History
In the mid 1970’s, Dr. Jonathan Sher, a nationally recognized authority on rural education and development, saw that rural youth were leaving their communities due to declining job opportunities; at the same time, they were ill-prepared to compete for good jobs in urban areas. To escape this trap, he saw the need for youth to become job creators, not just job applicants. Rural schools could help by becoming “school-based community development corporations” focused on revitalizing the communities they serve.
In the early 1980’s, Dr. Paul DeLargy, an entrepreneur and community educator, read about Sher’s ideas and put them to work in rural Georgia. Students in a handful of communities identified and met community needs with enterprises such as a day care center, a feeder pig operation, and a small construction company. Sher himself began working with North Carolina high schools, where students, with the help of enterprising teachers and administrators, created screen-printing businesses, a boat rental business, and restaurants.
In 1990, REAL (Rural Entrepreneurship through Action Learning) began working with post-secondary institutions, which today offer REAL to traditional community college students as well as adults of all ages. Since then, Dr. DeLargy created an elementary and middle school version of the program, K-8 REAL, which extends the impact of REAL Entrepreneurship to younger children and paves the way for seamless K-16 offerings.
A major grant from the Ford Foundation in 1988 allowed for the development of a dedicated experiential curriculum and professional development offerings for educators. Ford also supported the creation of an evidence development process to gather demographic information and measure participant outcomes, and an outreach program to disseminate the program nationally.