Education in Rural and Regional Areas: A Strategic review of potentials and possibilities for philanthropic engagement.

Focus Statement: Engaging overlooked youth cohorts to support the development of sustainable community economies. We often find that researchers and policy actors speak on behalf of the rural and that the rural voices that are allowed to be heard are not representative. In this review we have focused on the perspectives of this overlooked cohort as they are the ones most likely to remain living and working in these communities. Our approach The Rural Education and Communities Research Group (REC) leads research focused on empowering rural communities.  With a focus upon the sustainability of rural communities a distinct feature of the REC’s work is a rural standpoint and engaging the knowledges that exist in rural communities. We have been led to this approach through working with communities who experience much rural educational disadvantage as produced by comparison to an unstated metropolitan norm. This metro-normativity sees the rural as deviant to metropolitan world view, rather than as having unique strengths and opportunities. What did we do? This briefing paper is based on our experiences across multiple projects in rural, regional and remote NSW in recent years, a reanalysis of data from our previous projects from the perspective of youth participants, a review of the academic literature and significant programs, discussions with youth in 7 rural, regional and remote locations and a workshop with the national Rural Youth Ambassadors. Rather than present a linear outline of each component we have synthesized these sources into what we find to be the most compelling conclusions for this review. Details of the literature and programs reviewed can be found in the appendix.