Welcome to
Rural Opportunity Institute
Supporting
trauma-informed
and resilient communities.
At ROI, we smash disparate worlds together. We believe rural communities and people have deep assets and strengths that are often overlooked. And that we get the best outcomes when we combine what works in new ways. That’s how ROI started. We learned about design thinking and systems thinking and implemented these problem solving tools in partnership with communities in rural Eastern North Carolina (ENC). Our story is the story of a community coming together to build resilience.
“It’s a safe space that you can have the Ph.D. in all the things, or you can be completely ignorant in all the things. You show up, and everyone’s in the same, equal space. Everyone is gonna learn from where they are, and there’s equity in that.”
- ROI Participant
Our Mission
ROI supports youth, organizations, and communities to interrupt the cycle of generational trauma and design innovative solutions for healing and resilience.
Our Vision
A system that builds the capacity of rural, majority-Black, communities to support people’s healing from adversity to achieve health, safety, connection, and self-determination.
Our Values
Resilience
We embody the healing and restorative practices we want to see in the system through small, daily actions by:
- Creating strategic systems and replicable processes.
- Building habits of work-life balance and self-care.
- Building a work environment that we love working at.
Relationships
We build relationships based on trust and authenticity while encouraging people to live in their power and let their gifts shine by:
- Recognizing people’s assets and strengths.
- Honoring people’s inherent leadership.
- Connecting people to opportunities.
Radical Imagination
We live in the belief that our wildest dreams can and will come true. We stay rooted in the history and realities that have proven this to be true by:
- Learning and applying new knowledge.
- Taking advantage of opportunities.
- Strategically allocating ownership and responsibilities.
Results
We embrace and seek out accountability with the team and the community by:
- Getting clear on each person’s strengths and allocating new responsibilities in alignment with those.
- Putting ourselves in spaces with people that think differently from us and being open to criticism.
- Seeking alignment, not agreement.
Our Approach
01.
We center the community.
ROI seeks to develop deep, trusting relationships with members of our community with lived experience, and then co-design and co-build solutions together. We know that the answers are all around us, in the lived experiences and backgrounds of the people within a community. However, community members often do not have a seat at the table in designing solutions that will eventually impact them. ROI partners directly with community members to build new solutions to become more trauma-informed.
02.
We work in rural areas.
Rural areas experience underrepresentation in government and underinvestment in institutions and social infrastructure. In fact, less than 1% of philanthropic investments go to rural communities. Moreover, rural communities are often asked to look for urban settings for “best practice” solutions that do not work in a rural context. ROI reverses this pattern by designing solutions with rural communities first, and in the process, unlocks new areas of innovation, that people can benefit from in all settings. Our core innovation is to develop and implement impactful solutions in rural settings. We like to say, “If it works in rural ENC, it can work anywhere.”
03.
We apply systems thinking and design thinking.
Design thinking centers humans in the creation of programs, policies, and products. Community members created and own the systems map that guides this work. The map links previously disconnected challenges together to identify the highest leverage actions that can be taken to address the root causes of interdependent social issues. One of ROI’s greatest strengths is operationalizing these ways of thinking, and doing so in a way that centers community voice and input.
04.
We are currently focused on trauma and resilience work in rural Eastern NC.
We use the Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale (ACES) as a tool to name and understand trauma in rural ENC.We partner with different public agencies in our community to better learn from the people they serve, to identify previously unseen insights, and co-create new solutions that support healing and resilience building.
Photo by Travis Dove for Teach For America. Used with permission.
Our Story
Vichi and Seth first got to know rural Eastern NC, and the region’s history of resilience and persistence, when they taught through Teach for America (TFA) from 2010-2012. As teachers, they saw the strengths of their students and families, and gained an understanding of how systemic oppression manifested as challenges in their students’ lives. They wanted to do more and they became curious about how human-centered design could be utilized to unlock untapped community wisdom to address the educational and health inequities in eastern North Carolina.
Funded by a small seed grant, the school district helped Vichi and Seth convened twelve local leaders to name an initial focus for the project: to identify the challenges and opportunities to better support young and isolated parents and caregivers. Their objective was to listen to community members—parents, youth, religious leaders, teachers, school administrators, law enforcement, public health officials, doctors, small business owners—to understand their experiences.
The human centered design process uncovered a pattern: stories of unaddressed trauma. The community then engaged in a systems mapping process that pointed to one core, underlying challenge that is at the root of all of Edgecombe’s other challenges—the Cycle of Trauma.
The community found that trauma impacts almost every aspect of life. And often, when people struggle with toxic stress, they are often isolated from the very networks that could provide connection and healing:
- Children are suspended or expelled from school when they lose their tempers.
- Adults who use substances to self-soothe are often arrested, imprisoned, and denied employment opportunities for non-violent drug-related offenses.
The community identified the high leverage antidote to trauma: Replace punitive practices with responses that offer restoration. This strategy builds resilience at the individual, organizational, and community level.
Simply put, we need to work together to remove the barriers to healing.
“I’m watching my grandson’s face go through this map.”
- ROI Community Member, who explained that she could track her grandson’s difficulties in the school system almost perfectly on the systems map.
Get to Know Edgecombe County
“Edgecombe County leadership was open to trying out new things.” – Vichi Jagannathan, ROI Co-founder
Edgecombe County is not where you would typically imagine cutting-edge trauma and resilience work to take place. Located in rural Eastern NC, Edgecombe County is a deeply resilient community. It is home to the first town founded by freed slaves after the Civil War (Princeville). Princeville is the first place Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream Speech,” and the hometown of Janice Byrant Howroyd, the first African American woman to own a private company valued at more than $1 billion.
And yet, due to the compounded effects of systemic oppression and historical trauma that have disadvantaged rural, majority-Black communities like Edgecombe County for centuries, we see poor outcomes for children and families in Edgecombe County.
- A child poverty rate of 37%, one of the highest in the state. 69.93% of adults in Edgecombe disagree that there is plenty of economic opportunity in the county.
- Educational opportunities that are not meeting the needs of students. Edgecombe has the lowest level of 3rd grade reading proficiency in the state—31.2% of 3rd graders are reading at or above grade level. The county’s high school graduation rate is 77.3%, also one of the lowest in the state.
- Insufficient access to healthcare. The physician to population ratio is 2,903:1 and the mental health provider to population ratio is 1,793:1. On top of low access to providers, 26.4% of children in Edgecombe are food insecure.
Community members in Edgecombe have worked together to uncover that all of these challenges are connected—unaddressed trauma is at the root. The bright side? Understanding how these challenges are connected gives us the power to address them.
Photo by Travis Dove for Teach For America. Used with permission.
