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In West Virginia, solutions mold to the land
In West Virginia, the coal industry is in decline, a fact that dovetails with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, an opioid epidemic, and a population that has drastically fallen in recent decades.
Reversing course requires a multifaceted response: diversifying the economy, workforce training programs to support it, and help for communities devastated by the drug crisis.
A constellation of nonprofits in the Mountain State, including Coalfield Development, are on a mission to evolve the economy of the Appalachian region. Those nonprofits and their funders are putting a holistic approach into action — supporting a fresh economic future that leverages the area’s unique assets: its natural beauty and tourism potential; its ability to lead a shift to green energy and clean manufacturing; and its people, who hold deep-rooted pride in the place they were raised.
Coalfield, along with other nonprofits like it, seeks to diversify the state’s economy by framing up new industries and an economy that includes green energy and coal, plus other industries and a workforce to support it. Among Coalfield’s many areas of focus is building a replicable model to reclaim and reuse hundreds of thousands of acres of abandoned strip mines, turning them into solar arrays, adventure tourism destinations, and regenerative, sustainable farms.
“It's the place-based policies and investments for us that last, have a huge return on investment, and are very sticky — they attract other investment. You can see downtowns being revitalized and families being rewarded for their hard labor. People in rural America work so hard, are very skilled, and work with less. We know every dollar we spend in West Virginia will go far.”
Rooted in place and looking to the future
“The people of these communities have suffered economic shock and decline. But they have persistence,” says Jen Giovannitti, president and trustee of the 80-year-old Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation. The Pittsburgh, PA private foundation invests most of its grants in West Virginia’s rural communities, including Coalfield, which Benedum discovered through its West Virginia-based program directors, who scout places and projects with promise.
“When you're just starting [to fund] something like Coalfield, it's hard. It feels high risk — people don't believe in it, they don't understand what you're doing,” Giovannitti says. “This is a sweet spot for Benedum. We love the early dreaming ideas that come out of a rural community. And we generally stick with them until they can build the capacity they need to grow and stabilize.”
“Unlike cities, rural communities like ones in West Virginia have a sense of place that is rooted in the past, but is aspiring for innovative things in the future,” Giovannitti says.
Definition: Jacob Hannah
It takes a village
Jacob Israel Hannah, CEO of Coalfield Development, is the son of three generations of coal miners. Hannah assumed he’d go into the mines, too. But the jobs dried up. After college, he returned home. “I always wanted to come back to try and put our communities back together,” he says.
Coalfield Development is now the lead applicant on a new $62.8 million federal Build Back Better award for a coalition of state partners aiming to diversify the economy of southern West Virginia with renewable energy, mine land reclamation, clean manufacturing, and entrepreneurship. The coalition, ACT Now, includes West Virginia’s two largest universities and cities, private businesses, nonprofits, and individuals. The award tasks Hannah and team with reclaiming 5,000 acres of old mined land and training 200 people in reclamation and remediation.
At a site called Highwall, a small team is remediating a mountaintop that was once a strip mine to get the community on its feet, train workers, and hopefully attract new employers to the region. They’re raising animals and plants to produce fresh foods for the surrounding food desert towns. They’re building cabins and infrastructure for adventure tourists, plan to put a solar farm on the rock face’s high wall, and operate a treatment and recovery center.
“I'm a huge advocate for renewable energy, but there will never be enough jobs in one industry to repair and replace all the jobs lost by the coal industry,” he says. “Our goal is to create more economic drivers in the region.” Highwall, he says, is a symbol of “what good can look like.”
But it takes partners to succeed — other nonprofits, and outside funding sources. “It can’t be just us. It has to be a collective approach that brings all this forward together.”
“Place-based development work is so broad and so deep. It’s hard to imagine a single organization being able to do all the work that would lead to the transformation that we want to see,” says Marilyn Wrenn, Chief Program Officer for Coalfield Development. “This work takes a holistic approach. The beautiful thing about our coalition is we can make great strides by partnering in ways that we wouldn’t have without working as one.”
“It’s a story I want to be part of”
Makayla Lottridge is a young mom of two and joined Coalfield when she was in rehab. “This place is a saving grace for me,” she says from the Highwall mountaintop, where she and others are regenerating the land with a farm. “Addiction taught me a lot of what I did not want to live like. The whole fact that they are all about rebuilding and reclamation — it’s so beautiful to see what it’s doing to me and others, and the land comes to life. It’s a big story I want to be part of.”
Money alone is not enough
Decades ago, “in one of the poorest counties in Appalachia, millions of dollars were invested from the federal government to help restart the economy,” Jacob Hannah explains. “Fast forward to today, it's still one of the poorest counties in our region.”
It isn’t enough to throw money at a place without a way to help it stick around. Funders should aspire to measure beyond yearly outcomes because seeing long-term results takes time. Generations, in fact.
Philanthropy must be grounded in the community, reinvested into revenue-churning projects and businesses, and flexible in order to drive momentum. “The dollars have to stick some way, to make sure they don't just phase out when the grant ends,” Hannah says. “Our ideal blend is a 30%-30%-30% blend: Federal funding, philanthropic funding, and revenue generation. We need to make sure funding doesn’t fall off a cliff if administrations change or funding dries up.”
“My passion for this work stems from wanting justice and opportunity for people — my family and friends in our hills and hollers. We do a lot of work making sure that we're meeting the goals that the communities are setting.”
The 33-6-3 model
Driving deep, generational impact requires building capacity and infrastructure for the community, and committing to pulling multiple levers, large and small. Coalfield Development uses an innovative 33-6-3 model: 33 hours a week of paid work, 6 credit hours of higher education, and 3 hours of personal development mentorship.
“I can say ‘Here’s a job, jump up and get it,’ but there’s like eight barriers preventing you from being able to jump up and get it,” Jacob Hannah says. “So instead, we say, ‘Here are platforms that are going to help pay for you to get that job.’”
In West Virginia, solutions mold to the land
In West Virginia, the coal industry is in decline, a fact that dovetails with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, an opioid epidemic, and a population that has drastically fallen in recent decades.
Reversing course requires a multifaceted response: diversifying the economy, workforce training programs to support it, and help for communities devastated by the drug crisis.
A constellation of nonprofits in the Mountain State, including Coalfield Development, are on a mission to evolve the economy of the Appalachian region. Those nonprofits and their funders are putting a holistic approach into action — supporting a fresh economic future that leverages the area’s unique assets: its natural beauty and tourism potential; its ability to lead a shift to green energy and clean manufacturing; and its people, who hold deep-rooted pride in the place they were raised.
Coalfield, along with other nonprofits like it, seeks to diversify the state’s economy by framing up new industries and an economy that includes green energy and coal, plus other industries and a workforce to support it. Among Coalfield’s many areas of focus is building a replicable model to reclaim and reuse hundreds of thousands of acres of abandoned strip mines, turning them into solar arrays, adventure tourism destinations, and regenerative, sustainable farms.
“It's the place-based policies and investments for us that last, have a huge return on investment, and are very sticky — they attract other investment. You can see downtowns being revitalized and families being rewarded for their hard labor. People in rural America work so hard, are very skilled, and work with less. We know every dollar we spend in West Virginia will go far.”
Rooted in place and looking to the future
“The people of these communities have suffered economic shock and decline. But they have persistence,” says Jen Giovannitti, president and trustee of the 80-year-old Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation. The Pittsburgh, PA private foundation invests most of its grants in West Virginia’s rural communities, including Coalfield, which Benedum discovered through its West Virginia-based program directors, who scout places and projects with promise.
“When you're just starting [to fund] something like Coalfield, it's hard. It feels high risk — people don't believe in it, they don't understand what you're doing,” Giovannitti says. “This is a sweet spot for Benedum. We love the early dreaming ideas that come out of a rural community. And we generally stick with them until they can build the capacity they need to grow and stabilize.”
“Unlike cities, rural communities like ones in West Virginia have a sense of place that is rooted in the past, but is aspiring for innovative things in the future,” Giovannitti says.
Appalachia: Get the pronunciation right when you travel through the wild and wonderful hills and hollers of West Virginia. “If you get it wrong,” Jacob I. Hannah, CEO of Coalfield Development, says, “I’ll throw an apple-at-cha.”
It takes a village
Jacob Israel Hannah, CEO of Coalfield Development, is the son of three generations of coal miners. Hannah assumed he’d go into the mines, too. But the jobs dried up. After college, he returned home. “I always wanted to come back to try and put our communities back together,” he says.
Coalfield Development is now the lead applicant on a new $62.8 million federal Build Back Better award for a coalition of state partners aiming to diversify the economy of southern West Virginia with renewable energy, mine land reclamation, clean manufacturing, and entrepreneurship. The coalition, ACT Now, includes West Virginia’s two largest universities and cities, private businesses, nonprofits, and individuals. The award tasks Hannah and team with reclaiming 5,000 acres of old mined land and training 200 people in reclamation and remediation.
At a site called Highwall, a small team is remediating a mountaintop that was once a strip mine to get the community on its feet, train workers, and hopefully attract new employers to the region. They’re raising animals and plants to produce fresh foods for the surrounding food desert towns. They’re building cabins and infrastructure for adventure tourists, plan to put a solar farm on the rock face’s high wall, and operate a treatment and recovery center.
“I'm a huge advocate for renewable energy, but there will never be enough jobs in one industry to repair and replace all the jobs lost by the coal industry,” he says. “Our goal is to create more economic drivers in the region.” Highwall, he says, is a symbol of “what good can look like.”
But it takes partners to succeed — other nonprofits, and outside funding sources. “It can’t be just us. It has to be a collective approach that brings all this forward together.”
“Place-based development work is so broad and so deep. It’s hard to imagine a single organization being able to do all the work that would lead to the transformation that we want to see,” says Marilyn Wrenn, Chief Program Officer for Coalfield Development. “This work takes a holistic approach. The beautiful thing about our coalition is we can make great strides by partnering in ways that we wouldn’t have without working as one.”
“It’s a story I want to be part of”
Makayla Lottridge is a young mom of two and joined Coalfield when she was in rehab. “This place is a saving grace for me,” she says from the Highwall mountaintop, where she and others are regenerating the land with a farm. “Addiction taught me a lot of what I did not want to live like. The whole fact that they are all about rebuilding and reclamation — it’s so beautiful to see what it’s doing to me and others, and the land comes to life. It’s a big story I want to be part of.”
Money alone is not enough
Decades ago, “in one of the poorest counties in Appalachia, millions of dollars were invested from the federal government to help restart the economy,” Jacob Hannah explains. “Fast forward to today, it's still one of the poorest counties in our region.”
It isn’t enough to throw money at a place without a way to help it stick around. Funders should aspire to measure beyond yearly outcomes because seeing long-term results takes time. Generations, in fact.
Philanthropy must be grounded in the community, reinvested into revenue-churning projects and businesses, and flexible in order to drive momentum. “The dollars have to stick some way, to make sure they don't just phase out when the grant ends,” Hannah says. “Our ideal blend is a 30%-30%-30% blend: Federal funding, philanthropic funding, and revenue generation. We need to make sure funding doesn’t fall off a cliff if administrations change or funding dries up.”
“My passion for this work stems from wanting justice and opportunity for people — my family and friends in our hills and hollers. We do a lot of work making sure that we're meeting the goals that the communities are setting.”
The 33-6-3 model
Driving deep, generational impact requires building capacity and infrastructure for the community, and committing to pulling multiple levers, large and small. Coalfield Development uses an innovative 33-6-3 model: 33 hours a week of paid work, 6 credit hours of higher education, and 3 hours of personal development mentorship.
“I can say ‘Here’s a job, jump up and get it,’ but there’s like eight barriers preventing you from being able to jump up and get it,” Jacob Hannah says. “So instead, we say, ‘Here are platforms that are going to help pay for you to get that job.’”
“Employment is a central tenet for us, but not just employment that takes advantage of the community to extract from it, as West Virginia has done in the past. It’s about bringing along the community in this reclamation process.”
“I just kept moving forward.”
Steven Spry is a survivor. He got into trouble earlier in life, went to jail, and later rehab. Through a fresh start program, he learned of the Coalfield model for a job, training, and personal support. He got the job and earned his associate’s degree in technical studies. “Coalfield got me back on the right track,” says the 33-year-old, clean now for four years. “And I just kept moving forward here.”
He is assistant crew chief at Highwall, providing him a steady paycheck — critical for a dad of four. For Spry, leaving West Virginia wasn’t an option — for the simple fact that Mingo County is home. “I love it here…I want to raise my kids in a place that isn’t so hectic and crazy, and know they can still succeed,” he says. “I’ve been to jail. I’ve been to college. I’ve redone my life. I’ve had a taste of everything here and made a success out of it. Not many do.”
“I’m going to the top,” he says. “From where I came from, it’s a success story in and of itself.”
In West Virginia, solutions mold to the land
In West Virginia, the coal industry is in decline, a fact that dovetails with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, an opioid epidemic, and a population that has drastically fallen in recent decades.
Reversing course requires a multifaceted response: diversifying the economy, workforce training programs to support it, and help for communities devastated by the drug crisis.
A constellation of nonprofits in the Mountain State, including Coalfield Development, are on a mission to evolve the economy of the Appalachian region. Those nonprofits and their funders are putting a holistic approach into action — supporting a fresh economic future that leverages the area’s unique assets: its natural beauty and tourism potential; its ability to lead a shift to green energy and clean manufacturing; and its people, who hold deep-rooted pride in the place they were raised.
Coalfield, along with other nonprofits like it, seeks to diversify the state’s economy by framing up new industries and an economy that includes green energy and coal, plus other industries and a workforce to support it. Among Coalfield’s many areas of focus is building a replicable model to reclaim and reuse hundreds of thousands of acres of abandoned strip mines, turning them into solar arrays, adventure tourism destinations, and regenerative, sustainable farms.
“It's the place-based policies and investments for us that last, have a huge return on investment, and are very sticky — they attract other investment. You can see downtowns being revitalized and families being rewarded for their hard labor. People in rural America work so hard, are very skilled, and work with less. We know every dollar we spend in West Virginia will go far.”
Rooted in place and looking to the future
“The people of these communities have suffered economic shock and decline. But they have persistence,” says Jen Giovannitti, president and trustee of the 80-year-old Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation. The Pittsburgh, PA private foundation invests most of its grants in West Virginia’s rural communities, including Coalfield, which Benedum discovered through its West Virginia-based program directors, who scout places and projects with promise.
“When you're just starting [to fund] something like Coalfield, it's hard. It feels high risk — people don't believe in it, they don't understand what you're doing,” Giovannitti says. “This is a sweet spot for Benedum. We love the early dreaming ideas that come out of a rural community. And we generally stick with them until they can build the capacity they need to grow and stabilize.”
“Unlike cities, rural communities like ones in West Virginia have a sense of place that is rooted in the past, but is aspiring for innovative things in the future,” Giovannitti says.
It takes a village
Jacob Israel Hannah, CEO of Coalfield Development, is the son of three generations of coal miners. Hannah assumed he’d go into the mines, too. But the jobs dried up. After college, he returned home. “I always wanted to come back to try and put our communities back together,” he says.
Coalfield Development is now the lead applicant on a new $62.8 million federal Build Back Better award for a coalition of state partners aiming to diversify the economy of southern West Virginia with renewable energy, mine land reclamation, clean manufacturing, and entrepreneurship. The coalition, ACT Now, includes West Virginia’s two largest universities and cities, private businesses, nonprofits, and individuals. The award tasks Hannah and team with reclaiming 5,000 acres of old mined land and training 200 people in reclamation and remediation.
At a site called Highwall, a small team is remediating a mountaintop that was once a strip mine to get the community on its feet, train workers, and hopefully attract new employers to the region. They’re raising animals and plants to produce fresh foods for the surrounding food desert towns. They’re building cabins and infrastructure for adventure tourists, plan to put a solar farm on the rock face’s high wall, and operate a treatment and recovery center.
“I'm a huge advocate for renewable energy, but there will never be enough jobs in one industry to repair and replace all the jobs lost by the coal industry,” he says. “Our goal is to create more economic drivers in the region.” Highwall, he says, is a symbol of “what good can look like.”
But it takes partners to succeed — other nonprofits, and outside funding sources. “It can’t be just us. It has to be a collective approach that brings all this forward together.”
“Place-based development work is so broad and so deep. It’s hard to imagine a single organization being able to do all the work that would lead to the transformation that we want to see,” says Marilyn Wrenn, Chief Program Officer for Coalfield Development. “This work takes a holistic approach. The beautiful thing about our coalition is we can make great strides by partnering in ways that we wouldn’t have without working as one.”
Definition: Jacob Hannah
Money alone is not enough
Decades ago, “in one of the poorest counties in Appalachia, millions of dollars were invested from the federal government to help restart the economy,” Jacob Hannah explains. “Fast forward to today, it's still one of the poorest counties in our region.”
It isn’t enough to throw money at a place without a way to help it stick around. Funders should aspire to measure beyond yearly outcomes because seeing long-term results takes time. Generations, in fact.
Philanthropy must be grounded in the community, reinvested into revenue-churning projects and businesses, and flexible in order to drive momentum. “The dollars have to stick some way, to make sure they don't just phase out when the grant ends,” Hannah says. “Our ideal blend is a 30%-30%-30% blend: Federal funding, philanthropic funding, and revenue generation. We need to make sure funding doesn’t fall off a cliff if administrations change or funding dries up.”
“My passion for this work stems from wanting justice and opportunity for people — my family and friends in our hills and hollers. We do a lot of work making sure that we're meeting the goals that the communities are setting.”
The 33-6-3 model
Driving deep, generational impact requires building capacity and infrastructure for the community, and committing to pulling multiple levers, large and small. Coalfield Development uses an innovative 33-6-3 model: 33 hours a week of paid work, 6 credit hours of higher education, and 3 hours of personal development mentorship.
“I can say ‘Here’s a job, jump up and get it,’ but there’s like eight barriers preventing you from being able to jump up and get it,” Jacob Hannah says. “So instead, we say, ‘Here are platforms that are going to help pay for you to get that job.’”
In West Virginia, solutions mold to the land
In West Virginia, the coal industry is in decline, a fact that dovetails with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, an opioid epidemic, and a population that has drastically fallen in recent decades.
Reversing course requires a multifaceted response: diversifying the economy, workforce training programs to support it, and help for communities devastated by the drug crisis.
A constellation of nonprofits in the Mountain State, including Coalfield Development, are on a mission to evolve the economy of the Appalachian region. Those nonprofits and their funders are putting a holistic approach into action — supporting a fresh economic future that leverages the area’s unique assets: its natural beauty and tourism potential; its ability to lead a shift to green energy and clean manufacturing; and its people, who hold deep-rooted pride in the place they were raised.
Coalfield, along with other nonprofits like it, seeks to diversify the state’s economy by framing up new industries and an economy that includes green energy and coal, plus other industries and a workforce to support it. Among Coalfield’s many areas of focus is building a replicable model to reclaim and reuse hundreds of thousands of acres of abandoned strip mines, turning them into solar arrays, adventure tourism destinations, and regenerative, sustainable farms.
“It's the place-based policies and investments for us that last, have a huge return on investment, and are very sticky — they attract other investment. You can see downtowns being revitalized and families being rewarded for their hard labor. People in rural America work so hard, are very skilled, and work with less. We know every dollar we spend in West Virginia will go far.”
Rooted in place and looking to the future
“The people of these communities have suffered economic shock and decline. But they have persistence,” says Jen Giovannitti, president and trustee of the 80-year-old Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation. The Pittsburgh, PA private foundation invests most of its grants in West Virginia’s rural communities, including Coalfield, which Benedum discovered through its West Virginia-based program directors, who scout places and projects with promise.
“When you're just starting [to fund] something like Coalfield, it's hard. It feels high risk — people don't believe in it, they don't understand what you're doing,” Giovannitti says. “This is a sweet spot for Benedum. We love the early dreaming ideas that come out of a rural community. And we generally stick with them until they can build the capacity they need to grow and stabilize.”
“Unlike cities, rural communities like ones in West Virginia have a sense of place that is rooted in the past, but is aspiring for innovative things in the future,” Giovannitti says.
Appalachia: Get the pronunciation right when you travel through the wild and wonderful hills and hollers of West Virginia. “If you get it wrong,” Jacob I. Hannah, CEO of Coalfield Development, says, “I’ll throw an apple-at-cha.”
It takes a village
Jacob Israel Hannah, CEO of Coalfield Development, is the son of three generations of coal miners. Hannah assumed he’d go into the mines, too. But the jobs dried up. After college, he returned home. “I always wanted to come back to try and put our communities back together,” he says.
Coalfield Development is now the lead applicant on a new $62.8 million federal Build Back Better award for a coalition of state partners aiming to diversify the economy of southern West Virginia with renewable energy, mine land reclamation, clean manufacturing, and entrepreneurship. The coalition, ACT Now, includes West Virginia’s two largest universities and cities, private businesses, nonprofits, and individuals. The award tasks Hannah and team with reclaiming 5,000 acres of old mined land and training 200 people in reclamation and remediation.
At a site called Highwall, a small team is remediating a mountaintop that was once a strip mine to get the community on its feet, train workers, and hopefully attract new employers to the region. They’re raising animals and plants to produce fresh foods for the surrounding food desert towns. They’re building cabins and infrastructure for adventure tourists, plan to put a solar farm on the rock face’s high wall, and operate a treatment and recovery center.
“I'm a huge advocate for renewable energy, but there will never be enough jobs in one industry to repair and replace all the jobs lost by the coal industry,” he says. “Our goal is to create more economic drivers in the region.” Highwall, he says, is a symbol of “what good can look like.”
But it takes partners to succeed — other nonprofits, and outside funding sources. “It can’t be just us. It has to be a collective approach that brings all this forward together.”
“Place-based development work is so broad and so deep. It’s hard to imagine a single organization being able to do all the work that would lead to the transformation that we want to see,” says Marilyn Wrenn, Chief Program Officer for Coalfield Development. “This work takes a holistic approach. The beautiful thing about our coalition is we can make great strides by partnering in ways that we wouldn’t have without working as one.”
Money alone is not enough
Decades ago, “in one of the poorest counties in Appalachia, millions of dollars were invested from the federal government to help restart the economy,” Jacob Hannah explains. “Fast forward to today, it's still one of the poorest counties in our region.”
It isn’t enough to throw money at a place without a way to help it stick around. Funders should aspire to measure beyond yearly outcomes because seeing long-term results takes time. Generations, in fact.
Philanthropy must be grounded in the community, reinvested into revenue-churning projects and businesses, and flexible in order to drive momentum. “The dollars have to stick some way, to make sure they don't just phase out when the grant ends,” Hannah says. “Our ideal blend is a 30%-30%-30% blend: Federal funding, philanthropic funding, and revenue generation. We need to make sure funding doesn’t fall off a cliff if administrations change or funding dries up.”
Quote: Marilyn Wrenn
