REIMAGINE APPALACHIA hosted its fourth annual Reimagine Appalachia January Strategy Summit on Tuesday to discuss ways to improve economic development, environmental justice and social justice within the region.

Jen Seifert is executive director of the Survivor Advocacy Outreach Program, a nonprofit organization with several locations in Ohio. She discussed how the economy depends on the mental health and well-being of workers. She said many people in Appalachia struggle with trauma.

“Our organization is an impact organization that’s dedicated to the prevention of and healing from sexual violence, domestic violence, human trafficking and stalking,” Seifert said. “We believe that everyone deserves a life free of relational violence. We do this in our communities by educating about sexual trauma/healthy relationships to empower choice and enact change.”

The organization provides rape crisis centers, domestic violence programs and more.

Seifert said the COVID-19 pandemic caused a lot of people to experience trauma and made problems at home worse.

“The pandemic was really difficult for all of us, but I think most of us living and working in Appalachia realized that these systems really weren’t working for the folks in our region, and our organization had this lingering item on our strategic plan to reinvent and re-envision our prevention programming,” she said.

Seifert said she wants to help prevent child abuse, domestic violence and other forms of abuse or violence in the home and did a lot of research on the subject during the early stages of the pandemic.

“Essentially, one thing just kind of smacked me in the face and it’s this idea of how economic supports are so critical,” she said. “When we look at what prevents child abuse, sexual violence, intimate partner violence and adverse childhood experiences, increasing economic support for women and families is a primary prevention activity for all of that, but also knowing how do we best strengthen the economic support for families in our region when a disproportionate amount of individuals in our service counties are severely rent burdened.”

She said the organization started focusing on providing affordable housing for people in need.

“We provide two years of free transitional housing, workforce development, financial empowerment, supported employment, counseling and recovery meetings, child care and youth resilience programming and also case management and advocacy services,” Seifert noted.

“It’s a two-year program where they come in. We move them into our housing. We do a workforce development assessment to identify in-demand living wage careers that they have the interest and aptitudes to be able to pursue, and then work with all of the other workforce development partners that we are privileged to have in our little neck of Appalachia. This idea of eventually graduating them into permanent housing, and so we started our first recovery village in Nelsonville, Ohio, and that is up and operational,” she said.

The organization has locations in Athens County, Hocking County, Morgan County, Perry County and Vinton County in Ohio.

According to its website, the SAOP is funded by grants including the Rape Crisis Fund grant and Victims of Crime Act funding awarded by the Office for Victims of Crime, through the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

The organization was founded as a program of the Ohio University Women’s Center in 2013.

Jen Gilburg, deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development’s Office of Technology and Entrepreneurship, said during the meeting that many manufacturers in Appalachia are looking for more environmentally friendly ways to do business.

Gilburg said automation and technology mean that manufacturers in Appalachia can produce more, meaning that consumers can purchase more locally and American-made products instead of importing products from overseas.

“It used to be that automation was the bogeyman. Automation meant loss of jobs. Today, how I want people to think about automation is that it helps you increase capacity,” she said.

Jacob Hannah, CEO of Coalfield Development Corp. in Huntington, West Virginia, said he wants to focus on the “people, planet and prosperity.” He said his organization is helping coal communities adapt to changing times without losing sight of their heritage.

“I have three generations of coal miners in my family. My father, his father and his father are all miners. The only reason I’m not is because the mine was shut down before I was old enough to be employed. For us, it’s truly about honoring the legacy that our communities have provided,” Hannah said. “Coal powered the nation through two world wars and built the cities that we love.”

Hannah said he enjoys helping communities honor their coal mining history while still moving forward. He said Coalfield Development Corp. is helping communities move toward solar power.

“We believe this is our evolutionary birthright to continue to produce energy. This is another tool in our toolkit to do so, and coal is just sunlight trapped in the soil for a billion years. So we’re just cutting out the middleman of the 1 billion years and can go straight to the sun,” Hannah explained.

Andrew Dahlgren, co-director of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, an organization that provides economic development strategies for small and mid-sized manufacturers, agreed with Hannah’s statement.

“For some, coal is a four-letter word. And for some, it is core to their identity and family heritage,” he said.

For more information visit reimagineappalachia.org. A recording and more details about Tuesday’s meeting can be found on the ReImagine Appalachia Facebook page.