Extension Horizons Program: Improving life in smalltown Idaho

"Grandma Jean" Childers cuddles Dantae, 2,
a Bovill child Childers looks after while
mom is at work.

With timber jobs dwindling, many residents make a long and costly commute to work. Lacking day care, parents patch together babysitters and family caregivers or simply leave children alone while at work.

All the kids know where to find “Grandma Jean,” as townsfolk affectionately call her. Like a kind Pied Piper, Jean draws children behind and beside her as she walks through town. She always offers a hug or a pat on the back and knows all their names. Parents pay what they can or help her provide  snacks.

“Here in Bovill the going rate for  a babysitter is $3 an hour (it’s at least three times that in Idaho’s cities),  and that takes a big chunk out of a salary,” Childers explains. Parents ask her to watch their kids, or sometimes the kids come knocking.

One morning an 11-year-old girl with a toddler brother at home stopped to use the phone. Mommy didn’t come home last night, and  they were hungry. A few calls found mom in jail. “If I can have kids at my house, I know they are safe, at least for that minute.”

Born on a California olive ranch, Childers moved with her family to a South Dakota farm where she scraped by  in a shack with no running water or electricity. Her family of seven moved to Idaho huckleberry country for the area’s natural bounty, but she still found herself sometimes stretching two hotdogs into a meal. Yet today she is optimistic about her (and Bovill’s) future, thanks in part to a UI Extension-supported community-building program called Horizons.

Funded through a $1.3 million grant from the Northwest Area Foundation, the UI Extension’s Horizons program aims to help reduce poverty in 23 northern Idaho towns having fewer than 5,000 people and a poverty rate greater than 10 percent.

Childers, along with other residents, participated in study circles to pinpoint major challenges, then  got leadership training to learn how to mobilize their community.  Overall coaching and guidance were provided by UI Extension or Community Action Partnership, a local branch of a national forum focused on ending poverty. With the help of these community coaches, residents start tackling action items.

“We had a high rate of criminal youth activity for such a small town,” said Bovill community coach Pat Eck. Now there are after-school and pre-school programs and a plan for possible day care. “It’s rollin’.”

Understanding poverty’s spiral

Each town in the program can list  several tangible Horizons successes—but rural Idaho still faces an uphill battle, said UI Extension specialist and Horizons advisor Lorie Higgins, who is evaluating a community mentoring effort to get 100 northern Idaho families permanently out  of poverty within the next year.

“Overall we are finding the poverty threshold going up as property values and taxes rise,” Higgins said. “There  is a class separation going on.”

Many problems cannot be solved in isolation. Low wages might couple with limited abilities or inadequate educational opportunities. A lack        of savings may be exacerbated by unwise spending. No health insurance might be accompanied by unhealthy lifestyle factors such as malnutrition, high-risk employment, or substandard housing. The issues are interlocking--and can affect one another, sometimes in a rapidly downward spiraling chain reaction.

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