Growing up in Huntington, West Virginia, Lindsey Crittendon unchangingly knew she might have to leave home in search of job opportunities. She went to higher to be an engineer, but without graduating, managed to find a job in her hometown—working in child protective services. Though she loved serving her community, the hours were grueling, and taking time off was difficult.
After a decade, she was miserable. Crittenden recalls asking herself, “If this is life, what am I plane working for?” When she heard well-nigh an opportunity to learn computer coding through a program offered by Generation West Virginia, a non-profit helping uplift wangle to employment and educational opportunities wideness the state, she leapt at the chance.
Generation West Virginia is one of a number of organizations now striving to revitalize the state’s economy, which has historically relied heavily on the coal industry. As the industry declines wideness Appalachia, it has left glaring economic voids. President Biden’s Build When Better voucher has recently provided much-needed support for regional transitions yonder from fossil fuel industries. Yet advocates worry despite the new funding, smaller communities may still get left behind.
“There have been [past] periods where lots of federal money has flowed into the region, but the real roots of our problems have not really been solved,” says Brandon Dennison, the founder of the non-profit Coalfield Development, which has been working to rebuild local industries virtually Appalachia.
Born and raised in West Virginia, Dennison sees a strong link between the region’s current hardships, and its past reliance on coal as the sole suburbanite of the economy, a cautionary tale that has shaped Dennison’s vision for creating increasingly resilient paths forward. Coalfield Minutiae started as a volunteer effort in 2010, when Dennison started talking to a couple of friends who worked in construction. He says their initial idea was to rent unemployed locals to build green, affordable housing—they started with a hairdo of just three people in one county.
It took three years for Coalfield Minutiae to get their first grant funding to support their efforts, which have since scaled up to providing a combination of paid on-the-job training, higher education opportunities, and other personal minutiae for Appalachian residents. With teams now working in multiple counties, Dennison says their ultimate goal is to empower workers with the skills they need to establish their own businesses virtually the state.
In wing to starting the first solar visitor in the area—which now employs over 80 people and is now operating as an self-sustaining and profitable business—Coalfield Minutiae supports agricultural projects, local craftspeople, and ecotourism through mountaintop restoration efforts. “We want everything we do to goody people here to be environmentally sustainable, but moreover to be financially sustainable,” says Dennison.
To unzip that goal, he’s working to make sure that significant funding is reaching other local organizations, who are often weightier suited to put in motion projects tailored to their communities’ needs. It’s a variegated strategy than many federal programs, which often requite funds to the state. “They just seem the state government’s going to requite it out in the hills and hollers where it’s needed, and that never really seems to unquestionably happen,” Dennison says.
Bolstering the organization’s bottom-up approach, Coalfield Minutiae recently led a successful bid by a collaboration with Generation West Virginia and other groups that they are calling the ACT Now Coalition. The consortium recently received 63 million dollars of federal grant funding through the Build When Better Regional Challenge. The coalition of West Virginia organizations who will goody from the funding includes a diverse set of polity groups, universities, businesses, and nonprofits.
But plane as expansive federal legislation supports established projects and kickstarts new ones, many smaller organizations foresee major hurdles ahead. Alex Weld, the executive director of Generation West Virginia, says, “as federal funding allows us to scale our work, it moreover ways the operational financing of our work exponentially increase”—an expense that grant funding often doesn’t support.
Weld says simply having the legalistic topics to ensure that grant paperwork is filed accurately—and every dollar is rumored for—is one of the biggest challenges for smaller organizations. That’s why if you squint at who receives grant funding, it’s often states or large universities with existing legalistic capacity, rather than grassroots organizations. “We’re all very, very cognizant of ensuring that all of the implementation procedures are washed-up correctly,” Weld says, expressly as grant money is typically awarded as reimbursement, rather than up-front payments.
Generation West Virginia is leading the workforce minutiae portion of the ACT Now Coalition, which ways they will be helping ensure that four other grantees all meet these reimbursement requirements.
They have wits facing these kinds of challenges. “We’ve unchangingly been small and nimble,” Weld says, which has helped shape their grassroots approach. Whether it’s their intensive computer coding undertow or helping young people translate their lived wits onto a resume, Weld says that their mission is to help West Virginia vamp and retain young people with good jobs, and empower them to grow.
Weld says it’s a misconception to think that just this round of funding will write the region’s problems. Without sustained support for projects and organizations’ legalistic frameworks, Weld asks, “How do we ensure that the work continues?”
Heidi Binko, the executive director and co-founder of Just Transition Fund, a national organization profitable communities impacted by the legacy of coal power and mining, says that helping successful projects like Generation West Virginia scale up is essential. The infrastructure legislation offers unprecedented opportunities, she says, but “we hear over and over then that cumbersome grant writing and matching fund requirements shut out people who could goody profoundly from federal funding.”
Just Transition Fund raises funding and distributes it to partners wideness the country, including through the organization’s recently launched Federal Wangle Center. This Center provides grants and technical assistance to help communities and smaller organizations overcome some of these kinds of logistical hurdles. “We want to tear lanugo these barriers and get resources flowing to the people and places who need them most,” Binko says.
Forced to weather the early impacts of coal’s decline, Appalachian communities have ripened what Binko calls “a robust transition ecosystem,” and are primed to capitalize on federal investments in infrastructure projects like broadband connectivity, or reclaiming and cleaning up x-rated coal mines. This could be a moment of transformative and sustainable growth, Binko says, “for the people who fuelled generations of economic growth from tailspin to coast.”
The uncontrived correlation between opportunity and quality of life is typifying of what these kinds of organizations are hoping to achieve. At a reforestation project of a former mountaintop mine, staffed by former coal miners, Dennison recalls looking wideness at an zippy mine with a crewmember who told him, “I used to be the one self-glorification up the mountains. And now I’m the one putting the mountains when together.”
“That’s the biggest manna of my professional life,” Dennison says, “I get to withstand witness to real positive transformations.”
For Lindsey Crittendon, working nights while she went through the Generation West Virginia’s program was entirely worth it. Like nearly all of the participants in the program, Crittendon quickly found a job with her new coding skills, one that enabled her to live in her hometown and work remotely. As a tech lead for an international company, Crittendon now has weekends off, a increasingly substantial salary, and work that is unceasingly engaging. “I am no longer in survival mode,” she says.
“Generation West Virginia really did transpiration my life.”
The Just Transition Fund is on a mission to create economic opportunity for the frontline communities and workers hardest hit by the transition yonder from coal. JTF is guided by a weighing in the power of communities, supporting locally-led solutions and helping hoist the voices of transition leaders.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Redefining coal country on Feb 14, 2023.
