The first step was to achieve a clearer, more compelling understanding of what Fahe could offer—how were we showing up as an organization? Drawing on an analysis of organizational types, I categorized and designed the analysis, choosing the types of organizations that we should assess ourselves against. I led a broad strategy exercise categorizing our place as a nonprofit in the national environment, and how we would differentiate ourselves. In this study of organizational types, we compared and contrasted Fahe to: 1) a membership association; 2) a CDFI or nonprofit loan fund (Fahe often spoke of and still speaks of itself as a CDFI); 3) a national advocacy organization like the NAACP; and 4) a regional foundation serving the Appalachian portions of six states.

Upon looking at the deep yet broad work carried out by Fahe members in housing and community economic development, we most resembled a multi-state regional foundation: 1) focused on a place; 2) working across issues; 3) with the ability to pull people and projects together and implement at scale across sectors; yet 4) with a depth built up of trusted relationships over time. Although we did not have a large pot of money sitting behind us, we were more focused on place than on a particular issue like a national advocacy organization or a professional membership association, and we were not limited to being a loan fund. Fahe could still leverage funding from other sources, like an intentional action-oriented regional foundation that steers other grant or its own endowment.

In fact, Fahe was a unique kind of collaboration in the whole country for the scale and depth it provided for investors, from governments to foundations, to leverage resources in Appalachia, a place in which outsiders had found it notoriously difficult to work effectively. Given the relationships built through decades of these leaders working together, if we thought of ourselves as anything less, we would not capture the true potential of all the Fahe Network was and could be to our communities and to the country. I synthesized the conclusions from the strategy exercise and gained consensus with the Fahe leadership team for this direction, which resonated with the approach the Fahe board chair at the time thought Fahe should take going forward which, which she has called “Fahe’s secret sauce”.

In the second step of this process, out of these conclusions, working with Fahe’s Board, member organizations, and executive and communications teams, I facilitated the revamping of our own strategic orientation and our organizational branding. Over a series of meetings in winter and spring of 2018, shortly after I joined Fahe and led the analysis above, I guided a consensus building effort to listen to longtime stakeholders and team members. The group carefully heard concerns that this way of talking about ourselves was too ambitious and different. Over months of weekly meetings, we talked through these concerns, and while not every longtime staff member involved was 100% enthusiastic, through structured listening sessions and addressing of concerns, we did emerge with an agreement to move forward.

That agreement about the way we saw ourselves, and the branding that resulted from it, allowed us to move into our third step: implementation, and the results speak for themselves: in 2025, seven years later, the language I authored based on this clarity, “we have cultivated the deepest-reaching platform to connect nationwide investment to boots-on-the-ground-leadership throughout one of the most challenging places to serve in the country,” continues to stand as the topline organizational summary on the frontpage of the Fahe website.

Our clarity helped our leadership and development team grow our capacity. Fahe doubled in size as measured by staffing and operating budget over the four years 2018-2022, and this way of conceptualizing our value and resultant messaging has continued to support the dedicated leadership and development efforts at Fahe, who have won tens of millions of dollars for the organization’s operations from groups like MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving, The Heron Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation among others. Fahe Members and staff working together have leveraged these investments into serving the people in Appalachian communities to better realize the American promise of economic development, homes to make a life in, and recovery and health.