Rural Opportunity Requires Childcare, Jobs, and Benefits Built Together
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Cynthia McFadden led a discussion with Derek Kilmer of the Rockefeller Foundation, Save the Children’s Janti Soeripto and South Carolina community leader Pamela McKnight on why rural opportunity policy fails when jobs, childcare, food, housing, broadband and benefits are treated separately. The speakers argued that rural families experience those systems together, and that economic mobility depends on investing in both work and family infrastructure through locally designed partnerships. Their case was that rural America is not a single problem to be solved from Washington, but an underinvested set of communities where access, administrative complexity and inflexible funding often determine whether children and parents can use opportunities that formally exist.
The Aspen Institute·Jun 30, 2026·17 min read