By completing the entire Horizons program, a community can expect:

• A community-wide understanding of poverty and ways it can be solved;

• More people in leadership role in the community;

• Community leaders who come from all ages, backgrounds and incomes,

• At least six people with better skills to help lead community discussions and move toward community action on poverty;

• Three people who can present ongoing leadership training in the community;

• At least 20 people with enhanced leadership abilities;

• A vision and a plan - created and carried out by at least 60 people;

• Up to $10,000 to sustain community strategies for poverty reduction and leadership;

• Connections to many organizations and hundreds of other Horizons communities that can help for the long haul; and

• Changes from within the community that allow this work to continue long term.

Community Success

Is Horizons worth the effort? Nearly 200 small rural and reservation communities - towns just like ours - say :yes!" Read some of their entries at www.communityblogs.us .

SOME TESTIMONIES FROM OTHER COMMUNITIES

"A year and a half ago, if you had asked me or others in town about poverty, we would have said, 'There isn't much, it's not a big issue.' Some people would have said it's just those people who are too lazy to get a job. When you start looking at it though, as in Study Circles, you realize that bad things do happen to people, that you can't always get a job that will support your family."

"What mattered most with Horizons is that someone believed that things could be better - they had more faith in us than we had in ourselves."

"We have new leaders in the community because of what we are doing here. People are volunteering for things that they had never even been invited to before."

The delivery Organization for Rochester is: Wasington State University Extension, www.horizons.wsu.edu .