Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: Exploring a creative approach to rural mentorship
02: Roadside Attractions: Have a rural story to pitch?

01: Postcards

In a small rural town along Belfast Bay, a host of Maine teenagers spent the start of one summer break “LARPing,” battling with lightsabers while re-enacting an epic Star Wars battle.

Their live-action roleplaying adventures are just one example of the unique experiences backed by the Rural Futures Fund as part of its Aspirations Incubator, which aims to increase resiliency, community engagement, and college-going rates among rural Maine middle and high schoolers.

The Aspirations Incubator is notable for its impact: Of the 390 students who have completed the pilot program, 74% ended up enrolling in college last fall — the statewide average is around 52%.

Over the last six years, mentors and students met at five diverse sites across rural Maine, everywhere from a local gaming club and a YMCA to a 4-H center and an outdoor adventures camp. 

The program starts for students in 7th grade, instilling habits early that could help them succeed later in life. Each cohort of students picked a core program theme that fit their interests, with staff and volunteers helping them pursue their goals both at school and in their free time.

One cohort set out to hike all 48 state parks, visiting eight each year until they finished high school. Other groups organized sight-seeing trips to Canada, sprinkling in tours to colleges from Maine to New York and Philadelphia.

Students in the program — the oldest of which are now entering their sophomore year of college — were nearly twice as likely as their statewide peers to say they felt like they mattered to people in their community. They were also less likely to be chronically absent, and reported better scores in the state’s English and Math exams their junior year.

Engaging students and setting them up for successful career pathways is particularly critical in Maine, which has the highest percentage of adults over 65 of any state in the United States, and is invested in growing its in-state talent pipelines.

What may be most interesting about the incubator is its flexibility: After all, how many programs for rural stands can comfortably create space for everything from rock climbing at Acadia National Park to LARPing outside a local Baptist Church? 

The Aspirations Incubator’s unique setup is based on the Trekkers Youth Programming Principles, an experiential learning mentoring model developed by Don Carpenter, executive director of the Rural Futures Fund in Portland, Maine.

It was born in part from the Pittsburgh-native’s frustration with the limitations of engaging youth in more urban environments, as he previously had while leading similar experiential programs in Camden, New Jersey, through the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

“Working in the inner city, we were working with thousands of kids a year. We could never guarantee kids would be in that community the following year, there was just a vast movement of kids going from district to district, place to place,” Carpenter said.

When Carpenter arrived in Maine in 1997, he knew working with rural students would mean smaller enrollments — however, he also believed his model could have a much deeper impact on the students it served.

“They weren’t nearly as transient,” he said.”We could build a programming structure that would support long-term engagement because, in many of these communities, students would go to the same schools from pre-K through 8th grade and beyond.”

While it is true that rural communities often suffer from a lack of resources compared to urban ones, one of their strengths is that having even one or two skilled mentors can create an outsize impact, as my Open Campus colleagues and I have reported in Colorado and Kansas.

Carpenter grew his Trekkers organization into a program that led outdoor excursions and community mentoring to hundreds of Maine students each year, before stepping down in 2015 and becoming executive director of the Rural Futures Fund.

Previously, the fund had supported a wide-range of grants across the state. But in 2017, it decided to focus all its efforts on youth development through the Aspirations Incubator, committing $600,000 to each of its five sites for the six years of the pilot program.

The fund worked closely with each partner site to understand the needs of their students and provide year-round programming and mentorship through what Carpenter calls “informal relationship building.”

“Staff and mentors are encouraged to show up in the world of these young people where they are, instead of waiting for them to show up in class or through the doors of the organization.” 

Since the pilot ended last year, the Aspirations Incubator has added one more site, and has worked with its partners to secure long-term funding to keep the programs going. 

According to the pilot program’s final evaluation, the average annual program cost $151,676 — or around $2,002 per student — to cover all the direct and indirect costs of running cohorts of 10-20 students across six grades (7th-12th) at once.

“For comparison, the average cost per child in an afterschool program is $100 a week,” the report says. “In Maine there are about 36 weeks in a school year, making the annual cost approximately $3,600; more than the year-round cost of an AI program.”

Now that the program has gone through its first full six-year cohort, upperclassmen and recent graduates are taking the reins as mentors themselves, building a deeper “bench” that can help inspire the next generation of rural students too.

“A huge part of the model is seeing these kids give back to their community, both by participating in the program and then committing to leading those younger cohorts,” Carpenter says.

“When those younger students see the older kids leading, they start thinking: ‘When I become a junior, that’s what I want to do too.’”

-SPONSOR MESSAGE-

Join us at the 2024 Horizons summit where educators, leaders, investors, policymakers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, philanthropists, and corporations from every sector converge in Washington, DC on July 22-23 for 2-days of thought leadership, networking and transformation of the work-and-learn ecosystem. Register Today!

02: Roadside Attractions

• Are you a local newsroom with a higher ed story idea focused on rural America? Pitch us before Aug. 1 and you’ll receive $10,000 as well as coaching, editing, and data analysis from our team. 

• Ed Department disperses rural funding. Eight community colleges, spread out from California and Washington to Alabama and North Carolina, are together receiving more than $17 million in grants to boost enrollment, persistence, and completion rates among rural students pursuing career pathways that lead to in-demand, high-wage jobs.
  

• Tilting the scales. University of South Carolina and University of Virginia researchers are working to enroll more than 600 rural volunteers for an online weight management study, with the hopes that such digital efforts can be helped by adding a human touch, potentially through group video sessions and individual coaching calls.

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