Everyone knows how important education is for the economic prospects of a community or region. But who would have thought that low education attainment levels would lead to a scarcity of supermarkets?

Eden, a town of about 16,000 in Rockingham County, North Carolina, found this out the hard way in 2005, when one of the community’s few groceries closed and the locals got up a petition asking a supermarket chain to open a new store. They already had a site picked out and gathered around 2000 signatures. But the supermarket chain took a pass on Eden. The reason: the percentage of residents with college degrees—about 10.8 percent—was considered too low.

Every year, a couple of statewide education groups sponsor a College Application Week. About 113 colleges and universities participate and 25 of them actually waive their application fees for the week to encourage more kids to apply. In 2006, a total of zero kids from Eden applied for college during College Application Week.

In the old days, all it took was a high school education to make a decent living working in the local textile mills, but in the 1990s, the U.S. textile industry tanked, and many workers lost their jobs and faced grim prospects for competing in the new economy.

Eden has made impressive strides and is recovering from the textile collapse. Citizens came up with a new motto: “Eden: the Land of Two Rivers,” drawing on its geography at the confluence of the Dan and the Smith rivers, and began to focus on protecting and promoting the local waterways. River outfitters now offer canoe and kayak tours. Tourism has increased along with motel occupancy rates.

In 2008, eight Eden citizens launched a grassroots movement to promote higher education, modeling their program on a similar one in nearby Patrick County, Virginia. Visiting the program in Virginia, they found out about the College Advising Corps, a program that hires recent college graduates to work with high school students from low income families to help them become first generation college students.

The activists merged with an existing community group to form the Eden Education Foundation, and later, broadening their focus, the Rockingham County Education Foundation. Working with the University of North Carolina, the group brought in two new college counselors to split their time between four county high schools advising kids who had never seen themselves as potential college grads.

It may seem like a small or obvious thing, beefing up the high school counseling program, but it’s not. These days overworked high school counselors spend an average of less than 20 percent of their time advising kids about college, according to one survey, but their help is essential, especially for first generation learners.

At the All-America City Awards in Kansas last June, Eden brought several kids from the local high schools who described how a counselor, named Mr. Woodard, had helped them through the daunting process of applying for college and scholarship money, rallying them, encouraging them, and bugging college admissions offices on their behalf. These were kids whose parents had never gone to college and had no idea what to do. One compared the process of applying to college to being in a foreign country.

I mentioned already that no kids from Eden had applied for college during College Application Week in 2006. A year later it was 22. By 2009, the number increased to 583. In 2010, seniors from the four schools earned more than $17 million in scholarships, an increase of about 44 percent from the year before. Small steps, perhaps, on the road to getting more kids in college.

Eden was one of ten AAC winners in 2010. You can watch their presentation to the AAC jury
here.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

As I watched the spontaneous celebration outside the White House Sunday night, I was struck by how much how attitudes about patriotism and the military have changed since I was young. The unembarrassed, flag-waving patriotism of the people in DC and New York was contagious. It wasn’t a “red versus blue” crowd. It was a “red, white and blue” crowd.

During the Vietnam years, support for the military reached a low point. Then there was the anti-anti-war reaction of the 1980s, when Hollywood revenge fantasies like “First Blood” turned vets into superheroes and anti-war activists into villainous stereotypes.

American culture was a roller coaster ride during those years. Patriotism was on the rise, but it was a peculiar kind of partisan patriotism that pitted one side of the political/cultural spectrum against another. Are we now experiencing the birth of a new kind of “post partisan” patriotism? Hard to say, but if you want to see one version of what a “new patriotism” might look like, you should check out this article in Time magazine about Fayetteville, North Carolina, “America’s most pro-military town.”

The story goes back to the bad old days of the Vietnam War era, when the local army base, Fort Bragg, was a major stopping off point for soldiers bound for Southeast Asian. Being an Army town during those years was a mixed bag. Most of the draftees who went through the town were not happy about being there. Nor were the townies always thrilled. Strip clubs, cheap bars and tattoo parlors proliferated downtown, earning a new nickname that stuck for years, “Fayette-nam.”

Flash forward to the year 2001 when Fayetteville, like much of the industrial south was languishing economically. Per capita income was stagnant. Few jobs were being created and young people who grew up there had to look elsewhere if they wanted to find promising career paths.

A community improvement effort known as Greater Fayetteville Futures came up with an idea. Why not turn the community’s Army town identity, once considered something of a liability, into a major cultural and economic asset? Members of the community actually voted online to adopt their new slogan, “History, Heroes and a Hometown Feeling.” Fayette-nam rebranded itself as “the most patriotic town in America.”

This was in part a canny form of pure economic development. In 2005, Fayetteville opened its North Carolina Military Business Center, working with local businesses and individual to garner defense industry contracts. Instead of attracting strip clubs and cinder block taverns, the city would bring in high tech companies and defense industry entrepreneurs.

But it’s not all about marketing. Residents were encouraged to fly flags and say “thank you” to service men and women they pass on the street. Local organizations were formed to help military families find housing and jobs. There was a local baby boom-let a few years ago when 22,000 members of the 82 Airborne returned from Iraq, so the town threw a mass military baby shower for all the hundreds of expectant mothers.

The results have been impressive—more than 5000 jobs and $586 million invested and a housing market that is booming—this according to the city’s application for All-America Award. Per capita income growth is the second highest in the country. Tourism is also on the rise with a convention bureau that touts the military-friendly posture to vets planning Army reunions and other events and local attractions like the Airborne and Special Operations Museum and the soon to open Veteran’s Park downtown.

Not that everything is all roses in Fayetteville. It never is. There was a controversy earlier this year when the mayor asked a local Quaker group to participate in a celebration of Vietnam era vets and some of the veteran groups objected.

But the military people interviewed in the Time article and other news reports seem to like the sense of welcome in town. And the local group Fayetteville Cares plans to hold its second “Boots and Booties” event for military moms June 25 at the city’s events center. Apparently a large number of Fort Bragg soldiers returned from a deployment late last year, setting off another baby boom-let in Fayetteville.

Also in June (15-17), the All-America City Awards in Kansas City, Missouri, and Fayetteville will be there as a finalist.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.