A statewide partnership rebuilds the model for rural counties.

By Danielle LeCourt, Partnership Communications and Narrative Director

Among people who study economic mobility, Utah has been an object of quiet interest for more than a decade. A landmark 2014 study by the economist Raj Chetty and his collaborators found that Salt Lake City was one of a small number of American cities where a poor child still had a realistic chance of reaching the middle class. What later invocations of the finding tend not to specify is that ninety percent of Utahns live on one percent of the state’s landmass—meaning one of the country’s brightest examples of the American dream has, on closer inspection, been a story about one percent of Utah’s map. 

The other ninety-nine percent is where this story begins. 

On an afternoon last August, a group of Grand County residents met in a room in Moab to begin building the kind of infrastructure the state’s mobility story has never really been about. Two county commissioners were there, along with the county’s economic development coordinator, a community center director, a children’s librarian, a grant writer, and a handful of others—an assortment a rural county pulls together to build something that hasn’t existed before. Cookies were passed around the table. 

At one point, the conversation turned to the upcoming launch of Baby & You, Our Village Community Center‘s nine-week workshop series for new and expecting parents. The county provided space for it at the local senior center, along with funding for supplies to set up childcare for participants.  “Do you need anything else for that launch?” someone asked Annie Watts Thomas, who runs Our Village. “Yes,” she responded. “We need a bunch of grandmas to come hold babies.” Everyone laughed.Our Village builds its programs around intergenerational connection and lifelong learning, so the request was literal. 

A little later, Melisa Jeffers, Grand County’s economic development and communications coordinator, said something the room paused on. “In Moab, our locals are not thriving,” she said. “The ones we want to be progressing are the ones progressing the least.” Amy Ahrens Terpstra, Promise Partnership Utah’s (PPU) managing director who was facilitating the meeting, walked to the whiteboard and wrote “All means all.” She underlined all. 

The capacity problem 

What that room was doing was assembling capacity Grand County does not yet have. Helping rural counties build that capacity is new work for PPU, and the push to take it on came from outside when Dreama Gentry, founder and CEO of Partners for Rural Impact, asked Amy why the partnership wasn’t providing rural Utah the same support it had been providing metro areas. That question turned into a listening tour, funded by Partners for Rural Impact. In the fall of 2025, Amy and her backbone staff traveled the state.  

What they heard changed their theory of the work. 

For most of her career, Amy had worked from a single model of what a backbone does. It solves an alignment problem: the resources exist, and what’s missing is the structure that points them at the same outcome. In most of rural Utah, the diagnosis was different. “They have been fundamentally disinvested in over decades and decades,” she said. The first thing a rural community needs is capacity itself — the staff, dollars, and infrastructure urban communities take for granted. You cannot align resources that were never sent. 

Brian Martinez, a Grand County commissioner and river guide who was in the Moab meeting, described how that disinvestment compounds. “One of the things that rural communities face as a challenge that you don’t face inside of a city,” Brian told the room, “is that these larger cities are able to audit their departments, track performance, and say, ‘Look, we went from here to here.’ A rural county can’t compete with that for funding, because we don’t have the infrastructure to say the same.”  

The counties least able to document progress are the counties least able to win the funding that would let them document it. 

So in rural Utah, the model has to do something more elemental than alignment. It has to make the work survivable. Dakota Matherly, Director for the Office of Early Childhood at the Utah Department of Health and Human Services and co-chair of the Promise Partnership Council, has watched what happens when rural staff leave. “Turnover happens less frequently in rural areas,” Dakota said, “but when it happens, it has more of an impact, because when that person leaves, everything that they do leaves with them.” A backbone is what allows the work to outlast the individual doing it. 

The case for rural 

Why bother, when most of Utah lives on the Wasatch Front? Amy has two answers. The first is that hitting a statewide number and serving the whole state are different achievements. Utah could probably reach a seventy percent literacy goal by concentrating on its most populated areas, she explained, but a statewide literacy goal reached by focusing on the Wasatch Front leaves rural kids out of the count. “Rural kids are our kids,” she said.  

Her second answer is that rural is where saturation is possible. In Salt Lake, a program can serve thousands of families and still reach only a small share of those who need it. In Grand County, a program like Baby & You could reach every newborn and follow the cohort from cradle to career. Dakota puts it in numbers: “If I serve over a thousand people in Salt Lake, that’s like one percent of the population. Whereas if I serve thirty to fifty people in one of these rural areas, that could be a much more significant percentage.” 

What emerged from Amy’s listening tour was the legislation meant to make that math possible statewide. Senate Bill 165—the REACH Initiative, signed in March of 2026—establishes a state framework for community-based partnerships that align education, health, and workforce systems around economic mobility. 

Read with rural in mind, three features matter. Any community can put itself forward; there is no geographic gate. The qualifying criteria were kept low-complexity on purpose, because grant-writing capacity is one of the mechanisms by which rural communities are excluded from funding. And the bill was written with a twenty percent rural carveout — one dollar in five — which was quietly removed when REACH went unfunded this session; the partnership expects to fight for it at appropriation. 

The phone line 

Reaching every newborn in Grand County, and staying with that cohort from cradle to career, takes an organization that will still exist in twenty years. That is what the room in Moab was functionally becoming: the coalition that will hold the work in place long enough for saturation to accumulate.  

Later in the meeting, Brian offered a metaphor. It is a phone line—the number a community remembers to call, years from now, when the moment arrives to do something ambitious. The work is to make sure the line exists, that it is answered, that it doesn’t disappear when a single person moves on. 

Something shifted in the room that afternoon. Annie had been building toward this kind of work in Grand County for years. Hearing a room of people with the authority to sustain it start to describe what they were making—something that would outlast a single grant, a single commissioner, a single plan—made it, briefly, real. “That gives me chills,” she said. 

That is what a partnership looks like when it takes rural seriously: a structure held open, over time, so a place can build its own answer inside it. Rural Utah was never a footnote to the state’s mobility story. It was always the big picture. The partnership is just finally standing where you can see it from.