Appalachian Transition: A New Narrative Gains Traction

The Appalachian Transition Initiative (ATI), launched in 2011, was a grassroots effort to promote a participatory conversation about economic transition and rewrite the region’s narrative. It was rooted in years of work and relationships between two of the most effective community economic development and community organizing groups in Central Appalachia. Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) has thousands of members who work statewide to address multiple issues, including economic justice and a transition to a new energy economy. Mountain Association is a CDFI that, since 1976, has provided innovative financing, business support, and deep expertise around clean energy and other key sectors to support the transition to a more diverse, resilient, sustainable, and equitable economy. When the two organizations teamed up in 2011 to launch ATI, they combined the vision and values of grassroots leaders with the technical skills for economic development.

The invitation to collectively rewrite the narrative for Central Appalachia quickly caught on  and went on to influence mainstream economic development partners, including state and federal officials. Appalachian Transition provided an informal framework for a broadly inclusive vision and shared set of values for the region’s economy. Partners in the community investment ecosystem committed to a common cause of advancing a diverse, sustainable, equitable, and resilient economy.

Appalachian Transition captured the power of bottom-up solutions, provided a unifying narrative, and offered a compelling vision for a regional economy that addressed environmental, labor, and social concerns. This envisioned economy promised to build local wealth and promote widely shared prosperity, create good jobs and local ownership opportunities, and steward natural resources. Developed by grassroots leaders and their CED allies, the new narrative provided a coherent and cohesive frame for diverse groups working on community organizing, policy advocacy, asset-based development, sustainable development, and other strategies. The concept of economic transition resonated with the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and other federal agencies under new political leadership from the Obama administration. It also offered a vision that united diverse funders in the region in the formative years of the new Appalachia Funders Network (AFN). While ATI was a short-term initiative, it was the genesis of a regional narrative and frame that galvanized diverse partners toward shared goals across the regional community investment ecosystem.

Anchor Networks for a Collaborative Regional Infrastructure Emerge

As the Appalachian Transition framework gained momentum, existing collaborative networks expanded, and new ones emerged to move the vision to action. The Central Appalachian Network (CAN) became a “network of networks” that included mature anchor organizations as well as dozens of grassroots partners. Working across six states, CAN focused first on building the local food sector, where there was emerging demand, a growing movement of local farm and food businesses, and existing expertise among support organizations. Based on this experience, in the mid-2010s CAN began identifying and supporting other priority sectors, including clean energy and creative placemaking, to advance economic transition. Its food system work became a model for collaboration, guiding the path to collective impact in other sectors and strategies: identify critical leverage points, share tools and strategies, build the capacity of intermediaries in the system, and collect data to track market growth and community impact. The Central Appalachian Network developed collaborative strategies in sectors like clean energy, creative placemaking, and other cross-cutting approaches to support entrepreneurship, improve community health, and build inclusive community wealth.

Inspired by relationships formed at CAN’s 2009 gathering, a small group of grant makers convened their colleagues to explore the creation of a new regional funder network. The Appalachia Funders Network has become an important anchor for philanthropy and public sector funders who want to support a just and sustainable economic transition. The network adopted a big tent approach to build relationships across community, private, and public funders with disparate cultures and priorities. From the beginning, AFN’s goal was to increase collective impact through learning, analysis, and collaboration. A set of working groups enabled AFN members to learn with and from community-based practitioners and forge a common analysis and shared strategies. Learning exchanges with CAN partners and other practitioners influenced AFN’s road map and helped develop cross-sector networks. For instance, relationships on the Food and Agriculture Working Group led to a series of large federal grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture), ARC, and regional funders to build capacity, develop regional strategies, and support collaborative pilot projects. These demonstration projects led to the Central Appalachian Food Enterprise Corridor, a coordinated local foods distribution network which connects over 200 food producers across five states to wholesale distribution markets. Such large-scale, cross-sector collaboration showed that attention to ecosystem coordination pays dividends within sectors and across the investment system.

Partners Focus on Capital and Scale

In 2015, the Obama administration launched the Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) initiative to ease the economic impact of energy transition in coal-dependent communities. National foundations were also paying attention to coal transition, and AFN helped create the Just Transition Fund (JTF) as a vehicle to focus national grants on local efforts consistent with Appalachian Transition. In its first two years, JTF raised and deployed $1.3 million in capacity-building grants to help community-based organizations develop competitive POWER proposals, leveraging $12.4 million in federal grants. The influx of federal and national resources raised expectations for large-scale projects and brought a reality check for the region’s capital absorption capacity, particularly for community-driven efforts. While aligned networks were more competitive for grants, CDFIs understood that more of the same capital would not fix the problem until we had sufficient capacity and infrastructure to use that capital well. Adding to the demand for scale was the growth of impact investing, particularly the DivestInvest movement. If Appalachia wanted its share of the investment side of DivestInvest, the region needed a more robust pipeline of investable opportunities. The Appalachian Regional Commission helped create Appalachian Community Capital as a regional aggregator for small business lending by community loan funds and CDFIs, and regional actors like AFN began to consider other systemic solutions to the challenge of capital absorption in a low-resource region.