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’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?
Photo by Travis Dove for Teach For America. Used with permission.
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
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?
Photo by Travis Dove for Teach For America. Used with permission.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
From December 2022 – February 2023, Rural Opportunity Institute’s (ROI) Small Bets Lab collaborated with the Wilson County Department of Social Services (WCDSS) on a pilot aimed to promote staff wellbeing.
This rigorous evaluative report offers an in-depth analysis of ROI’s Biofeedback Breathing Program pilot.
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.
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!
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).
Edgecombe County, North Carolina
Attn: Rural Opportunity Institute (ROI)
Area L AHEC
1631 S Wesleyan Blvd
Rocky Mount, NC 27803
Email: info@ruralopportunity.org
Email: naomi@ruralopportunity.org
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