Economic Development

Thrive Rural Framework: Systems-Level Building Blocks

March 7, 2022  • Community Strategies Group

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The Thrive Rural Framework is a new tool to help you take stock, target action, and gauge progress on rural prosperity. We invite everyone involved in rural development — from local leaders to investors and philanthropists to state and national policymakers — to use this tool to spark new ways of thinking and acting to move communities, regions, and systems toward producing more widespread and equitable rural prosperity, health, and well-being.

This piece of the framework, the Systems-Level Building Blocks, includes driving forces and conditions that are in larger systems outside the direct control of individual rural communities or regions. People and organizations that design, guide, and implement these systems must act to change them — and rural places and people can (and must) act together to influence them. These include a wide range of public and private systems, from regional and multi-state financial institutions, to state and federal policy and programs, to issue advocacy organizations, to information hubs and national media — and more. 

To better visualize and digest the different layers involved in the framework, we created a series of documents that together showcase the entire framework: