• increasing institutional capacity to better serve disadvantaged students and their communities
• reforming public policies and systems to increase the quality and availability of higher education
• promoting the critical link between postsecondary education and economic well-being for people and communities

Projects

Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count

• is a multiyear national initiative to help more community college students succeed, particularly students of color and low-income students who have traditionally faced significant barriers to success. Achieving the Dream emphasizes the use of data to drive change and focuses on measurable outcomes, especially closing achievement gaps.

Eighty-three institutions in 15 states participate in Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, which is funded by Lumina Foundation for Education, KnowledgeWorks Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, Houston Endowment Inc., College Spark Washington, Nellie Mae Education Foundation, The Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, Kamehameha Schools, Office of Hawaiian Affairs, The University of Hawaii Community Colleges, The Lloyd G. Balfour Foundation, The Boston Foundation, TERI, The Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, the South Carolina Technical Colleges System, and external partners coordinated by the Palmetto Institute. MDC is the managing partner in this initiative that includes eight national partner organizations. The initiative has its own Web site at www.achievingthedream.org.

Project Director: Carol Lincoln

Disconnected Youth

• is a report, commissioned by the GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, about the status of young people, ages 16-24, who are neither in school nor employed.

Research has shown that the problem of disconnected youth is particularly acute in the South, where there are numbers of young people who have dropped out of school and are essentially unemployable and without resources to better themselves. Future work on this project will involve a discussion with community leaders in the Triangle region of North Carolina about the implications of the research and a plan to broaden the work into a "call to action" for the Southeast region.

Read an interview with David Dodson about what MDC has discovered in its research on disconnected youth in North Carolina's Research Triangle area and the gravity of the problem.

Project Director: David Dodson

Rural Leadership for Community Change

• is a program to develop leadership courses for students to become leaders and change agents in their own communities

Faculty at six rural community and tribal colleges are developing a leadership curriculum that will prepare students to become leaders for community change. The new curriculum will combine classroom learning with hands-on community projects and will serve as a model for other rural community and tribal colleges across the United States. This program is funded by the federal Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), which supports innovative educational reform projects that can serve as national models for the improvement of postsecondary education.

Project Director: Verna Lalbeharie

Past Projects

Vision to Action in Africa

• was a program to help the University of Namibia develop a new community college campus in Northern Namibia.

Northern Namibia, following generations of colonial rule, economic distress, and political instability, now faces the challenge of building a future for its people. In the Spring of 1998, the Ford Foundation invited MDC to assist with applying learnings from the Rural Community College Initiative to the development of a new community-college-style campus in Northern Namibia for the University of Namibia. Through the RCCI's "Vision to Action" strategic planning process, a team of community, university, civic, and government leaders has developed a vision for the future of the region's people. The team, with assistance from MDC and support from the Ford Foundation, is in the process of developing and implementing a long-term strategic plan to achieve this vision.

Project Director: Carol Lincoln

Rural Community College Initiative

• was a demonstration program designed and managed by MDC to strengthen rural community colleges and enhance their ability to build community prosperity

The Rural Community College Initiative (RCCI) demonstration, funded by the Ford Foundation from 1994 to 2001, helped 24 community and tribal colleges in the nation's most economically distressed regions to move their people and communities toward prosperity.  It supported aggressive and creative efforts to increase jobs, income, and access to education in rural communities. To sustain and expand the work begun by the RCCI demonstration, MDC and the college presidents created the Rural Community College Alliance, a membership organization that supports peer learning and provides a national voice for rural colleges and the communities they serve.  

A followup RCCI program, managed by the Southern Rural Development Center and North Central Regional Center for Rural Development, is currently introducing RCCI philosophy and practice to additional colleges.

During RCCI's demonstration phase, MDC produced video and print materials to document the colleges' experiences and help other rural colleges become engaged in community development work.  These materials are available from MDC.

Project Director: Carol Lincoln