How can a community shift their economic future?
In this podcast discussion, we explore how communities heavily reliant on a single industry can come together to diversify and build a more resilient economy. This kind of transformation is complex and requires collaboration across a broad range of partners to support the wellbeing of the whole community.
We discuss what it looks like to diversify single-industry communities with Heidi Binko of the Just Transition Fund and Sherene Hess, an Indiana County Commissioner from Western Pennsylvania. We discuss the challenges these communities face, including job losses and economic uncertainty, and delve into development strategies that can support diversification, including how to leverage local assets, foster collaboration across communities, and access a variety of funding streams.
This is a helpful conversation for anyone seeking to better prepare your community to withstand economic shifts and shocks, and proactively plan for long-term economic sustainability.
Ways to listen: You can listen below or on your preferred podcast streaming service, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Please find a transcript of this talk further down this page.
Resources and Footnotes
More on Collective Impact
- Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
- Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact
Music
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
Listen to Past Episodes: You can listen and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode, we explore how communities heavily reliant on a single industry can come together to diversify and build a more resilient economy. This kind of transformation is complex and requires collaboration across a broad range of partners to support the wellbeing of the whole community.
To explore what it looks like to diversify single-industry communities, we talk with Heidi Binko of the Just Transition Fund and Sherene Hess, an Indiana County Commissioner from Western Pennsylvania. We discuss the challenges these communities face, including job losses and economic uncertainty, and delve into development strategies that can support diversification, including how to leverage local assets, foster collaboration across communities, and access a variety of funding streams.
This is a helpful conversation for anyone seeking to better prepare your community to withstand economic shifts and shocks, and proactively plan for long-term economic sustainability.
Serving as interviewer today is the Collective Impact Forum’s Executive Director Jennifer Splansky Juster. Let’s tune in.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s podcast. I’m Jennifer Juster, executive director of the Collective Impact Forum. Thank you so much for joining us today.
We find ourselves here in the United States and in many other places across the world in a time of transition. A world that is changing in many ways. We see changes in culture, changes in demographics, changes in many different dimensions of the context where folks are pursuing their work. One area where these changes present themselves in a very acute way is in a local economy. For example, a community that relies heavily on a single economic focus can be deeply impacted when that industry is challenged for any of a variety of reasons. It takes focus and intention along many dimensions to prepare for and navigate through these economic changes in a community.
One essential strategy to withstand economic change on a local level is to work toward diversifying a local economy, to build economic resilience, create jobs, fuel innovation and collaboration, contribute to long-term environmental sustainability and overall enhance community wellbeing.
This is the topic we will be exploring today, a topic as essential as ever—how do you diversify the economy of a community? To explore this with us I’m delighted to introduce today’s speakers. First, we are joined by Heidi Binko, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Just Transition Fund. The Just Transition Fund supports local innovators and community advocates building diverse and resilient economies. I’m also delighted that we are joined by Sherene Hess, Indiana County Commissioner from Indiana County, Pennsylvania, a long-time partner with the Just Transition Fund. Welcome, Heidi and Sherene. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Sherene Hess: Glad to be here. Thank you.
Heidi Binko: So happy to be here, Jennifer, thank you.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I’d love to start by asking you to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what brought you to your current work.
Sherene Hess: I’m Sherene Hess, and as you mentioned, I am a county commissioner in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. That’s in Western Pennsylvania, and this is my third term, so I’ve been doing this for a little while. But before I was a commissioner, I worked in the environmental conservation world where I worked on a lot of water quality education kinds of projects. I worked for the Department of Agriculture and helping farmers conserve their soil and I worked at a solid waste authority for a number of years so I have a strong background in that world.
But what I found that most interested me was public policy related to environmental conservation, public health, community wellbeing. So I was very involved with the League of Women Voters for many of those years and am still a member. That’s where I learned about public policy, the importance of citizens knowing their decisionmakers and knowing what’s involved in making good public policy and the importance of civic engagement. So I’ve had a long career of doing those things and I’ve brought all of that with me in my work as a county commissioner now, as a decisionmaker, and we live in—Indiana County is an energy community and of late we’ve been very dedicated to trying to understand what the future looks like for Indiana County in this new economy that we’re seeing now related to energy.
Heidi Binko: Jennifer, thanks again for having me. I’m Heidi Binko, as you said, CEO and co-founder of the Just Transition Fund, and I’ll talk about the JTF in a few minutes. I have been in climate philanthropy for about 23 years now and most of that time I’ve spent working with coal communities all around our country and even internationally. Did a lot of work with coal communities in Australia, actually. And what was really interesting to me is as I was working with a lot of those, in a lot of those communities, I was seeing a lot, I was starting to see a lot of the economic distress that was happening when plants and mines were closing. A lot of folks in those communities would say to me whether I was in the Power River Basin or in southern West Virginia or wherever, folks would say, “Gosh, I don’t know what we’re going to do when the coal plant, the coal mine closes.” Our local economy really runs on coal, right?
So throughout all my work that was something that just was really resonating with me, and you know, meanwhile, I’m doing this work with coal communities and I’m in climate philanthropy and I’m watching climate philanthropists tackle the climate crisis and do a lot of work in local communities to make sure that we’re dealing with polluting power plants, right? So that’s good from a climate perspective and that’s good from a health perspective but philanthropy was really not doing anything on the economic problem, right?
And that’s where something really clicked for me because this issue is also really deeply personal. Sherene, I grew up just a little bit north of you in western New York, in rural western New York and my aunt was an IBEW worker. She worked in a coal plant for 40 years, and that coal plant provided 40 percent of the local government budget revenue in that town, in the town I grew up in, and my mom worked in the school district.
It’s one thing to think about the energy transition and to think about plants and mines closing in a very theoretical perspective. It’s another thing when, you know, these people are your family and your friends and, you know, you know the folks that are affected. So, that was really what brought me to this work, Jennifer, and I’ll speak more about the JTF, but this probably all got started for me about 15 years ago.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, I think it’ll be great now to hear you talk a little bit more about the JTF.
Heidi Binko: Sure. I created the Just Transition Fund in 2015, and you know I’d done a lot of work in probably the three to four years leading up to that, right? Just figuring out like what was happening in these places, what was philanthropy doing, what was the federal government doing, and circa 2015, before President Obama announced the POWER Initiative, the federal government had not done anything to really help energy communities in transition. The POWER Initiative was the first time that federal funding was ever made available.
So me and my partner who helped me start the Fund at the time really wanted to take advantage of that opportunity because, you know, if federal dollars don’t get used by communities, they get repurposed and they went away.
So we specifically launched the JTF in 2015 to address an economic problem, right? And that is really more pointedly to try to strengthen and diversify local economies where coal plants or coal mines were closing. There is a significant amount of economic distress in these places. I won’t belabor it now but you know, there’s the direct job loss, but there’s also the indirect job loss, the erosion of the tax base is really, really significant, right? So when you add up all of those stacks of financial distress you get big swaths of workers and people that live in communities that are affected, right? So we really felt like somebody needs to start thinking about this from an economic perspective. So we did that when we launched the Fund.
The JTF, overall, really does two things. First, we help communities access federal funds because that federal funding has been a really critical shot-in-the-arm investment to start these diversification efforts in communities, and then we do a lot of work in the policy space and that is to make sure that local economic leaders just like Sherene are the people that are actually informing both state and federal policy. We feel like, you know, a lot of the climate policy today is really economic policy, and so we want to make sure that the local entrepreneurs, innovators, the people who really are thinking about how do you create wealth and create jobs in a community, are the ones that are informing this policy. So we’ve been around 10 years, started in 2015 and we’ve been doing this work now through four different administrations which I’ll say a little bit more about later.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, thank you. Both of you have already mentioned energy communities, and of course, those are the types of communities where your work is focused. But can you tell us a little bit more about what energy communities are, as background for the rest of the conversation for folks that might not be as familiar with that space?
Heidi Binko: From the JTF’s perspective and Sherene, I’d love to hear how you all think of yourself and think of the broader field, but for us, an energy community or a coal community specifically is a place where a coal plant or a mine or both are closing. So I think many people are really surprised to hear that when you look across the United States, 372 counties or 10 percent of all counties in America have coal plants or mines or both in them. It’s kind of a staggering amount when you think about it, right?
And so we did a project a number of years ago, probably circa 2018 at this point, called Our Prioritization Project, where we took a look at 15 to 16 different economic and socioeconomic factors in those 372 counties and what we essentially did is we ranked those places, right? So what that does is that helps us guide our investments to the tier one communities which are the places where the economic problem is the worst and essentially the capacity is the least, right? But when you look at the problem in that way what you realize very, very quickly is that the hardest hit coal communities in this country are predominately rural, right? And so the other thing that you realize is that they are rural communities that are spread across 46 different states, right? So that means that you’ve got tribal communities, you’ve got environmental justice communities, right?
A lot of times people think about the typical West Virginia miner as like the energy community personnel, and that is absolutely true, as is the Navajo Nation, right? I mean, parts of the Four Corners were built out so that places like Las Vegas and Phoenix and L.A. could have power, right? So they are affected by this energy transition. Sherene, obviously, from Western Pennsylvania, is another place that’s affected as are places like Becker, Minnesota where a coal plant is closing, right? So that’s the way we think about energy communities, big swath of the country and very varied, right? Much more diverse that I think people think.
Sherene Hess: Yeah, and if I can just add to that, U.S. coal production peaked in 2008, and then just started to drop the years after that. And that drop was really more pronounced in Appalachia. That’s where we are. We’re actually in northern Appalachia, in Western Pennsylvania, where production fell by 62 percent compared with 38 percent decline in the rest of the nation, so when you talk about why diversifying a local economy is so important, that’s why. It was just felt, such a pronounced decline and all the things that you mentioned earlier about the tax base and the jobs leaving and that drain on local economies was so pronounced, you know. Indiana County itself went from being one of the most prosperous counties in the nation to being one of the poorest, and even at that, northern Appalachia was a little better than southern and central, but we felt it and just like a lot of communities felt it and it was severe.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Heidi, do you want to build on that?
Heidi Binko: Yeah, well, you know, I was just thinking, Sherene, it’s really interesting from my perspective because I love the quotes you gave. You know, when I think about how coal communities were affected it’s sort of like a—I sort of picture a map or a wave. It’s like the downturn, you’re right, it hit Appalachia first and it kind of moved out to the west and the Powder River Basin, and in recent years it’s been really hitting the Illinois Basin. And when you start to think about the communities that are dealing with the response, right, this is why you see some of the best innovators coming out of like the southern coal fields of West Virginia or even eastern Kentucky because they’ve been dealing with the problem the longest, right.
And it’s kind of interesting, Sherene, like you and I haven’t really talked about this but when you look at a state like Pennsylvania, northern Appalachia, as you were saying, right, like there’s a group of funders that spend a lot of time investing in central Appalachia, right, so a lot of the different models we’ll talk about today had seen funding going back, but you are also in a region like you just hit that Pennsylvania border and like I don’t think that the groups in Pennsylvania had been invested in near enough as you know folks even in West Virginia had. So I guess what, you know, just to build on what you were saying, what I see from my perspective is a lot of people being affected, a lot of people at different stages of the transition, and a lot of folks having different levels of capacity, right, just based on where they are and how much they’ve been supported over the years.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, thank you for painting that picture for us. I think now folks probably understand more about where we’re talking and some of the nuances as to why this is so Important in certain communities. And we want to dive into the question of the how, so how would you think about diversifying an economy in a community and recognizing there are no silver bullets or magic wands for this kind of work. We’d love to learn from the experiences that you both bring into the conversation.
So what are some of the primary considerations or strategies that you would uplift as you think about the work?
Sherene Hess: Well, this is Sherene, and I guess I would just say there were really valiant efforts to do work or retraining, and you know, some successes in community building and involvement of citizens, but I would—I think that there were some gaps and a lot of people felt like what is happening, why don’t I know anything, why are people leaving, there were a lot of questions, unanswered questions.
And that’s one thing that an organization, sort of an informal organization, called the Center for Community Growth that was trying to answer these questions. What’s going to happen when the power closed? We knew it was going to happen. It was reaching its end of life not to mention natural gas production was a huge impact, having a huge impact on that, just making coal not the most economically feasible thing, so natural gas was coming in, environmental regulations were having some impact, but really the natural gas thing was really happening big time.
So we knew that the power plant was going to close and we were trying to ask the questions and get the community involved. What are we going to do? What kind of jobs do we envision here? We are talking about the clean energy economy. What does that mean for a place, an energy leader like Indiana County? We’re an energy leader. We have been for decades. Why not be an energy leader now in this new economy? So we started talking about what does it mean to invest in education, in technology, infrastructure, broadbands. You know the regions, these communities, Western PA, you could literally watch it year after year the decline, the disinvestment. It wasn’t something that was intentional. It just seemed to happen.
So we started to talk about, OK, let’s be intentional, and then in these last few years you hear the talk about broadband. Broadband is so critical, so vital to these communities to connect. You know, for education, for health care, for you know, commerce, for small business development. Education, we’re very fortunate in Indiana, Pennsylvania, to have Indiana University of Pennsylvania, one of our largest state-owned universities, and they’re doing great things there and have been a benefactor of the past administration’s investments in the new economies that we’re seeing.
So we’re lucky we have financial institutions. We’re fortunate in a place like us, but that doesn’t mean that we have the capacity to avail ourselves of all those economic investments that were coming down from the federal government, until we started to get connected. We knew about Just Transition Fund but when it got started to get connected, we realized, OK, we can take this community-based organization and work with our local government, with our business community, with educators and start to build capacity for not only Indiana, the center of our economy, but also our small towns and our rural areas because they are economic contributors too.
So that’s the kind of discussions that this organization, the Center for Community Growth, started having. They had some films about what does a transition look like for communities like ours, panel discussions, starting to try to connect. We started the Sustainable Economic Development Task Force, working with local government, and for eight years now we’ve been having these conversations. Last few years, seeing some of the fruits of that labor and really going to have to work hard now to see more. We’ve got some challenges in front of us but we’re not giving up. In fact, that’s exactly why this organization is so important now. We’ve got some gaps to fill in seeing where that can play a role, that organization.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: And Sherene, you mentioned seeing some of the fruits of the labor coming to bear. Tell us a little bit about that progress. What have you been seeing at this point?
Sherene Hess: So I talked about this Center for Community Growth, sorry, Center for Community Growth, and we got, with the funds, Just Transition Fund, we built an organization, a project called Indiana County Thrives, and it was all about community engagement. It was all about working with local leaders, finding that spark plug in the community and sitting down and saying, “What do you want your community, what do you want your future to look like?” We did that in the footprint of where the power plant had closed. It actually closed and so now the timing couldn’t have been more, I guess, better, because the power plant closed in 2023, we got this funding at the end of 2023, and dove right in. So, we saw that community connections happening through that grant, that funding.
We were able to achieve a fossil and carbon management grant from the Department of Energy to work in another coal-affected community. We were able to avail ourselves of the energy community volunteers in service to America, that VISTA program. Things are a little bit in flux right now but we showed and demonstrated that we built our capacity. That organization now is a bona fide organization of 501(c)(3). We just hired an executive director which is big, and we have some plans to really work with our, be almost a technical assistance provider ourselves.
So, that’s one thing. You know, the traditional economic development benefited greatly from the previous administration’s funds, the economic investments, through our local development alliance. There was a 62.7-million-dollar federal grant for robotics, for those kinds of futuristic types of things, and that trickled down to IUP, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. They got a million-dollar project to start a steam shop and to do some workforce development opportunities. We’ve had a lot of workforce investments activities going on because of those funds. So there are a number of things happening both at the traditional level and then both from this community-based level, and we’re pretty proud of that.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Congratulations. Yes, with good reason, with good reason. It’s fabulous to hear about what this has looked like in Indiana County. And I’d love to bring you in, Heidi, to share what you’re seeing really across communities, across the country when it comes to some of the considerations and strategies as communities think about diversifying their economies.
Heidi Binko: Yeah, well, you know as I was thinking about this, I was thinking that I think it’s maybe for some of your listeners it would be important to maybe say why we should diversify an economy, like why is that important so I thought maybe I’d speak a little bit to the why and then maybe lift up some of the how that we see in some of our community partners are working in.
You know I mentioned earlier about the amount of tax erosion, the financial, like the stacks of financial distress that hits these communities and I didn’t get into a lot of detail about it but a lot of the communities that we work with, the power plants that are the local government’s largest property taxpayer so when the plant shuts down, the local government budget loses a ton of revenue. What I didn’t say in the opening because it’s too much detail and I wanted to wait is that a lot of the communities that we work with have lost upwards of 70 to 80 percent of their whole budget so I just can’t emphasize enough like this is a really big deal, right?
And I bring up this example because again we’re all in different places in America. Everybody’s got a different sort of perspective and world view, and what I think is important to remember about a lot of these energy economies is that they are mono economies. They have been historically dependent on one primary industry, the coal industry, and some it goes even further like some of the communities I just mentioned. They are not only dependent on the coal industry but they’re overly reliant on one particular employer.
So what does that mean? That means that when that industry or that employer shuts down or goes away or wobbles, it causes these tremendous economic shocks, and so that’s when you see these boom-bust economies that we see all over the country. It hasn’t just been—I mean it’s coal today but you know a number of years ago it was timber, it was base closures, it was paper mill, right? It’s been steel plants closing. There have been a lot of times in our nation’s history where we’ve seen these sort of economic adjustment problems so if you’re seeing an economy that is dependent on one source and you want to make sure that that community can become strong and resilient, you’ve got to diversify the economy. So that’s a little bit as to the why, right?
As to the how, if you’ll just forgive me for a minute but I want to tell you the way that we think about it at the JTF, and of course everything that Sherene said about the details of what’s happening on the ground in power plant closures I love and we’ve done a lot of that work at the JTF over the years too but I think when, you know, just at almost like a little bit of a higher theoretical level, when you start to think about these communities, they’ve lost a big economic output and so you want to replace that and ideally you don’t want to replace that with just one thing. You want to replace that with many things, right? Think about your financial portfolio. You want to diversify. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. It’s the same kind of principles.
There are a lot of different theories and strategies about how you do economic development and they’ve changed over the years, and the strategy that we really hold most to and that I know Sherene and the Center for Community Change and most of all our other grantees and community partners really work on doing place-based economic development that builds on the assets of a place. So the starting point are the assets that a community has, right?
So I’ll just speak to clean energy. Clean energy is important everywhere but in a place like Wyoming it’s going to be all about wind energy. In a place like Kentucky it’s probably going to be about solar energy, right? So you’re really building from what’s there. A lot of places like southwestern, Western PA is a great example. Beautiful, beautiful country. A lot of outdoor recreation opportunities, right? That presents a unique opportunity for the outdoor recreation economy and tourism so you’ve got to—you really want to think about the assets that are there.
And then the other thing that I think about a lot is you want to make these economies grow and so you can sort of think about them as almost like islands. You’re not going to get an island to grow if it’s just like, you know, its trading partners are itself so you want to make sure that you’re connecting that community with larger and often more regional markets, right? So I, a lot of the times think about the concept of an export economy so how do you make a local economy grow and be more wealthy? Well, you export something. You either export knowledge, you export craft goods that are made there, maybe you export local goods that go to a regional food hub or maybe you even export an experience like in the case of sustainable outdoor tourism. I mean you’ve got to think about making that economy bigger and more robust, right?
Then the last thing I would say about the how is that some of the communities doing the most innovative work in these places are using the place-based asset strategies that I’m talking about but they also pair it with strategies that make a community really awesome to live, work, and stay. Those are those downtown revitalization strategies. Those are those strategies to make sure there’s farmers markets and coffee shops and other things because quite frankly a lot of these places are losing population. Young people aren’t staying because there’s really nothing there for them, right?
And so when you pair all of these other strategies that I’m talking about with a strategy to keep and retain people, you start to see more and more young people coming back, and that’s actually some of the really cool work that we’re seeing in places like all throughout Appalachia and even on tribal reservations.
So again thank you for bearing with me but I just sort of—we think a lot about that at the JTF and the how, right? We think about that exercise and then the examples are a lot of the ones that Sherene already mentioned but you know workforce development programs that connect local people with remote work, outdoor recreation strategies that bring people to a region, clean energy strategies as long as you’re thinking about local hiring practices so the money stays local and local people benefit, I think key for all of us at the JTF is that you build from the assets of a place, you build from a community up so you find the local leaders like Sherene who have these really vibrant economic visions, and then you invest in a lot of different sectors because that’s what makes this work robust.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you. That’s so helpful to hear the example from you, Sherene, and then those patterns and the frameworks and the trends, Heidi, that you see across the country and the best practices for how to approach the work so I appreciate having you both dive in there.
You both have mentioned the need to have a broad range of folks across the community, a broad range of partners and stakeholders engaged in the work, and for folks who are listening to this podcast, a lot of them are doing place-based collaboration across their communities so I think that that really resonates for people. Can you say a little bit more about this and ways you’ve seen partners come together to move the work forward? Maybe we’ll start with you this time, Heidi.
Heidi Binko: Absolutely. I’m just thinking about—I mean there are so many great examples to choose from but I’m thinking about a couple different things. We over the course of the last couple of years have really had the privilege to help support a lot of big federal grant winners and coalitions obtain federal funds. So I’m speaking specifically about the ACT Now Coalition in West Virginia which received $63,000,000 in Build Back Better funds, the Wind River Coalition in Wyoming which received $36,000,000 from the Economic Development Administration and Recompete, SOAR in Eastern Kentucky, another $40,000,000 grant from EDA, and you know also we’re working with a lot of smaller communities in the Navajo Nation that are trying to get larger federal grants now.
And what you see in all of those places, you see the local nonprofits coming together with private companies, local governments, utilities, labor, right? Community colleges, technical colleges, as Sherene mentioned earlier. I think that that’s what makes this work both so exciting and so challenging is that to do this work well, Sherene started out by talking about the community all coming together to get a vision for what they want to do in the face of the power plant closing. You’ve got to bring a lot of stakeholders together because when you say community in quotes, that’s a lot of different people and they have a lot of different goals, right? So those are sort of the pieces that I see that are the same no matter where you go.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Sherene, do you want to talk a little bit more about what that looked like for you all?
Sherene Hess:There are a lot of words that get tossed around in this world, in this space of transitioning to the new economy and workforce and even things like site remediation and industrial policy, those kinds of words, rural, urban, and we understand the importance of the organization doing this work but in the end it’s about the relationships between people and not organizations.
So we talk about assembling, like getting together, and people have to have a sense of why that is and they also have a sense of a community and why they’re there. And then going through that, it’s all about the communication, building the trust, and building the commitment so that it stays because it’s real easy for these types of movements to fall apart. We’ve seen it and sometimes the infighting for lack of a better word is really that. It’s amongst people you’re supposed to be working with and going through these challenges with so you’ve got to work hard. You’ve got to have that leadership so that you can continue to grow and maximize the successes and also learn your lessons. We learned a lot of lessons through our year of working with the JTF funds and it really is about persistence too.
There were a few times where we were just ready to—and this was even before the new administration started to talk about defunding and clawing back some of the funds and canceling some things, even before that we had our challenges because this is just a challenging landscape so persistence is so key to that.
You know the government being involved in industrial policy is what we saw in the last few years as a good thing, as a positive. Knowing the role of local government, state and federal government, it was just so vital for us to have that underpinning so that we as an organization working with our local government and our business community and our educators and those other partners and the nonprofit sector and the human services sector, all those things are cogs in a big wheel.
What we found out was it takes a lot of—it takes a lot of leadership and we were able to find that and develop that through our JTF funding, and that was so important that we could wrap ourselves—what does a board development look like in an operating board, and the ability to hire an executive director, it’s almost this very unique opportunity in a place like Western Pennsylvania. We just don’t have that capacity and hadn’t until now so we’re looking forward to persisting even more, finding out where the new opportunities are, whether that’s at state, local or through philanthropy.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you, Sherene. I think some of the things that you just mentioned will really resonate with our listeners, the importance of building relationships and not only organization to organization but especially people to people. I’m so glad that you uplifted that and the importance of persistence. This is hard work and it’s long-term work and that is so essential. You just talked about leadership and having dedicated staff to do this work being so unique. We often talk about the importance of a backbone or the importance of someone who can actually convene groups and facilitate those conversations. All of those threads are just going to really land for folks listening to this podcast because we talk about them all the time. Those are such great examples.
So another key component and you both mentioned this a little bit is the importance of trying to tap into federal funds that are available to support economic transition at the community level, and I trust we could do a whole podcast about this but I do want to make some space for any concrete advice that you might have for folks particularly if they don’t have a lot of experience accessing these funds.
Heidi Binko: You know there are so many obstacles. We talked about the energy communities in particular being real hard hit and rural but rural communities in general face a huge amount of obstacles when you’re trying to go after federal funds. You have to sort through more than 400 different programs spread across at least 10 different agencies, and all of these programs have different eligibility requirements, applications processes, blah, blah, blah, right? At least that had been the case under the last administration so you know obstacles if you’re trying to do this work and you’re rural are the—just federal navigation, figuring out what’s the best program for you, right? Making sure that you have—hiring like a professional grant writer because typically you need to be able to have somebody who knows—who has experience writing these grants. Finding matching funds, right? All of those things. A lot of these programs require a 50 percent cost share so that’s a huge impediment.
So what we did at the Just Transition Fund is we created our Federal Access Center which provides grants and technical assistance to address—to help communities address all of those barriers and they can use our funds really, really flexibly. That’s sort of the first thing that I would say to communities that are out there struggling with this. If you’re in an energy community and you’re looking for help, please come to us, and if we’re not the right people that can help you, we can show you where you can go but there are resources to help you with all of those obstacles that we have so check out our Federal Access Center.
We even in our annual convening every year we’ve got learning labs where we got really deep on not only helping people learn how to access federal funds but then how to manage the grant once they get them. There’s a number of resources out there where you can really get help not only with the application process but with obtaining the capacity that you need to put together a really competitive application.
Sherene Hess: I’ll just add to that. That was our starting off or jumping off point, was the resources through the Just Transition Fund among other things but that was certainly the springboard. I guess I would just say to communities out there, there’s always someone who’s really hungry to do something. You’ve got to find them and that means we all have to get out there, and we’ve got to go to those meetings and find the people who are serious about it and talk to your business community and find sponsors. Just keep on developing those relationships. Go to your local decisionmakers, your local government and demand support. Just tell them you’re doing something here, you want to complement what they’re doing.
There’s some things that government can’t do that the community-based organization world can, and there’s—if you look at all the—I think about all of our resources, we’ve got a conservation district. We have social centers throughout the county. We have lots of places where people can gather, and that’s been hard to do these last few years, those gathering places but I say, you know, if you’re serious about it, get people together and keep talking about it.
There are still some resources available and I think about the Interagency Working Group which was just so dedicated to coal communities. Their resources are still online. They have a great document called Getting Started, a step-by-step guide to help communities and workers start talking about planning or continue that planning exercise that’s been happening, to talk about local economies and all the social changes. Even more locally and through philanthropic efforts, we have the Southwest Municipal Hub now in Western Pennsylvania and that’s something that never really existed that’s very accessible. It’s very accessible for small towns, rural areas. Before you had to maybe think about all these organizations are great, your local development agencies and your regional-type organizations. They are doing a great job but sometimes it was intimidating for a small town, a small municipality, to think about availing themselves of that kind of help so there are things happening. There are things out there. It’s just a matter of connecting with those movers and shakers and keep it going.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: You all have begun to speak to this throughout our conversation but this work is hard, right, and there are likely a lot of challenges not only to getting started but to sustaining the work for these types of transitions over time. I’m curious what advice you might have for folks for overcoming some of the common challenges that you see communities facing.
Sherene Hess: Well, this is Sherene and I mentioned a few things about kind of in a vague way like keep your connections and just keep talking with people and keep on meeting about things. Sometimes I just feel like we in this space are the chief optimism distributors. We need to just keep people up here and not sinking into that despair but we have public goods, parks and trails and libraries and beautification efforts that are happening every day. They really are and there are organizations that are working around that so again I just continue to emphasize that all is not lost. Sustainability is still a positive word. We need to continually think about the future, and the decisions we make today are going to affect the unborn generations. We just need to understand what our role is.
Our communities, as disinvested as they have been, we are in this—we can demonstrate what grit and persistence looks like every day. You also have to, you know, know how to take care of yourself and understand that it’s going to take a group effort. It’s no one sector. You need educators. You need businesses. You need labor. They are a huge partner, labor. You need young people. I really give credit to young people these days for applying pressure to decisionmakers on all levels. I think that wherever you can find the young energy and get it connected up with the seasoned individuals who have been doing it for decades, I think you’re going to find that’s the sweet spot. So I know it’s tough out there right now but I’m remaining optimistic about the future of our coal towns.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Sherene, I think you just gave me a list that I need to put on my wall. I was taking notes like we need our chief optimism distributors, uplifting those bright spots so people can see the progress, focusing on the future and having young people at the table will make that an imperative to focus on the future and taking care of yourself. Those are just so wise. I really appreciate those. How about you, Heidi?
Heidi Binko: Yeah, I think Sherene said it all so beautifully but I don’t know. I think a lot of the JTF right now is—we’re recording this. It’s early February and we’ve been in the midst of a federal pause for all grants just a week or so now, right? So it’s a really tough time for people but I really do also share Sherene’s optimism because the people that we work with all over the country in these communities, there’s a lot of grit and there’s a lot of determinism, determination to just really like charge forward and chart their own path and have a bright future, you know. I think for all the reasons she said, I agree with it.
I think right now there’s an opportunity to think about—to try to think about, you know, we’ve been talking this whole episode about diversifying an economy and I think there’s the opportunity to start to think about diversifying investment, different types of investment support for these projects, right? We are just coming off of really a historic amount of investment from the Biden administration and I think a lot of people have been thinking about like, oh, now it’s gone away, now what? I actually think the way to think about it is that that was the anomaly, right? That was a level of historic investment we will probably never see again in our lifetime maybe, who knows but I don’t think so, right? And now it’s almost like back to business, right?
So at the JTF and with a lot of the community partners that we’re working with. We’re really starting to think about if it’s not federal funding to help support these communities, let’s try to drive more philanthropic investment to these places. Let’s try to drive more private sector. Let’s start to think about like state funding and even impact investing funding, right? So I think this is the time to look for all those other sources, right? And you asked a question about advice for local community groups. We have our blueprint for coal communities on our website where we have got guides to help communities where power plants are getting closing get unstuck, guides to identify the top 10 sources of federal funding so there’s a lot of resources there.
I think the point that I would emphasize and Sherene has made this point too quite along the way but is that if you are a community group struggling with these issues, don’t struggle alone because chances are many, many before you have struggled with the same question, and I think once you get into these networks you’ll be able to find people from communities that have similar characteristics to you and you will be able to see what worked for them, right?
One of the quotes that always sticks with me is a friend of mine who runs a Native CDFI once said the best gift that we can, that I am given is something that already has been proven to work in another community so we don’t have to try 10 different things, right? So at our convening every year that’s one of the things that we’ve been doing is bringing all the best and the brightest to share their ideas, and we’re just seeing these ideas sort of spread like wildfire, right? So don’t struggle alone. There’s resources out there and this is the time to really think about diversifying.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s great. Thank you for that. You mentioned your role or the importance of all different types of investment and Just Transition Fund, you yourselves are a funder. Can you talk a little bit about the role of philanthropy in this work?
Heidi Binko: Yeah, for sure. I think about when this works really well, you see a really nice almost sequencing between philanthropic investment, public investment, and then private investment, right? So I referenced some of the big coalitions of federal winners that we helped support. Many of those coalitions contain nonprofits that we at the JTF helped them get their first federal grants like 10 years ago. Some of those coalitions are also coalitions that have worked for the last eight to 10 years really, really closely with foundations, not just us but foundations all over different states whether it be Wyoming or West Virginia or even Pennsylvania.
So my point here is that philanthropy has a really unique role to play to almost provide seed capital to these community groups to figure out—like this is like a period of experimentation—figure out what works, right? How do you diversify your economy? What are the assets that you have? What are some different maybe workforce development models that your organization might want to try, right?
So again I see philanthropy coming in to provide that seed capital, to provide essential capacity and then we sort of play that role and help those key programs get built up to capacity until they’re able to actually go after those big federal funds, right? And then after you see those folks win those big federal awards, then you start to see the private sector come in to really scale things so it’s almost like a—I sort of think about it as like seed builds scale, right? Private philanthropy, public investment whether it be state or federal, and then private, and each of those sectors or sort of industries if you will, like what the federal government can invest pales what philanthropy can do but what the private sector can do pales what federal government can do, right? So you’re sort of—I’m always thinking about how we can re-leverage our small dollars to the utmost and that’s a really good role for philanthropy, is to play that catalytic role in the very, very beginning.
Sherene Hess: Yeah, I’ll just add to that. The philanthropy that we’ve experienced through JTF and a couple of other local philanthropic organizations really helped the Center for Community Growth to leverage its grassroots strengths, its inclusive mission for marginalized populations, and really to help it coalesce with its partnering organizations and even to start talking about building coalitions so that we could maximize our vision. It helped us collect our thoughts so to speak and it really bridged what government funding can’t do, what volunteerism can’t do, it’s a huge bridge so I hope they’ll continue to see the value in doing that.
In these places where we’ve had this decline over decades in our health and wellbeing and infrastructure and all those things that make communities strong, we’re just digging ourselves out of a hole in a way but I think that, look, this is the region and all of these coal energy communities built this nation with all of our extractive industries through backbreaking labor and through sometimes death on the job so I’m sure that our philanthropic organizations will see that value, and we want to be the best partners we can be as community-based organizations. It’s been transformative to have that kind of a partnership. I hope it continues and I do believe that it will.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: You know you mentioned this, Heidi and Sherene both, that we’re heading into a new presidential administration here in the U.S. and I’m curious beyond what you’ve already shared if there’s any advice that you would share with folks as they prepare to navigate changes as, Heidi, you mentioned you’ve been through four presidential administrations at the Just Transition Fund and lessons learned or reflections for folks who are early days into this new administration.
Heidi Binko: One of the things that we haven’t cracked this nut yet as a country but I hope that we do soon is to try to figure out a way to provide some assistance to communities like this where the assistance isn’t dependent on changing political winds, right? Because it’s really, really, really tough, right? Like the pendulum swings one way and then it swings another so you know at the JTF we’ve really tried to mitigate that and I think we have to the extent that we can with our partners from Obama to Trump and then from Trump to Biden and now going from Biden to Trump again.
So advice for people? I think again right now we’re in early February and there is a lot that is going on that is creating a ton of uncertainty for communities so if you are doing after federal funds and you have federal funds from different agencies, different agencies might be telling you different things. There’s a federal pause and no one is quite sure what programs fall in or out of the federal pause, right? Sherene, you mentioned the IWG which has been fabulous but IWG was created by an executive order that the Trump administration rescinded on day one, right? So there’s a lot of uncertainty going forward.
I think the dust will settle and again I don’t think we’re going to get—we won’t see the levels we did last year but there will still be key programs. I’d love for anyone who’s interested to check out the JTF. We’ll be monitoring these and will help sort of connect people to those federal programs once they become available but I also really do think that this is the time to start thinking about opportunities at the state level, right? Opportunities among philanthropy, right?
One thing I think folks don’t really necessarily think about is that a big portion of bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act funds actually flowed to state intermediaries which means it went to the states or it will go to the states. It goes to tribal governments, right? So if you’re somebody—like we have a big broadband program, Sherene, right? So we think a lot about like how critical, critical like you can’t do economic development if you’re in a place where there’s no broadband, right? How critical those funds are. BEAD is one type of program where states are moving forward with their application processes so again there’s uncertainty but I think as the dust settles, we’ll know more and more and so I would say to folks stayed tuned and keep looking at as many different places as you can.
Sherene Hess: Yes, I would echo all of that and in fact that’s part of my daily tasks is talking with our state agencies. We have Department of Community and Economic Development, Community Natural Resource, Conservation Natural Resources, and Department of Environmental Protection, all of those state agencies still have funds. Now you’re right. A lot of them were tied to the federal investments but agriculture, environment protection, conservation, natural resources, outdoor recreation, community, main streets, downtown revitalization, that’s still going to happen and these are just opportunities for people to understand why you’re doing this, remember your why, and make sure you get involved and even at the local level. As I mentioned, demand of your local leaders, look, we want to do something. Even a small beautification project can be a huge partnership that then develops a sense of a win. Just keep having the wins no matter how small they are. I don’t want to paint it like it’s all rosy because it’s not but there are certainly opportunities.
I also want to just mention this notion of being involved in the public policy process. It has real—even at the very local level. I remember a time when a small, small township had the specter of an injection well coming in. They weren’t opposed to the industry but they just did not want this injection well near their drinking water but they had no idea how to participate in an environmental hearing. They got involved with their local League of Women Voters chapter who had just been doing a huge study on extractive industries and natural gas and Marcellus shale kinds of developments and they had a whole bunch of knowledge about this, and they partnered with the League to present some facts about what this was going to look like.
All that to say then that they were able to keep this injection well out of their small community for 10 years now. So there are real world implications of being involved at that local level with decisionmakers. I just really encourage people to get to know your mayors and your borough council people and your township supervisors and your county commissioners. They’re out there to help but they’ve got to hear from you too.
Heidi Binko: Sherene, you know that’s actually another great, great way. You know, Jennifer, you asked about how philanthropy can get involved, right? I think a lot of times when philanthropy thinks about changing state and federal policy, a lot of times particularly at the federal level it’s thinking about funding groups that are inside the Beltway, right? What we did at the JTF back in 2018 is we felt like—exactly on this energy problem, we worked with over 300 people from all across the country for two years. We pulled them together to inform the creation of what we called a National Energy Platform. It was building on what President Obama did but it was energy community leaders coming together and saying to diversify our economies and to strengthen, we need this, this and this. A lot of those things actually showed up in the IWG. We had asked for some type of coordination, right? Those leaders asked for things that showed up in chips and science and bipartisan infrastructure, right?
So my point to really, really underscore what Sherene is saying is the exact type people who should be informing state and federal policy are people like you, Sherene, right? That’s where philanthropy can really, really play a role because often smaller groups particularly at the community or local level don’t have the capacity to engage in those processes and I think as a country we’d all be better off if they could, right?
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Well, thank you, Sherene, for that call to action for folks to get engaged locally and, Heidi, for that call to action to support folks making that local to state to national connection because the way that we see the change we want has to happen at all three of those levels and it starts with us. So thank you so much. I have absolutely thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I know everyone listening will have as well.
If people want to continue to follow your work, could you please let us each know where is the best way to follow you. We’ll start with you, Sherene, and then go to you, Heidi.
Sherene Hess: The Center for Community Growth of Indiana, Pennsylvania has a website at www.thecenter-indianapa.org and that’s one way we can be in touch with you. We hope to be a model for other communities and would love to talk to anybody who’s interested in how we did this and listening to our lessons learned but also understanding the challenges and the opportunities.
Heidi Binko: If you’re a community group interested in the topics you talked about and looking for help, check us out at www.justtransitionfund.org. On the site we have a way for you to sign up to our newsletter which I would encourage people to do that because we are always posting about opportunities available for funding definitely in the federal space but we’ll be doing more in other sectors this year. You’ll also learn about our convening on the website and we’d love anyone who’s interested to come. Once you go to that website, you’ll be able to find our handles on X and Facebook and LinkedIn as well.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Well, Heidi and Sherene, thank you both. It has been a pleasure and I wish everyone a wonderful day.
(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
In Forum news, we’re excited to share that registration is open for the 2025 Collective Impact Action Summit, that will be held online this April 29-May 1, 2025. It’s our biggest learning event of the year, featuring over 30 virtual sessions, and sharing out best practices from collaboratives from across the U.S. and globally. Please visit our events section at collectiveimpactforum.org if you would like to join the 2025 Collective Impact Action Summit. We hope you can join us.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.
