The context was that Fahe’s 50+ member organizations had been lifting up concerns about the shortage of construction workers in the residential space that they depended on to engage in their community development and housing activities. After the Great Recession when building ground to a halt, many construction companies and workers left the industry or retired, and the number of workers never picked up much in the decade after the depths of the recession. Residential construction was not keeping up with demand, which many of us now know as neighbors struggle to find a home they can afford.

Having heard these concerns before the 2020 pandemic, I’d led my policy team to conduct a research project on opportunities to leverage federal and state dollars to create a residential housing workforce program. We wrote our conclusions as a memo to our program colleagues for their information. I concluded that the current opportunities for funding for apprenticeship, on the job training, and other workforce development did not present a good case for Fahe‘s programmatic involvement in 2019, Yet I also stated that if new, more flexible funding became available, this situation likely could change as it was a pressing issue for our membership of local leaders.

At the Fahe annual meeting in late September 2021 where Fahe’s local leaders gathered from around six states in Appalachia, I heard strongly that workforce issues were only growing. My policy team knew that money had been made available for new workforce programs as a result of pandemic relief funding designed to speed recovery from the pandemic. We had shared this information with the program colleagues, however, the idea of a multi state multimillion dollar Economic Development Administration (EDA) workforce project had not moved forward. Thus, the funding opportunity had been open for several months. After hearing the concern at the annual meeting in 2021, I saw an opportunity for Fahe staff working together to help the member organizations with an issue essential to them.

I was not the executive team member over our programmatic activities, and so my first step was securing permission from our CEO to do a quick exploration which could then be brought to hesitant program colleagues for their consideration. I researched a number of quality workforce development consultants who focused on state level and local level, because I was not an expert but knew my role was to ask the questions and bring a few best practices to the table so Fahe could make our best decision about this EDA project. The National Governors Association who we were acquainted with had hired a Michigan-based consultant to help them on best practices, and I connected with that consultant among others who agreed to advise and provide the expertise that Fahe could use to build a workforce strategy and apply for a multimillion-dollar support.

Fortunately, the consultant was willing to share a few hours of his time and my team got to work on creating a white paper so that we could meet with the consultant, our CEO, and the program team with a plan. My team and I researched best practices and put together our outline in the two days we had before our key meeting. Our strategy featured some back of envelope projections about organizations, involved, employment numbers, pay rates and support needed to make the project work from our employers’ and apprentices’ point of view. The consultant provided this perspective that the key was to focus on making the program work for the employer so that it would stay viable over the long-term, cautioning us that many programs focused on the apprentice, which in and of itself was not enough.

Based upon my team’s work years before in forecasting the opportunity should new funding become available, finding a good consultant who could add the expertise to our local capacity, and the quick work crafting a white paper and sketch of a plan, the CEO agreed that we should move forward with the program team. At the meeting, where the CEO, the consultant, and I laid out the idea, there was definitely excitement, but also caution and an understandable worry that this programmatic initiative had not come from their team. The CEO and I worked to reassure the team that we all were on the same team, wanting to see action for our member organizations in the workforce space given the rare funding opportunity. The CEO made clear the program team would be able to consider and decide upon, and then take ownership of any work done. Over the next few days, we reassured that program leadership was remaining in charge of programmatic activities, and that this small exploratory piece of work was designed to be a help, and that neither the CEO, nor my team wished to infringe upon their responsibilities. When an organization decides to try new and ambitious, there are usually challenges along the way, and this trust building was among those.

Once the program staff became comfortable with the opportunity and their ownership of it, they dove in with enthusiasm. They correctly forecast that they did not have sufficient resources to produce a program plan of this size to the specifications of the federal process. Fahe would need to bring in a consultant to help put together the program documents, so the program team brought one on, who was critical in getting us over the finish line.

Another challenge related to the timeline related to the way this originated after the funding opportunity had been open already for several months.  That meant we needed to build relationships with workforce development boards, community colleges, economic development authorities, local governments, companies, and other stakeholders on a very short timeline. We did a lot of phone calling and request for introductions. I helped lead our efforts in making calls and building up support, including securing letters of support for our application. At the end of our effort, we had over six dozen letters of support and a 200-page thought-out multimillion dollar plan between the states of Tennessee and Virginia for workforce development in the residential construction trades.

The experience of having our leadership come together around a new much larger scale workforce development program made a strong impression on the organization: Fahe created a new innovation accelerator model with staffing to help us identify and seize these opportunities. Even if a bit outside our existing program experience, Fahe decided they made sense to pursue on behalf of and together with our Appalachian member leaders and communities. Fahe stepped into taking an increasingly can-do approach to new and innovative programmatic activities where they will have more time and capacity to serve the Appalachian communities in which they work.