A pair of meetings last week reaffirmed our belief that many of this community's leaders are on the right track toward solving some of our greatest problems. And just as important, those leaders appear to have substantial public support, which is the most important driver of success.

We were pleasantly surprised to see about 500 people turn out for a Cumberland County Schools town meeting Thursday to hear about the school system's developing strategic plan. "We want everyone in our community to own this plan," Superintendent Marvin Connelly Jr. said. School board chairwoman Donna Vann echoed that belief: "It takes all of us to educate our future," she said.

We'd say 500 people is a pretty remarkable turnout from this community, and a strong statement of support for what the school system is doing. The strategic plan is a broad-based endeavor, with about 40 people on a team co-chaired by retired Maj. Gen. Rodney O. Anderson and Melody Chalmers, assistant superintendent for district transformation and strategic initiatives. Team members include principals, teachers, parents, school leaders and community members.

The people who attended the town hall gathered at tables to discuss priorities and at the end of the session voted online for their priorities. The top choice was "graduating every student confident, competitive and ready for a career and college." The second-ranked goal was "recruiting, retaining and supporting effective teachers and school leaders."

The community buy-in that was evident at Thursday's town hall is essential to transforming and improving public education in Cumberland County. And there is no question that a strong, innovative system of public education is the key to solving some of our region's most pressing problems.

Foremost among those problems is the persistent generational poverty that afflicts Fayetteville more deeply than any other American city, according to research done a few years ago by a team led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty. Each generation of impoverished residents in the city sinks farther below the poverty line than the generation before it.

Reversing that trend is the mission of Pathways for Prosperity, a broad initiative founded in 2017 by state Sen. Kirk deViere and City Councilman Larry Wright. On Saturday, the project gathered more than 70 anti-poverty advocates, government officials, nonprofit leaders and others to talk about the initiative's plan for the next three years, which will soon begin work in 11 communities within Cumberland County.

The program will start with working to improve and increase participation in early childhood education and seek to create more high-quality daycare options for families. It wants to double enrollment in work-based learning opportunities in the county's public school system and reduce the number of infractions that lead to out-of-school suspensions. It plans to connect 500 families with community resources like job training, health care, financial literacy and job opportunities, and to recruit and mentor 10 percent of the participants for leadership training, so they can become mentors for others. The program plans to increase the amount of safe, affordable housing in each of the 11 communities where it's working. And it will coordinate with local business and industry to create new job-training initiatives and better align the skills in our county workforce with the needs of present and future employers.

Most of those initiatives are rooted in education, and we'd say the timing of that move is excellent. As it is with the school system, though, the Pathways for Prosperity leaders know that this is a long-haul effort that will take years. "This is something that's going to take time," 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."

And that's the encouraging thing: We are moving forward, and we can't help but feel excited by that.