The Partners for Rural Transformation proposes to provide opportunities for people who are dealing with poverty themselves to break down the negative stories that divide our nation based on race, class, and geography, and to construct new stories that reveal the shared experiences of people living in places suffering from decades of intentional disinvestment. They believe that sharing these stories with others is the way to change the attitudes that drive policy and investment, and will help eliminate a competitive posture commonly adopted by various vulnerable places and populations that keeps us from building a unified strategy to achieve the “strength in numbers” necessary to effect positive change at scale. 

In 2020-2021, our partnership took early shape with the ask to create a documentary to capture these rural experiences. With our traditional documentary approach impacted by the pandemic, KERTIS pivoted to working virtually with participants in their communities, having them film, write, capture their own stories, with KERTIS support. In 2022 we launched the first version of the "Everything Else: The Stories of Rural America" website, with the stories presented as multi-media experiences that included photo, writing, audio, and film. 

In the past 3 years, our teams have continued the work, traveling to 15 rural communities across South Dakota, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, California, Washington, Maine, Virginia, and New Mexico to produce 16 stories. Each story is presented as a multi-media experience via writing, audio, photo, and video. These stories are also documented in a ‘story map’ that organizes stories by categories and acts as a narrative archive.

The storytelling work was developed along side a comprehensive communications strategy used in companion to elevate the work of PRT.