Aspen is a place for leaders to lift their sights above the possessions which possess them. To confront their own nature as human beings, to regain control over their own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and hence more self-fulfilling.

Walter P. Paepcke, Aspen Institute Co-Founder

Dreama Gentry

Founder & CEO, Partners for Rural Impact

Dreama Gentry is one of the nation’s leading voices on rural education, economic mobility, and place-based partnerships, and she has built her life’s work around one core idea: place should not determine possibility. As founder and CEO of Partners for Rural Impact, she works every day to help ensure that the 14 million young people in rural America are on a path to economic mobility. Her work is grounded in systems change, education, and a deep belief that every community holds strengths worth building on. Over the course of her career, Dreama designed the nation’s first rural Promise Neighborhood, developed a rural-focused Full Service Community School model that has reached more than 100 schools, and helped bring rural voices, rural assets, and rural realities into national conversations about opportunity and what is possible in rural America. Born and raised in Appalachian Kentucky, where she still lives, Dreama was the first person in her extended family to graduate from college. An alum of the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law, she received the College of Law’s Community Service Award. She is an Annie E. Casey Children and Family Fellow, a Harvard By All Means Senior Fellow, and a founding trailblazer of the William Julius Wilson Institute. She lives in Paint Lick, Kentucky, with her husband, Hasan Davis, and their sons, grounded in the same rural place that continues to shape her work and her sense of possibility.