Mining Hope in Appalachia with Jacob Hannah (Coalfield Development)

[Amy Hulst]:
Hi, this is Amy Hulst, and you’re listening to From Poverty to Prosperity, where we ask what keeps people in poverty in America and what it takes to break free.

Today we’re doing a segment called Practitioners on the Mountain, where we talk with nonprofit leaders around the country about their unique approach to helping people in their own communities move from poverty to prosperity.

Jacob Hannah, thank you for joining us today. You are the first guest on the Practitioners on the Mountain segment of From Poverty to Prosperity. Thank you so much for joining us.

[Jacob Hannah]:
Thank you for having me. Yes, ma’am. Here in the hills and the hollers of West Virginia.

[Amy Hulst]:
I love it. Well, let me brag on you a little bit. I’m going to read your bio. You’re somebody that needs no introduction, but I’m going to introduce you anyway.

So Jacob is the CEO of Coalfield Development Corporation, an Appalachian nonprofit building a new community-owned economy in the coal fields of Southern West Virginia. He’s a fifth-generation West Virginian from a coal mining family. Jacob joined Coalfield in 2018 as chief conservation officer before becoming CEO in 2024. Under his leadership, Coalfield has trained thousands of workers, built new solar infrastructure on former coal land, and helped bring hundreds of millions of dollars in investment back to the region. And he is a Rockefeller Foundation Big Bets Fellow.

But let’s first start here. For many listeners and viewers, West Virginia is a line in a John Denver song. So paint the picture of West Virginia. What’s the need?

[Jacob Hannah]:
Yeah, I’m totally not biased as a fifth-generation West Virginian, but I think it’s the most beautiful state in America. It has some of the hardest challenges in America as well, though. We have the lowest labor participation rate in America, the highest opioid overdose rate per capita in America, and some of the highest pollution and utility rates. It’s sort of rock bottom. And it started with the collapse of the coal economy, which my dad and his dad all mined in.

And so we’re really trying to figure out what comes next, you know. It’s surrounded by such a beautiful region with beautiful people, but not a lot of options. Your choices are either leave, stay and flip burgers, or join the military. And so how can we create a better option, a better definition and quality of life? That’s where our organization, Coalfield Development, comes in.

So, you know, West Virginia is the only state completely within the Appalachian mountain range, and so it is very rural and very mountainous in its geography. That adds challenges for transportation and infrastructure, but it also makes it just an intentional place to live. You’re not on autopilot when you’re here. You’re choosing to be in the wilderness, and that’s a beautiful thing to me.

[Amy Hulst]:
Yeah. Well, Jacob, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about Coalfield Development? What’s the mission and vision? What are you up to in Appalachia?

[Jacob Hannah]:
Sure. Well, you know, our tagline is rebuilding the Appalachian economy from the ground up. And how that looks is really like a table that stands on three legs. One leg is people, one leg is place, and one leg is prosperity. How can we prop up communities through those three legs?

For the people piece, that’s the one I’m most passionate about. That’s where it all starts. It’s through our wraparound workforce development model that helps folks who were either laid off from the coal industry, impacted by the opioid epidemic, or just looking for good jobs. They receive paid on-the-job training, barrier removal, and wraparound services that pay for their GED and their associate degree. It’s unionized, it invests in their life as a lifelong learning opportunity, and it’s part of this broader ecosystem of employment-based social enterprises. All of that is wrapped up in the people piece.

The flagship model for that is what we call the thirty-three, six, and three. It’s how we structure our work week. It’s thirty-three hours a week of paid on-the-job training, six hours a week in the classroom getting your associate degree, and then three hours a week going to the DMV, going to drug court, removing those barriers with paid time and funding. So by the end of three years, someone’s removed a lot of barriers, gotten a lot of certifications, gotten their associate degree, learned a trade and been paid for that trade, and is normally a homeowner or has stabilized housing, has custody of their children, et cetera. The things that we all care about. An employer may say, well, that’s your life, just come work a nine to five. We see those things as steps on the ladder to get someone into the employment system. So that’s the people piece.

Then it fits within the prosperity piece. We want to make sure folks have good jobs and employers to work with. When coal declined in the region, we wanted to incubate new businesses. One of the largest to date is a solar company called Solar Holler. It’s a coal miner mining the sun. It leans into our legacy as an energy-producing state, and it’s unionized as well. It’s one of 500 different businesses that we’ve either incubated or supported, including a sustainable construction company that we started, an agriculture company, reclamation, et cetera.

But those businesses need a place to be a business. Otherwise there’s not a lot of incentive to move into a dilapidated rural coal community. So that’s the third leg, the place. We renovate those buildings and those communities to become incubators for businesses downstairs and housing for folks in a workforce program upstairs. That really completes the whole positive feedback loop of renovating place that incubates prosperity that then invests in people, et cetera.

So that’s Coalfield in a nutshell. We track a lot of tangible outputs like people trained, jobs created, businesses incubated, and square footage revitalized. But our biggest metric is that we’re an exporter of hope. That’s the thing we’re most excited about. And it takes me a lot of different places. A lot of other regions are wrestling with these challenges, and that’s how I bumped into you all, because you’re tackling a lot of similar challenges in a lot of similar ways. That’s why I really resonated with your model as well.

[Amy Hulst]:
Yeah. Jacob, using the mountain model as an example, there’s give a fish, teach to fish, equip with a good pole, and own the pond. In a lot of circles as a practitioner, we could place you in that teach to fish and equip with a good pole. You mentioned that with the thirty-three, six, and three. But what makes you distinct at Coalfield is that social enterprise, that own-the-pond portion of what you do. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that? Double-click for us on that solar, mining the sun, and how you all think about social enterprise differently.

[Jacob Hannah]:
Sure. You know, I think for the longest time, economic development has been, let’s hope the next big employer moves to our town. And it just hasn’t happened. It doesn’t happen on its own, especially as a community declines further in opportunities and resources. It’s just this negative feedback loop.

So how do we make sure there are good employers in the region? Well, we know there are good people and good entrepreneurs with great ideas, but they may lack some of the resources or capital to make that happen. So how do we combine the efficiency of the for-profit world with the empathy of the nonprofit world? That’s really where ESEs, employment-based social enterprises, come together.

It’s all owned by the community. It’s from the ground up, through the community. It’s all locally owned, and it can take different forms and shapes. It can be a for-profit, it can be a benefit corp, it can be an LLC, it can be a nonprofit. But the emphasis is an entity that creates widgets or does a service in order to employ. It doesn’t employ in order to create widgets or provide a service. The emphasis is employment, and then that generates revenue, et cetera.

So that’s been really exciting, and it ranges in scale from an individual to a 100-plus-person organization. A great partner that’s helped us along the way with creating these models is the Redefine Alliance. They’ve been great to work with to figure out the different scales and scopes of this.

And then on our end, we’re patient, because we know we’re not going to reverse a hundred years of disinvestment and dilapidation. So when we incubate an entity, we’ll try to offset the energy bill with solar. We’ll try to offset the water bill with rainwater capture. We’ll try to write grants to offset rent, to remove as many barriers as possible for the entity as we would for the individual. That’s helped to rapidly grow a new economic sector that then complements the workforce development component as well.

[Amy Hulst]:
Wow. There’s something I want to ask about. It’s not squarely on the practitioner side of what you do, but I think it’s at the very golden center core of what you do. It’s this idea of going from extraction zone to exporter of hope. That’s something you all talk about. You view your work as moving from the extraction zone of what used to be in the coal fields of West Virginia to now exporting hope. Talk to me about why that core framing matters to the work you all do with social enterprises and with workforce development.

[Jacob Hannah]:
Sure. The concept of an extraction zone isn’t innate to coal. The tourism economy can be just as extractive to a community. The data economy can be just as extractive to a community. So how can we make sure that communities that have been extracted, or are at risk of being extracted, reverse that flow to where they’re outputting hope and opportunity and good jobs and investment?

For us, it has to come back to that golden core you’re talking about. What satisfies those things, the people, the place, and the prosperity? How can we make sure we center that in our strategy? Because it’s one thing for me to talk about things that are hopeful. It’s one thing for me to go out in the world and say, hey, here’s a good idea. It’s another to be able to say, hey, here, I can point to Jane Doe, who’s completely reversed all the barriers in her life. She’s part of an employment-based social enterprise that she is now a decision maker in, in a building in her community that was dilapidated and is now vibrant, and she’s training her neighbors.

That announces itself. I don’t need to sell that. If you get it right, the hope is a spontaneous combustion in and of itself. It’s nothing we have to force or programmatize. And I’m just in the lucky role of CEO to be its loudest cheerleader.

[Amy Hulst]:
Yeah, love that. It’s interesting. I lived a handful of years out in Hawaii. It’s a huge extraction zone with tourism and exploitation in a lot of ways, of land and of culture. It’s about trying to find the threads. Where are beautiful things happening? Where can we empower? Where can we turn the extraction into exporting something different, something new? It’s beautiful, especially in places in the country that aren’t seen that way. You must have that different worldview going into this kind of work, because otherwise you continue to extract.

[Jacob Hannah]:
That’s right. And everything I outline sounds very complex and large, but really it distills down to something very simple, which is human-centered design. If you wrap all these layers of the onion I’m talking about around a person, it usually writes itself toward being additive rather than extractive. You could use a lot of different models and theories, but as long as you keep it human centered and really lean toward employee empowerment, individual empowerment, and community empowerment, it really has a snowball effect.

Again, by ourselves, we cannot create all the jobs and training impacts that we would hope to. So having this incubation function makes a tide that lifts all the ships.

[Amy Hulst]:
If you were speaking to a room, which I know you do often, of folks who are like you, who are in a place and see a need, who see different dots of how this could work, or know a handful of people here, or have heard about somebody there, what would you tell them? What’s the great first step they can take to say, hey, I want to be a practitioner, I want to step into the needs and challenges of my neighborhood?

[Jacob Hannah]:
I love that. Well, if I was in the room with them, I would go back to our theory of change, which is a delta that leads to layers. It’s kind of like the mountain that you all climb. It leads to capacity and self-actualization, but the foundation of that delta starts with conversation with the community. Really intentional conversation, in the form of a charrette process. How do you tackle very place-based challenges and needs and incorporate the community into that?

Usually how it starts for us is, hey, there’s this abandoned warehouse in our community. Our downtown is empty. There’s an abandoned coal mine that is causing issues. We don’t have a third space for our hometown. Whatever it may be, start with the tangible and invite the community around that tangible to say, hey, what do you want to see happen? What do you want to see manifested here? And ten out of ten times, you’re going to get a thousand beautiful ideas that make a lot of economic sense. Then it’s on our end to say, how can I bake that into a grant? How can I bake that into a strategy that then turns into a social enterprise?

So I would say step number one is to have the conversation about the big ugly challenge in your community, because the big ugly challenge is usually what gets the big shiny dollar. And it’s not out of reach for a community member to pull that down. That’s all our organization is. It’s just a collection of ragtag community members who built an organization that does this 24/7 now. So having those conversations and having that collective impact together can get you a long way.

[Amy Hulst]:
You’ve been quoted before as saying funding is fantastic, but capacity makes it sustainable. So talk to us a little bit about sustainability. How do you see that at Coalfield? And have you seen a lot of ideas that aren’t sustainable?

[Jacob Hannah]:
Quoting myself back to me, huh? Well, I would say sustainability has looked different over different seasons. In the previous five years, sustainability would have meant, how can we integrate our model so it can continue to leverage all these federal dollars? Now that’s a different strategy, because there are not as many federal dollars or federal opportunities. So how can we diversify our funding? How can we pull in corporate opportunities and say, hey, come to the table and work with us?

There are a bunch of different strategies. For us, the ideal balance is funding broken into thirds. A third federal, a third philanthropic, a third earned revenue. The earned revenue piece comes from the social enterprise incubation and the rent for our spaces. But we never want to say we’re going to completely remove federal or philanthropic. I think it makes sense to weave all that together, because sometimes you need the philanthropic dollars to be patient, you need the federal dollars to build the infrastructure, and you need the earned revenue to keep the lights on.

That blend has worked well for us. Diversify, diversify, diversify is what we’ve learned in the last eighteen months, and that’s helped a lot. So sustainability looks different each year. I could have a different answer for you tomorrow, but so far, that’s the goal ratio.

[Amy Hulst]:
Yeah. Why that mix of thirds? At CrossPurpose, we’re venturing into doing the same thing. We view all three as important to the work, not just to bring operational sustainability, but to have those types of stakeholders at the table who normally don’t get tapped in the kind of work you and I do. So talk to me a little bit about how you came to the conclusion that thirds is a perfect blend for what you do. Do you think that’s necessary for every practitioner who’s playing on the mountain?

[Jacob Hannah]:
I don’t think it’s necessary. It’s what I recommend. And this comes from someone who at one point was about eighty-five percent reliant on federal funding, and at another point, early in our days, was more reliant on earned revenue. Having those thirds allows for flexibility. If something goes down, you have other options that can go up.

But there’s an external reason as well. If all we did was say, hey, I don’t want to mess with all the red tape of the feds, I’m just going to stick to the dollars I can control, then that isn’t really contributing to systems change. That’s saying, you communities figure out how to navigate all the federal chaos, that’s not for me. And that’s not how we create scale. So for us, it’s a challenge. Ideally, I’d just earn all my money and not have to report to anyone. That would be the sweetest scenario, but that isn’t systems change. Systems change is saying, how can we help everyone figure out how to pull every lever as much as possible, in a way that doesn’t overextend ourselves but provides enough cash flow and balance of funding that we’re changing the system and creating enough funding to satisfy the needs of what we do?

And it leads back into people, place, and prosperity most of the time too. The place piece is usually the federal side. That’s your EDA grants, your loans, et cetera. The people side is usually philanthropy. Philanthropy cares a lot about workforce development and people. And then on the prosperity side, there aren’t a lot of grants where a funder will say, yeah, I’ll invest in a for-profit business. So that’s where our model is trying to say, how can we care for this side that’s absolutely crucial for employing the other side? So it fits that three-legged stool a little bit as well.

[Amy Hulst]:
Jacob, zoom out for us. Put on your CEO hat, which I think you’re wearing anyway right now. What do you see coming for Coalfield in the future? What’s going to be your greatest challenge, and where’s going to be y’all’s greatest triumph?

[Jacob Hannah]:
Sure. I think we’ll continue to see a lot of federal churn. I think we could see another government shutdown, which could lead to more challenges for our communities. So how do we get the powder dry and keep it dry in the meantime, and get communities ready for that work? On the other hand, I think the way we keep the powder dry is to bring in more powder, and I think that comes from the corporate sector.

We’re seeing a lot of corporate entities look at the playbooks that were built by the federal administration a couple of years ago and say, hey, I want to copy and paste some of that here. Especially as we’re seeing increased demand for energy through all these data center developments, and increased labor demand in the skilled trades, all things we know are valuable. I think we’re seeing some of that playbook carry over into the corporate sector, and that’s going to be more and more of where we see this grow.

But I also think there are going to be some universally valued elements. Whatever political spectrum or socioeconomic background you’re on, people care about workforce development, people care about community economic development, people care about business. So how can we do all those things in a way that stays true to who we are but also makes a bigger tent and invites folks into that space to contribute? I think that’ll be the challenge slash opportunity in the next two years.

[Amy Hulst]:
Jacob, what would you want to say to West Virginia? What are your parting words today for your people, your community, your region of West Virginia?

[Jacob Hannah]:
I would say we have simultaneously terrifying and exciting times ahead of us. There is no normal. So it’s going to take us leaning into this together to wield it and pull it down in a way that is additive to us. Otherwise, it’ll just sweep through, and we’ll ask, well, what was that all about?

So I think for rural communities like mine, it’s going to take collective impact to say, hey, this is what we want and this is how we do it. And we’re seeing that. We’re seeing collective impact work together. But it’s going to take sitting down and talking with your neighbor who you may not see eye to eye with. We both agree we want to see jobs. We both agree we want to see opportunities. So how do we bring folks together? There’s been such a dry spell of community, capital C community. How can we make space for that?

So I’d say buckle up and lean into each other. That’s my advice.

[Amy Hulst]:
Well, Jacob, thank you so much for joining us today. We are big fans at CrossPurpose. We are huge fans of Coalfield, we are rooting for you in your corner, and we cannot wait to see what you all cook up next and where we can all go together.

[Jacob Hannah]:
Thank you, Amy. It’s been a lot of fun getting to know you all and your model. It feels a lot like we’re on the transcontinental railroad, both building very similar models and meeting in the middle here. That’s a lot of fun. It feels affirming that what we’re building resonates. We’re endlessly inspired by your model as well. So thanks for the time today.

[Amy Hulst]:
Yeah, thanks, Jacob.

[Jacob Hannah]:
Take care.

[Amy Hulst]:
To learn more and support Coalfield Development Corporation, visit the link in our show notes. If you’d like to learn more about the mountain model, join us at crosspurpose.org/navigation.