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Our Work

Our initiatives combine big ideas with grassroots leadership and community ownership.

“It’s a very community-led initiative and organization. It’s not people parachuting in with tools and techniques, but building tools and techniques in community with those that are every day working to build a stronger social fabric in these areas.”

- ROI Supporter

ROI supports Resilience
Building in these ways:

Resources for Resilience - ROI

Resilient Community Members

Trauma & Resilience 101

ROI’s two-hour Trauma & Resilience 101 covers the basics of trauma, ACES, and resilience—how stress impacts the body and brain and how we can rewire it for healing. We offer this program to Eastern NC community members for free four times a year and have reached over 15,000 people locally. 

Want to host Trauma & Resilience 101 in your community or organization?

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Trauma and Resilience 101 - Teach For America - Travis Dove

Photo by Travis Dove for Teach For America. Used with permission.

Listening Circles

A listening circle is an opportunity for a group of people to build resilience skills through facilitated storytelling. During a listening circle, groups—including youth, first responders, or helping professionals—share their experiences and challenges and facilitators offer resilience “tools” for the group to practice to help process these difficult experiences in a communal setting. 

Impact

From October 2020-April 2021, we hosted five listening circles for Edgecombe County middle and high school students. 100% of the 80 students who attended said that they would like to attend virtual listening circles during the following school year. 

“Everyone had positive thoughts for others.” – Edgecombe County Student

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Listening Circles - Home, ROI

Reconnect for Resilience® Training (RFR)

Through our close partnership with Resources for Resilience®, we trained and certified 25 leaders in rural Eastern NC to deliver Reconnect for Resilience®, an in-depth, 14-hour resilience training. This group of individuals has reached over 1,000 people locally.

“This training cuts to the root of so many challenges we see. It gives me hope to know there are things we can do to build each other’s skills and build healthy nervous systems.”

— Reconnect for Resilience Training Participant

Want to host a RFR training in your community or organization?

Partner With Us
Teach For America - Travis Dove, ROI

Photo by Travis Dove for Teach For America. Used with permission.

Resilient Organizations

The Resilient Leaders Initiative Cohort 2 Impact Report

RLI is the first social accelerator program in the country that is based in a rural community, focuses on public agencies (instead of startups), and centers on healing trauma.

RLI is an intensive, cohort-based program that guides teams from public agencies to implement trauma-informed practices at their organizations. Over nine months, leaders from these organizations build a deeper understanding of their clients through the human-centered design process. Then, they ideate, test, iterate, and implement policy and practice changes that build resilience within their organization.

Read about the outcomes from the Resilient Leaders Initiative’s second cohort, who participated in the program from March-November 2022.

Read the Cohort 2 Impact Report
Apply for the 2023 Cohort
Resilient Design in Rural Communities

Case Study: HOPE Program Makes Mental Health Supports Available in Schools, Funded by Medicaid

HOPE Program Coordinator Quarry Williams entered into RLI with a challenge in mind: students in Edgecombe County School District were not accessing the mental health supports they need to be successful in school. Through RLI, he designed an innovative, replicable, and sustainable solution: to bill Medicaid for student mental health services. This solved for a big barrier in student mental health: initiatives are often funded by short-term grants, so support stops when the funding stops. Through his participation in RLI, Williams created a model that works in the long-term and can be replicated throughout the state. Learn more about HOPE.
Read the RLI Cohort 1 Impact Report
HOPE Program Makes Mental Health Supports Available in Schools - ROI

Resilient Ideas

Small Bets Lab

Testing a small idea is a powerful first step in igniting systems change. ROI’s Small Bets Lab is a process for exploring promising but risky ideas that show incredible potential to transform the toughest challenges that rural communities face. Modeled after corporate innovation programs like Google X and Bell Labs, the Small Bets Lab is where our initiatives are born. If proved promising, we grow an idea into an ROI initiative.

Why “Small Bets”?

In urban settings, and private sector settings, investment in early-stage innovation is a given. In rural communities, and nonprofit organizations, investment in early-stage innovation is rare. With Small Bets, we lead by example to show that exploring risky ideas is possible and necessary in rural and nonprofit settings.

Current Small Bets:

01.

Local Policy Change: School Resource Officers

ROI is working with the community to create a proposal for a more trauma-informed School Resource Officer policy. Once there is a community-approved proposal, it will be presented to the school district and sheriff’s office, with the aim to create lasting, county-wide, systemic change that could ultimately be replicated in other districts.

02.

Using technology to heal trauma

There are many cutting-edge technologies that help people better manage stress and heal the impacts of trauma. We have identified the top 18 technologies currently on the market. Today, Fortune 500 CEOs, astronauts, and professional athletes use these technologies to enhance performance in their respective fields. Our vision is a tomorrow where rural communities easily access these technologies to heal trauma. For example, we’ve implemented Biofeedback Breathing Technology in community settings such as schools and prisons to help teachers, students, inmates, and police officers understand and control their reactions to trauma.

03.

Data Dashboard

We are currently working on a project to identify the long-term indicators that can measure the community’s progress in building a more resilient Edgecombe County. We know and value the collective effort of countless organizations and individuals who are working together to create positive, long-term impact in Edgecombe County.

04.

Statewide Policy Change: Healthcare Storytelling

Last year, an NC Medicaid expansion bill failed to pass the state legislature. This is part of a larger pattern of state lawmakers overlooking rural communities’ needs. We’re working to gather stories about the impact of barriers to accessing mental health support in Edgecombe County and plan to share the stories with state lawmakers.

Apply for a Summer Internship in our Small Bets Lab

Learn More

Resilient Policy Program

ROI’s policy program aims to be a bridge between the communities in Edgecombe and Nash counties and local policymakers. We hold monthly sessions in which we listen to our community to identify priority issues and then fuse community knowledge, international best practices, and local connections to solve them. Our long term vision is community-driven policy change, implementing systems-level solutions to wicked problems that focus tightly on the unique resources and challenges of our rural communities.

Our three priority issues currently are workforce development, disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline, and increasing access to mental health care in schools. See our one-pager for specifics on how we are using our process to tackle each of these issues.

The policy program’s existence and accomplishments are a testament to the power of ROI’s Small Bets Lab, which seeks to test and iterate on promising, high-potential ideas for improving our communities. The program started as a Small Bet in the summer of 2021. The Small Bet evolved into a pilot project in the fall of 2021, and in the summer of 2023 became a full-fledged ROI program.

Read the one-pager

Resilient Resource Hub

ROI Resource Hub

At ROI, we believe in making information accessible to every community so they can learn from it. Our online Resource Hub is an open-source platform that is home to articles, downloadable resources, and videos to support changemakers who share our commitment to local communities. We work to share what works freely to anyone that could benefit from these insights.

Learning Report: Community Violence Intervention

ROI Community Accountability Board member, Crystal Wimes-Anderson, and UNC Master of Public Health student, Liz Royea, presented Liz’s research on Community Violence Intervention (CVI) programs at the N.C. Office of Violence Prevention’s annual conference. Her report, based on interviews with leading CVI practitioners, identifies key elements of successful programs and will help guide ROI’s efforts to develop a CVI initiative in Rocky Mount.

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How ROI Uses Community Accountability Boards

Here at ROI, we pride ourselves on being knowledgeable about the needs of our community. Within our organization, we do extensive research to learn what’s working and not working in our trainings and make corrections as we learn.

ruralopportunity February 21, 2023
Explore Resilient Resources

ROI Podcasts

We handed the mic to those who are affected by trauma and took a step back. The goal is to let people share knowledge and build expertise through sharing their experiences in their own words. Powerful stories emerged.

The Resilience Zone

Resilience is for everyone. Elijah and Gabby, two students who grew up and through hardship together, want to show you how. Join these students as they explore how resilience tools have helped them overcome trauma and how they use these tools in real time today. We’re heading to the resilience zone and we hope you’ll join us!

Listen Now

On the Edgecombe

On the Edgecombe explores stress, trauma, and resilience through conversations with law enforcement officers in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, and Rural Opportunity Institute. Strategies discussed apply for anyone.

Produced by Kathryn Carpenter, Maura Drewry, Allie Rothschild, and Juliet Wu, members of a graduate student team from UNC Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, in partnership with Rural Opportunity Institute (ROI).

Listen Now

Together, these initiatives have a powerful impact.

Learn About ROI’s Impact

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Improve Student Mental Health

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