Better Together: Rural Community Collaboration in North Carolina's Cape Fear Region

The disAbility Resource Center of North Carolina (dRC) has served the Cape Fear region of NC since 2008. The dRC holds to the philosophy that every individual has the right to maximize their abilities, live as independently as possible, and participate fully in their community. In rural NC, the delivery of formal support requires informal trust across people, places, and organizations. In this sense, dRC is a trust broker, facilitating relationships between informal rural support networks and the network of public and nonprofit service providers in the area. dRC does this through being embedded in rural places, earning trust person by person, and community by community, allowing them to reach people and organizations often invisible to larger agencies. RTC:Rural researchers explore how dRC’s participation in this rural outreach training helped facilitate the growth of dRC’s network of rural partnerships and consumers.