affiliate CDFI;
- Together, IBERIABANK and SMHA created the Louisiana Rural Home Loan Partnership;
- The Rapides Foundation funds SMHA's effort to expand the Louisiana Rural Home Loan Partnership into nine additional parishes, and SMHA helps Rapides with technical assistance to emerging Community Development Organizations.
In 2002, these historical relationships were formalized into the Building Rural Communities Collaborative. The collaborative expands the scale of the individual organization's work in battling rural poverty. While all of the partnership organizations are recognized for their innovation and leadership in community development, together the groups can achieve increased impact, greater scale, and expanded geography in its work.
The Building Rural Communities Collaborative has three goals that deal with capacity building:
- Building the capacity of individual members to do programmatic work;
- Increasing the ability of the individual members to build the collaborative -- to change policy, deepen leadership, communicate effectively, and work more intentionally on Social Return on Investment;
- Building the capacity of the collaborative as its own entity, allowing BRCC to create products and perform work that members could not do individually.
The Building Rural Communities Collaborative (BRCC) takes a holistic approach to community development:
- Developing families through homeownership, education, job training, and public policy leadership;
- Developing the economy of communities by creating new institutions and resources, and access to affordable capital;
- Developing the health, economic well-being, and stability of family farms through sustainable agriculture.
BRCC crosses racial, gender, and economic barriers by working with all levels of communities -- low wealth families (especially those headed by women), family farmers (formerly an economically stable segment of rural communities), business leaders determining the availability of resources in communities, and policymakers whose policies impact the lives of individuals. The collaborative fosters leadership of women, minorities, and farmers, increases existing capacity of community development activity in the South, and increases ability of emerging non-profits to engage in long-term community development. The collaborative's work in sustainable agriculture is concentrated on bringing Southern row-crop family farmers into the leadership and policy making process. BRCC shifts existing paradigms to build bridges that allow the for-profit and publicly funded sectors to learn the valuable lessons the impoverished have to teach.
The collaborative works in rural Louisiana, the poorest state in the nation. Statewide, 18.4% of the population and 26% of children live in poverty, compared to 13.3% and 19.9% respectively, nationwide. The rural south and central Louisiana parishes (counties) in which BRCC works exhibit even higher poverty rates and lower education rates than the state as a whole. There is a dire need for comprehensive community development in this area of Louisiana that has not received the philanthropic attention that has benefited the Mississippi Delta area of the state. Furthermore, the models created through BRCC's work can be replicated throughout the 13 southern states, thanks to Southern SSAWG's regional network.
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