We build the infrastructure for stronger connections, communications, and communities around rural children and families.
Our Mission
The Center on Rural Parenting supports rural children, families, and communities by strengthening the organizations that serve them.
Grounded in public health, Reproductive Justice, storytelling, and community-rooted education, CRP provides communications technical assistance, capacity-building resources, and practical learning materials for rural-serving organizations and community partners working across education, health, technology, broadband, workforce, family support, and local development.
CRP helps these organizations communicate more clearly, listen more deeply, build community trust, and better support the environments where rural children are raised, learn, connect, and grow.
Our Vision
CRP envisions rural communities where children are surrounded by informed, connected, and supported adults - and where the organizations serving families have the communications capacity, community trust, and practical tools needed to support the full child-raising environment.
We believe rural children deserve communities that understand their full development: learning, safety, creativity, digital lives, emotional well-being, local identity, family systems, and future opportunities.
To learn more about the center’s work and initiatives, explore Our Work.
The Founder and Executive Director
Aaliyah Sweet P. Bailey
Aaliyah Sweet P. Bailey is the founder and Executive Director of The Center on Rural Parenting, where she develops research, frameworks, and practical tools to strengthen the organizations and communities supporting rural children and families. Her work sits at the intersection of public health, communications, technology, research, and community capacity-building.
Through CRP, Bailey developed the Rural Half-School, a communications technical assistance and capacity-building initiative for rural-serving organizations, and Community Digital Awareness, a framework for building shared community capacity around the digital communication environments shaping children's lives. She also created the Rural Health Transformation Program Public Visibility Tracker, an independent research and data product examining what the public can see about state implementation of RHTP.
Bailey brings more than a decade of experience across public health communications, digital strategy, research and evaluation, emerging technology, and AI. Her work is grounded in a simple premise: strengthening the environments around rural children requires strengthening the people and organizations that build, communicate, and sustain those environments.
