Project aims to break the cycle of poverty with better childcare, job training and other programs to better people's lives and opportunities.

The Pathways for Prosperity anti-poverty initiative is about to begin working in 11 communities in Cumberland County to help the people there break an intergenerational cycle of poverty.

The Pathways project on Saturday announced an action plan for those communities with two broad goals: to attack the conditions that hold people in poverty, and provide people with opportunities to improve their lives and their children’s lives.

The plan was presented at the county Department of Social Services during a Pathways for Prosperity meeting of more than 70 anti-poverty advocates, government officials, nonprofit organization leaders and others who want to end poverty in and around Fayetteville and bring more success to the area.

“This where the heavy lifting begins,” state Sen. Kirk deViere said at the end of the presentation. “This will take hard work across our communities.”

Pathways for Prosperity was founded in 2017 by deViere, who then was on the Fayetteville City Council, and Fayetteville City Councilman Larry Wright. They created the project following studies that reported some parts of the Fayetteville area are extremely poor and children growing up in those communities rank at the bottom nationally in earnings potential and opportunities for better lives.

The Pathways for Prosperity plan is to run over the next three years. Here are its goals:

• In early childhood education: Reduce chronic absenteeism among the children in childcare to 8 percent from 11 percent. Also, boost options for high quality daycare by helping four childcare programs achieve at least a four-star rating on the state’s five-star scale that ranks their services.

• In K-12 education: Double enrollment in work-based learning opportunities from 1,874 in the 2017-18 school year to 3,748. Reduce the number of infractions that lead to out-of-school suspensions by 15 percent in the 11 communities.

• To enhance people’s life skills: Connect 500 families to community resources (job training, health care, financial literacy, job opportunities, etc). Also recruit and mentor 10 percent of the participants for leadership training to become mentors.

• For affordable housing: Increase the amount of safe, affordable housing in the 11 communities and work with residents to address housing policies and allocation of resources.

• To align workforce skills with the needs of industry: Coordinate local industry with education and training resources. Also, increase the training options and completion rates in job training programs, develop entrepreneurship training and find ways to support remote workers (people who work from home or otherwise away from a traditional workplace).

“This is something that’s going to take time. This is going to take years to change,” deViere said. “We’ve got three-year, kind of first-step goals with these objectives. And then we’re going to come back and resync and look at how to move forward.”

The communities that the project will focus on are:

• Parts of Spring Lake.

• In Fayetteville, part of downtown; the Bonnie Doone area; the northeast side around Ramsey Street and Country Club Drive; parts of Fayetteville’s Murchison Road corridor; the Bunce Road area in west Fayetteville; the Massey Hill neighborhood; the Old Wilmington Road and B Street area.

• In unincorporated Cumberland County, the southeast corner, also known as Beaver Dam; the Shaw Heights and University Estates area between Fayetteville and Fort Bragg; part of the Cedar Creek Road area east of Fayetteville.

Staff writer Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3512.