Change in the Coalfields: A Podcast by Coalfield Development
Change in the Coalfields: A Podcast by Coalfield Development
Andrew Crosson
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Original intro/outro music:
"'Till I See Stars" by The Parachute Brigade
The sun does not always shine in West Virginia but the people always do. And I'm delighted to be here.
Brandon Dennison:These are historic times in Appalachia. A lot has changed. A lot is changing now and a lot still needs to change. In our podcasts we talk with change makers right square in the middle of all this working to ensure the chang is for the good. You're listening to Change in the Coalfields podcast by Coalfield Development. I'm your host Brandon Dennison. This is Change in the Coalfields, a podcast by Coalfield Development. I'm your host, Brandon Dennison, here with a colleague and a friend Andrew Crosson. Who is the CEO or Executive Director of Invest Appalachia, which is a very exciting initiative to bring something called impact investing into the region, very innovative cutting edge work. We're going to hear all about it. Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Andrew Crosson:Yeah, it's great to be here, Brandon. I love that. In the midst of everything else that you've got going on, you're also doing a podcast. So more power to you!
Brandon Dennison:Well, I do this one, this is sort of my treat to myself, because it's so much fun. So it's much more...yeah, there's grant reports that I put off until next week.
Andrew Crosson:Well, happy to be here. And, and looking forward to it.
Brandon Dennison:So, Andrew, when I met you, you were in North Carolina, and I think you grew up in North Carolina. Is that right?
Andrew Crosson:Yeah. So I grew up in western North Carolina, I grew up on a family farm, you know, grew up in an area that was almost entirely agricultural. It has changed somewhat, it's, I live in Asheville, North Carolina, now, which is, you know, compared with the rest of Appalachia is pretty, pretty developed economically, pretty hip cosmopolitan place. But I'm still a country boy at heart. And I sort of wear my mountain routes on my sleeve, whenever I get the chance. So grateful to be living and working close to where I'm from. I'm one of those boomerang kids that we talked about in Appalachia, right, I left for a while, didn't necessarily see my future here. And was so relieved and in retrospect, so glad to have been proven wrong, and to found the place for myself here and be able to make a career and give back to the region that I call home.
Brandon Dennison:So what kind of agriculture did you grew up around?
Andrew Crosson:It was just a subsistence farming, small family farm, you know, we never had much money, we didn't really need much money. So, you know, we had store bought stuff and homemade stuff. And it was mostly homemade stuff and a little bit of store bought stuff. So it was sort of how we got by. And, you know, I was a public school kid, as well, rode the bus, went to college based almost entirely on scholarships and financial aid. So got free lunch all the way through school. So I'm also the first white collar professional in my, in my immediate family. So sometimes I forget that and you know, like to remind myself, you know, that I have some things in common with a lot of my colleagues, but I'm also different from most of the colleagues I work with on a daily basis. And, you know, this broader world of, you know, nonprofits and impact investing and things like that. So yeah, it's a good thing to be reminded of.
Brandon Dennison:Some people I know that grew up on farms, they sort of looked back and they're like, I learned a lot from it, but I would never go back to it. I think from you I'm hearing different, like you sound like you didn't mind getting your hands dirty?
Andrew Crosson:Yeah, well, it's, it's one of those things where like, hindsight is 2020. Right. Like, I, I knew some of the great things about growing up in the country and growing up on a farm while it was happening, right, like, the world was my playground, right? Like, you know, got to love nature and at a young age, you know, have never been afraid of work, which I think is that's, that's value unto itself. But it wasn't until later that I think I looked around at a lot of my peers during and after college, and realized that they didn't have a sense of where they were from at all. You know, they had no sense of place. They might be interesting, you know, passionate, committed people, but they had no sense of where they were from or what they consider their place, no rootedness. And I realized that I was lucky and special that I felt a very strong connection to where I was from, that I'd had that sort of taught to me and you know, I've always had a strong sense of community. And, you know, people around me who cared about me and who were also rooted in place growing up and I think that's something that I'm most, people don't have in this day and age in America in general. And I think it's also something that, you know, people are rediscovering the value of and especially in Appalachian context, people really just taking pride in where they're from and claiming it and owning it and wanting to be affiliated with it and, and be proud of it. So I didn't realize a lot of that till after the fact.
Brandon Dennison:Can you describe describe your place when think of your place? And the farm that you grew up on? Can you describe that for the listener? And maybe that's never been to the mountains of North Carolina?
Andrew Crosson:Yeah. So, you know, I think of myself as kind of a pan-Appalachian, right like I have love for every part of Appalachia. But you know, and I had a mutual friend and colleague, Stephanie Tyree, told me that I was an honorary West Virginia once. So that was pretty exciting.
Brandon Dennison:Congratulations.
Andrew Crosson:Thank you. Thank you. I got a lot of love for Eastern Kentucky as well. You know, I've spent time in Appalachian Ohio, Appalachian Virginia, East Tennessee. So definitely feel a lot of resonance with a lot of different parts of Appalachia. But you know, I'm a Carolina boy all the way through. So Western North Carolina is like, it's a special place, you know, our landscape is a little bit. It's not quite the region, Valley of, say, the Shenandoah Valley. But it's bigger mountains and bigger valleys. And so I grew up on the side of the mountain, one of the last big mountains going down east before the flatlands you know, where I lived was about 3000 feet above sea level. So pretty high up there. When I grew up, we used to get just a ton of winter weather now that's, that's changing, weather is so much less predictable these days. But you know, we got four strong seasons, you know, lots of wildlife, lots of nature, hardwood forests everywhere. I like to say that I grew up sort of knowing the name of every mountain and valley and creek. And so when I think of like, being from a place, it's those things that that people have experienced. And they sort of feel in their, in their body or in their bones. When I think about a place it not necessarily knowing everything about that place or being able to, you know, knowing every person even though I didn't know everybody growing up. But yeah, it was a small agricultural community. Lots of people who were lots people who had been there for generations. And then a good number of people, like my parents who had moved there because they wanted to be in community and they wanted to be in community with other people who, you know, appreciated the land and wanted to take care of the land and wanted to live close to the land and in community with each other. So, so yeah, it was a wonderful place and time to grow up.
Brandon Dennison:What do you do for fun other than grow food? On a farm? What do you do for fun growing up?
Andrew Crosson:Yeah, you know, we just ran around the woods most of the time. I actually had been thinking, I mean, that's the thing is, you know, you don't you don't really have to overcomplicate it if you I had two younger brothers. So we were, we were far from our nearest neighbor. I mean, we had to walk, you know, a mile or two to get to the nearest house that had a friend our age. But I had two brothers. So we just got into all kinds of trouble just ourselves, we would just make up games and outside and climb trees. And my parents had a rule, which was you never use the B word, which is bored. If you ever tell your parents that you're bored, you're gonna get put to work. And they always had a job ready for us. It was basically on us to, to stay busy and entertain ourselves. I was also one of those kids who, who just I didn't always love school, but I loved learning. And so I would just do my homework on my own right. Like, I just always got it done. My parents never had to do any sort of rewards or punishments to make me do my schoolwork. And it wasn't till later that I realized, well, dang, that means I don't ever get any rewards. Well at
Brandon Dennison:They weren't bribing you with like an
Andrew Crosson:They were not. No and I set the bar. My(allowance). brother's like to complain, because I'm the oldest that I set the bar pretty high for them. But yeah, you know, I look around a lot of times and you know, I live within the city limits now. And I have a five year old daughter and she loves you know, one of the most important things for me is that she loves nature as well, right, that she's comfortable being outside that she likes getting her hands dirty, and she's not just glued to a screen all the time. And, you know, we had a tiny little, you know, 10 inch by 10 inch TV that picked up one channel, you know, until I went to college that was so I didn't have TV growing up. So I you know, I'm really like, like I said earlier, it's one of those things I didn't tell you at the time, right. I was frustrated. I wanted what other kids had, but looking back, I'm just so grateful. And I wish that for other people to have that, you know, especially now that it's so easy to just be going from distraction, distraction, entertainment, entertainment, you know, the opportunity to be bored, but to have nature to entertain yourself is and friends. And, you know, just getting back to basics. I mean, I think that's some of the richest stuff there is.
Brandon Dennison:So where did you go to college?
Andrew Crosson:I went to public university here in North Carolina, Chapel Hill, went to school there. Loved it loved learning. For some reason, I always just assumed I was going to do international work down. So I studied international development, international relations, things like that. Studied, you know, Latin American policy and social movements and things like that. I lived abroad for a couple years after college in Spain and teaching English to make some money and doing a master's program. And I was studying rural sociology and rural commune development. But I was studying it in an international context, right. So it was, you know, studying the role of agriculture, for example, or a small business or land use policy and things like that in rural communities. And, at some point, it like, clicked. For me, it was actually I was reading a Wendell Berry book at the time, which I traced a lot of my career back to the fact that I just happen to be reading this book, which is called the Unsettling of America. At the same time, as I was studying all of this internationally focused, real development stuff, and, and I thought, why, why have I never considered doing this stuff at home? And it was partly because I just didn't know that this field exists, right, this field of community development, or community economic development. So it was sort of this "aha", where I said, you know, I would be fine as an international development person, right, like I would, I would be dedicated, I would do good work. But that's not my space, like, I don't know, those places. And maybe I should try to do some of that work and apply some of those approaches in a place that I actually have some connection to, and have some insights on and came back home and, you know, stumbled into really this career, right, which I didn't know existed at the time. I thought I was gonna be working for, you know, some international development NGO or something like that, and stumbled into this field of community development and Appalachian community development at that.
Brandon Dennison:I do want to briefly, I want to dive into that a little bit more briefly, just back to being in Chapel Hill. Was that a tough adjustment going from farm, one TV channel to like, huge college campus, I assume in a dorm room with like, lots of TV channels? And what was that adjustment?
Andrew Crosson:It was, it was an adjustment for sure. You know, my dad likes to say that the best compliment that he's ever gotten on his sons is that we're adaptable. That's the case, right? You know, all the other stuff, all the other standard compliments people give as well. But that was kind of an unusual one. And I think that, you know, part that's, it goes back to how we were raised, like, I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. Right? Like being raised in the country, being raised on a farm, having to be creative, right, having to figure things out yourself. You know, not sort of having a predetermined, you know, path or, or, you know, way of living your life for you. And that cultivates her foster sort of a sense of autonomy and adaptability that I think served me well in college. So it was definitely, you know, I was definitely like, stood out a little bit as this mountain kid and there with, you know, people who were predominantly from the suburbs. But, but it was great, I ended up having a great time there, I found my people, you know, I found people who were, you know, I started, you know, a community garden cooperative, while we were there, started an advocacy organization around, you know, getting more local food into the dining halls, things like that. And, you know, found people who would rather be, you know, doing potlucks and having old time jams on their front porch than you know, going out to the nightclubs on the main street. So yeah, found my people. There's, there's there's good people everywhere I've found.
Brandon Dennison:Yeah that's a comforting thought there. And I think it's true too. So you're in Spain, you're you think you're doing international work. And you're reading Wendell Berry. So what got you back into what what eventually boomeranged you back into Appalachia?
Andrew Crosson:Yeah, I mean, I finished that...I finished that program. So I got my degree in sociology over there, and I said, You know what, I'm gonna move back home and see what the landscape looks like, you know, this was, you know, I graduated college in 2009. So it was one of the worst times to be looking for a job. I moved back home, just wanted to see what the landscape was like. It was rough, it was rough. So I was, you know, I was applying for jobs as like an office assistant and things like that, you know, to try to get my foot in the door at at some sort of a, you know, nonprofit or community development organization type place and was, you know, was ridiculously overqualified, and was not even getting an interview. That's how tough it was. So I wasn't getting the call back for office manager and admin positions, even with you know, relevant, relevant master's degree. And so that was pretty disheartening. And, you know, I've heard of people going through that where you just get stuck, right, you go through a long time trying to trying to find a job. Now it's, it's, you end up making sacrifices and doing something you don't want to do. And I didn't want to do that. And so I said, You know what I'm gonna keep (going), I'm not gonna give up but I'm also not gonna settle and so what I did in the meantime, was going to totally different direction. My mom ran a little health food, local food grocery store in a small town where I grew up, so I was clerking part time there, working at this store. And then my dad has an old gas powered wood Mizer sawmill, and so we had a bunch of land and you know, so we would cut down trees and my brother would help me or I would pay a friend to help me cut down trees but the trees you know, roll them into position and and you know, cut him into boards. And guy had a little saw milling business on the side. So I was selling up lumber and selling that was never quite efficient enough at it to really make money I didn't really have a marketing strategy or anything like that, you know, a two man team is not built to compete with the big commercial sawmills but you know, made some money doing that killed some time doing that just hired myself out to you know, family friends and other farms in the area and you know, did a lot of fence building that year. People always need fences built man. I got really good at building fences, all types, you know, high tensile, barbed wire electric filter mended, so always always. So, you know, I did that sort of hodgepodge of stuff for like nine months before applying for jobs full time. And, and finally, finally got a job as what was called, at the time, a rural fellow, which was sort of an apprentice level position at this organization that I went on to spend almost 10 years at called Rural Support Partners. And there were an organization that was doing the work that I hadn't even imagined existed, right, they were working with community development organizations focused on Appalachia, helping them be more effective at serving their communities. And I got to apply so many of the skills and ideas that I'd studied in college and grad school, to the Appalachian context to that job. So really glad I didn't settle for anything else before that, you know, and like I said, I kind of feel like I stumbled into the perfect career for me, but, but it wasn't, it wasn't straightforward.
Brandon Dennison:How many boring conference sessions in a conference center with no windows have you sat in and thought - man, I should have stuck with cutting boards and building fences?
Andrew Crosson:Ah, I have that thought, at least a week. And sometimes when I open up my, my email inbox, or look at my calendar, but I, you know, I'm blessed to, to be in touch with a lot of people who are still making their living off the land, right. And, you know, I have friends who run apple orchards or other friends who run, you know, livestock operations and friends who do forestry and, you know, non timber forest products and medicinals. And, and so I get to live vicariously through them a little bit. And I always say that, if there was some way to do what I do right now, half the time and spend the other half of the time being a farmer, I would jump at that chance. Right. And, you know, some way that I could have my cake and eat it too. But yeah, you know, I make sure to do enough work to keep calluses on my hands. I'll put it that way.
Brandon Dennison:Good rule of life and your life. Well, back to RSP. You know, we've had Thomas, Thomas's episode just aired. Just a wonderful human being. So tell us a little bit about how Thomas and RSP overall influenced you. And then I want to talk about Ken in particular.
Andrew Crosson:Yeah. Yeah. So Thomas is the founder and director of Rural Support Partners, this organization that I kind of landed in and Thomas is fascinating, because you know, as anybody who heard that podcast can tell pretty immediately, he's a very unique combination of qualities, right? Like, he's about as country as it gets. He's from Galax, Virginia, as he'll tell you, and, you know, it, you know, could barely read when he graduated high school, and then went on to, you know, get a, you know, a master's degree in social work from University of North Carolina and start multiple nonprofits and a business and they become really one of the most, you know, I think dedicated and innovative thinkers about not just, you know, community development, nonprofit stuff, but just how to relate to people and how to do things together as groups. So, you know, he's, he's a fascinating guy, he was, uh, you know, immediately understood, we understood each other in that sense of combining lived experience and theory, right? Like, there's a lot of people who are really smart in theory, right, they there, they've got the right words for everything, and they could write a good paper, but they're not good at translating into the real world. And then there's a lot of people with real world experience, who don't have the language or the concepts or whatever, talk about it in a way that that gets recognized as wisdom. And one of the things that really grounded, the work that Rural Support Partners was, the number one rule was that people understand their situations, and they understand the solutions, right? Like, the people experiencing things that people living in a place are the ones with the answers. They just need support to get those answers out, right, they need a process to get those answers out, they need a process that surfaces their wisdom, right and make sense of it. And so I got to learn a lot of that sort of stuff, like group group process, you know, there's this whole field called popular education, and it's about how do you organize adults, you know, members of a community, who, especially when they have been oppressed, or marginalized in some kind of way, right. And, and so using those, those processes, doing everything in a really participatory collaborative way, you know, and then learning to manage groups, the good, bad, and the ugly, right? Like you get a bunch of people in the room, you know, things get complicated, it's much easier to do things on your own and spend about 10 years never doing anything on my own, right, everything was in a group. So I carry a lot of that DNA sort of with me, even though that's not my role anymore. And I think a lot of people who are in positions, especially positions of some power or control where they can do things on their own, under appreciate the value, group process, and I'm taking things slow, and, uh, being collaborative, and of, you know, encouraging participant participation along the way, right. It's not just the product, or the outcome, it's how you get there that really matters. So that was, you know, that was sort of the a lot of the philosophical stuff that I always loved about RSP. And then I still carry with me,
Brandon Dennison:it's good stuff. It's really good stuff. In one of the big things RSP has done for many years, is facilitate the central Appalachian network, CAN. And that's how we met us through CAN and just amazing work that, that you and Thomas and others through the years have have done. Can you say a little bit about what, what CAN was all about? And what CAN has meant for the region and for leaders such as you and I and others?
Andrew Crosson:Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, CAN was my first project, and like, became sort of the formative project of, you know, of my time and RSP and of my career today. So, you know, So tell us about your, your new gig, you went from CAN to I it was wonderful as a young, I wouldn't even have called myself a young leader starting out, but just as a young person who was very excited about the work. The amazing thing about CAN was that it was a group of people who were leading organizations that were just doing some of the most interesting and impressive and in many cases, difficult work in the region, or in the country, for that matter. I mean, I've been all over the place, I've talked to all over the quote unquote smartest people in the country, and to this day, like, never am I as impressed and sometimes intimidated as when I sit in the room with the, you know, members of these CAN organizations because they just, they just know their stuff, man inside and out. And so, the great thing was that, you know, as a younger person, you know, get started my career, I had a job to do, I had a role to play, and mostly I existed to sort of help them make sense of their collective knowledge. Right and and synthesize it and, and create something that was collective, a collective vision and collective analysis. So I learned very early on that like, it's not actually about me, like, I don't actually have to know all this stuff, right? Like, the idea that to be a leader, you have to know everything, or you have to have all the answers, or you have to be the expert on everything, I think is wrong. And I think it's misguided. And it leads to a lot of bad leadership. And the fact that I spent, you know, the first 10 years of my career, being the person in the room who generally knew the least about the thing that we were talking about, right. But I had value to add there, because those people who knew so much still needed help making sense of their ideas as a group, right? I mean, that's the thing is like leadership that, you know, is not the same as knowledge or expertise, especially when you're talking about a group. So you know, it was it was an honor to get to work with, with all those organizations, I learned so much from the individuals in them. You know, I built so many of my own skills and my own believe, to your current role with Impact Appalachia, right? leadership, right, going from being just a, you know, a Yeah. So. So you know, another project that I was working on coordinator who kind of scheduled meetings and took notes to being someone who, you know, those leaders, by the, by the end of my role there, you know, would would ask me what I thought, right? Would asked me to bring the recommendations and earning that trust over time was something I was really proud of. towards the end of my time at RSP, was a project called Impact Appalachia, the organization morphed and became Invest Appalachia. At the time, it was just an idea. It was just a conversation. It was a group of people asking this question about, you know, why in a region like Appalachia, where, you know, you would think it would be top of the list for, quote, unquote, impact investors - why are we not seeing it? Why is the impact investment?
Brandon Dennison:Sorry to interrupt. Tell folks just in case they don't know, like, what the heck is impact investing.
Andrew Crosson:Yeah. So I didn't know. Right? So that's the beauty of it again, like same beginner's mind approach that I was talking about what CAN like, I didn't know anything about that. Yeah.
Brandon Dennison:I love that. Honestly, there, it's like, we need more impact investing in Appalachia. I agree. What is that?
Andrew Crosson:What is that? Yeah, you know, I didn't understand the difference between, you know, any of the different types of investment, you know, I knew what a mortgage was based on, you know, personal experience of having to go and try to get one. I knew about credit card debt, but like, nobody teaches the average person about finance. Actually, that's a sidebar, but like, why the heck are we not learning about personal finance in high school? So I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know. So I didn't even have the basic, you know, information. But, again, what that allowed me to do was just ask questions and listen for, you know, several years. And so I was, you know, coordinating a process where, you know, bunch of smart people, some foundations and philanthropies, some, you know, lenders, right, so, so basically, like banks, but for community development, they're called community development financial institutions, or local loan funds, or, you know, groups that sort of had money that was supposed to be used for community development benefit, but they still sort of operate in some ways, like banks. So those those types of folks, and then, you know, the, the projects and the organizations that need investment. And so, when we talk about investment, one of the things that, you know, I've gotten better and better at, and this is because I had to learn it myself is we got to define terms right out of the gate, right? So when we say investment, now, when I'm having a conversation on investment, I clarify what that means, right? So people will say a grant is an investment, we're investing in our capacity, we're investing in our future with people use a lot of poetic definitions of investment. And what I always want to clarify at the start of the conversation is, are we talking about a poetic definition of investment? Or are we talking about a financial definition of investment, a financial definition of investment means it's not spending, right, it's not an expense, it's money that is intended to be paid back or at least has some possibility of being paid back? Right. So this field of impact investing is this funny thing because it is so broad that it's effectively a meaningless term? Right? So it's like one of those things like, you know, a lot on a sustainability or community where or capacity where it's like, it means so many different things. If you don't explain what you mean, it's pretty, pretty worthless, useless words. So there's the there's a whole wing the vast majority of what is considered impact investing, not by me, but in general, is the weakest possible version of it, which is basically stock market level investments that have some what are called ESG screens, which means environmental, social and governance. Basically, it means you're saying that you don't want to invest in the very worst companies, right? You want to invest in companies that are doing a little bit less bad than the other companies. And people call that impact investing, right? It's like, oh, you have like, a board of directors that has women or people of color on it, that's great. Or, you know, you give, you know, some donations to charity, or you have some sort of a sustainability plan. But, you know, these are organizations, these are companies and investments that are driven by profit period, they're not even triple bottom line. I mean, it's, they say, ESG, screens or filters. And that's really what it is, it's not a, it's not an impact forward investment. It's not a, you know, a triple bottom line anything far from a social enterprise, which I know is something you've probably talked a lot about on this podcast. So that's one extreme, and then you basically move from that extreme, which is market rate, meaning it's the same, people expect the same returns in what they would get from the stock market, and you start moving from there in the direction of higher impact. And when you move towards higher impact, generally, what that means is also taking some higher risk, right risk that you're not going to make all your money back, or that you're not going to make a profit and the lower return. So, so the space that, you know, I'm mostly talking about when I talk about impact investing is investors, they might be funders, foundations, they might be banks, they might be corporations, but who have money that they want to put towards social good, but they want their money back. Right. And so they back, it's still getting paid back. And so you know, foundations can do grants. And they can also do investments, right. So foundations can make investments or even make recoverable grants that they expect to get paid back. So they have the most flexibility, a lot of these other actors are doing it just because they want the, you know, the good PR, or they, they legitimately want to have some positive impacts, or they just don't need more money, right? Like, there's like more and more of these high net worth individuals who, you know, make such an obscene amount of money that they recognize, you know, I don't really need to be making money on my investments, I don't want to lose money, but I don't need to be making money. So there's this whole movement out there of impact investing, people who want to be moving their money into, you know, more impact forword investments, and at least doing some social good. And then same time, there's this divest, invest movement, divest invest movement is basically involving foundations, university endowments, pension funds, right, when you know, unions or other groups pay into a pension, that pension fund is invested somewhere in the meantime, right? So there's this whole movement to get all those sorts of, you know, endowments and pension funds, and things like that, that have a group of stakeholders, right? The stakeholders might be the students for the university, or, you know, the the pensioners or the workers or the unions or the pension fund. It was a movement of them pressuring those funds to divest meaning to pull their money out of some of the investments in the companies that were the worst, right, the worst for the world, specifically for the environment. So a lot of, you know, the big oil companies were like an early target that folks wanted these funds to disinvest from. And then it's called the divest invest movement. So there's all this pressure to like, divest from companies that are, you know, exacerbating climate change or inequality or pollution or things like that, and then divest invest. So like, invest in what, and that's where we recognize that there was this challenge where like, people should be investing back into Appalachia, right? Like this whole notion of just transition is, if we're going to be trying to transition this, you know, the country's energy economy, which has historically relied on Appalachia, we're going to be transitioning that to a new energy economy and a new type of energy, then we need to pay attention to those regions and communities and workers that are being impacted by that transition. So in our mind, the divest invest movement should pay attention to the communities that are being impacted by that change. And it just wasn't happening. We weren't seeing that happening. And Appalachia was not in the conversation about impact investing, the dollars were not flowing to the region. And so we said why? And then over the next few years, we did a bunch of, you know, collaborative planning with, you know, different perspectives, who said, you know, I think this is why the money isn't flowing This is what our need is that isn't getting met, we talked to the, you know, the folks on the ground who are saying, I need more money for these types of projects, right? Like you were one of those people who said, you know, we need more flexible money for social enterprises, we knew more investment in, in the humans right? In in the human capital that makes all this stuff work. And then we have people who were paying attention to kind of the, the supply side where the money was coming from, right? Why are these organizations not investing. And it was identified that we needed a new type of platform, right, we needed a platform that was big enough to attract money from national investment, national investors, so foundations, you know, corporations, things like that, but also really tied into the regional networks, like CAN, like the Appalachia Funders Network, like others, and the organizations that are actually based on the ground doing the work. So you can't have you know, a what's called an intermediary, which is basically a go between that's out of touch with the work on the ground, or else, it's no better, right? It's not an improvement, but you need something big enough to pull money in. So that's what we
Brandon Dennison:Those big national international groups, are trying to design. it's pretty unlikely they're going to find like, one community based organization in this rural place they've never been to and make an investment in it. It's just not how it works, right?
Andrew Crosson:Yep. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. And so they're looking for investments at scale, meaning large dollar amounts, and they want to be able to make the investment and then see the impact happen, and not have to do it all themselves, not to have to be deeply acquainted with the region, which, you know, it's tough, it's tough to really deeply understand a place like Appalachia, you have to spend a lot of time there. So. So that was what we built Invest Appalachia to do, right? So it's got all these community control and governance functions. You know, we've got a board of directors that's deeply rooted in the region, myself, the other staff are all deeply rooted in the region. You know, we've got all these policies and you know, controls to make sure that we're doing impact first investment. So then we go out, we raise money, and we're still in the process of doing that. But we've hit a couple of key milestones. So we're raising money, and then we're, we're moving money, moving money through to the ground. And we have some pretty interesting ways of doing that, that are kind of bridging the gap between what funders do with sort of grants, right, where it's a one and done, they spend the money, it's out the door, it's supporting, you know, and organizational development, or programs or staff or whatever, which is great. But there's never gonna be enough grant money for all of the projects in the region that need investment. On the other side, there's financing, which is basically the money that has to get paid back, right, your car loans or mortgages, your, you know, property investments, things like that. And that money, there's a lot more of it. But there's not as many businesses or projects that are ready for it. And so we're trying to tackle that gap, right, to help more community focused projects and businesses who might have been historically reliant on grants to transition more towards investment, right. Repayable investment, which, you know, I've come to believe that, that that's actually the path, the scale and sustainability and viability in the long term for the region, right, because right now got a ton of public support, you know, lots of federal resources flow into the region. But you know, one of these days that's going to turn off and, and organizations and community oriented businesses, we have to have built, we have to use this chance we need those public resources, right, we need that background investment, but we need to use it to build economies that are self sustaining, right, and economies that can take on investment and repay investment. So that's a process, right? It doesn't happen overnight. I mean, this region's economy, and the challenges in the economy were, were created over generations and so it's not going to be a quick fix. So we've recognized all of that as well, right? It's not a pie in the sky, you know, wishful thinking about what investments gonna look like, you know, today or tomorrow, but we're trying to move things in that direction.
Brandon Dennison:You mentioned you hit some milestones, share those with us.
Andrew Crosson:Yeah. So, we've been, we're in the organization, right. So I was hired two years ago. And all I had was a board of directors. And so that, you know, I stepped into this organization when it was it was just an organization on paper. It had, you know, some shoestring operating money from an ARC power grant. That was a godsend, don't get me wrong, but that was it. Right? So we started very, with very little. And over the past two years have built sort of an order built out an organization built out a structure. We've built a fund. So an investment fund that is a standalone, pretty unique fund that we think can meet the needs of Appalachian communities. So it's a little bit more flexible, it's a little more risk tolerant. So the more impact forward, you know, it should work well side-by-side with other investors and other financing actors in the region, like those CDFIs and community banks I was talking about earlier. So we've been raising that fund, right, which is just really complicated. I mean, I like to joke Brandon that I spent way more time talking to lawyers in the past year than I ever want to do again. And I swear, some of my some of my days and weeks are just like, law, accountant, investor, lawuer, accountant, investor. So that's not the funnest part of the work because the you know, the building of that fund, and then raising the money, right? We don't, we're not like a foundation, we don't have an endowment. We're like, we're nonprofit, we're a public charity. So we have to raise all of our own money. And so that's been most of the job for the past two years, really. And so I've been raising on on a couple of different fronts, some operating money, although we've got a pretty lean organization. So we don't need a lot of money just to exist, but then trying to raise this investment, raising impact investment from impact investors, so that we can turn around and do even more impactful investment, right. And then raising grants that we can use for this sort of made up term that we have called catalytic capital. But it's basically just the most flexible kind of investment there is. I mean, it's, it's, it's like your best friend giving you a loan because they believe in your in your vision, right. It's that level of flexibility, using grant money to do it. But doing it with a real eye towards that onramp that I was talking about helping projects move towards investment readiness, but they're not quite there. Right. So a lot of money we've been trying to raise, we just hit a, you know, first close on our fund the Invest Appalachia fund. So yeah, thanks, thanks. So we're going to be making investments from the fund going forward in 2023. You know, any, any project or business can submit, right can apply for an investment, there's a link on our website, and Bestop was brought to do that.
Brandon Dennison:I was gonna say, put it put out if somebody's listening, I mean, a lot of changemakers listen to this, you know, in Appalachia, so if they have a good idea, they think might be investable. Catalytic, where should they how do they reach out to you?
Andrew Crosson:Yeah, so, you know, our website gives sort of an overview of how it all works. And there's a place to put in your project information. And one of the things that we recognize is that, you know, there's a lot of projects that are investment worthy, but not investment ready. Right. So they, there's some, there's some real potential there, there's a vision, but maybe they don't have, you know, every financial document that a lender would request, right? If you go to a bank, the banks probably gonna be like, yeah, maybe come back next year, right, or just "no". And so we're encouraging people who, who, who maybe don't have every piece of information that they need, but they've got the, the bones of something worthwhile. So you know, if it comes in, and it's like, well, this is actually a project that really should be able to repay this investment, and they're ready, then we'll start processing that through the Invest Appalachian fund. If it's something that's, you know, maybe it needs a little bit more proof of concept, or they just need some, some technical assistance, or, even better, they've got a solid plan, but they just need some subsidy. Subsidy, meaning some money in the deal, that doesn't have to get paid back, or that can be the last to get paid back. Right. Because banks and other lenders, they always want to be the first ones to get paid back. Nobody's in there willing to be the last money to get paid back. And so when you're trying something new, that's often the gap, it's called, you know, a collateral gap, collateral being, you know, the physical things that you have to back up your your loan, your ability to repay that loan. So if you can't repay the loan, the lenders come in and take your collateral, you know, it's a house or a car or whatever, or for businesses, it's the equipment or machinery, so we can be a substitute for that. And we have money that's specifically designed to be a substitute for that collateral, because if you have to have collateral to get investment, that means you have to have assets. How are you going to build assets and create wealth if you've never had investment in first place? Right. So it's this vicious cycle that keeps, you know, places with with with low resources trapped in low places, and it's not an accident, right? It's like a, it's a series of policy decisions historically, and it's very similar to like redlined neighborhoods in historical African American communities, right. These places are poor because the policies said that they were not worthy of investment, therefore, they never got investment, therefore, they stayed poor, right? So we're trying to break that cycle, and give people a chance to build wealth and build assets and not get stuck in that chicken or egg cycle.
Brandon Dennison:Andrew, it's I mean, it's truly transformational work. I'm honored to work with you and collaborate with you in all the different ways we've been able to do that. I just mean that from the bottom of my heart and my, my closing question, you know, you've you've been a part of some incredible change. You've seen some changes over the years. But what are some changes that you're still hoping to see in the future?
Andrew Crosson:Yeah, so when I talk to people from outside Appalachia, like, I'm always preaching this gospel of, of the ecosystem, right? And of collaboration, and I'll say, you know, look, Appalachia's got challenges, and I'm talking about some of the needs that we have, but you have to understand that, in spite of all that, like what this region has accomplished, is incredible, right? There's no other, you look around, there's no other, especially rural, but any low resource region that's suffered, you know, historical disinvestment, and, and, you know, economic marginalization, things like that, that has the capacity that we have, I mean, the organizations that we have in the region. So, you know, I think what's exciting to me is that, like, so much of the hardest work has been done, right? There's plenty of hard work ahead of us. But, you know, when you and I, as younger leaders, you know, sit around that table with other members of CAN, and we're talking to people who were doing this stuff in the 80s, when people thought they were just crazy, and nobody knew what committee development was, or what a social enterprise was, I mean, that's just inspiring. So just, you know, honoring, right, you know, all of the work that's come before, and, and the ways that that has primed the pump for success, and that there's just so much to build on these existing networks, these existing organizations, the leadership, the history, the engagement with communities, and people living in these places. So that's the big, that's the big change that I feel like I am blessed with and in trying to do something that's big and new right now, myself. So that level of collaboration, I think, is has been, you know, the most exciting thing to see. I think what I'm really excited to see next is I just want to blow the roof off of our expectations of what's possible. Like, I think that one of the main things holding back this work in in Appalachia. Well, there's two main things. One is the reality of the resources, right, the resource scarcity, the political roadblocks, you know, the regulatory context, all the things that make it hard and slow to do meaningful change. Then the other thing is what that does to people's mindsets, right, the culture of that, right, this culture of scarcity, this culture of being risk averse of being cautious, apply and take things slow of wanting to stick to what's already been tried, right? And what's already been proven. And one of the coolest things about Coalfield is like, at just about every step, you were doing things that probably a lot of people who liked you thought were crazy. Right. And that didn't stop you. They thought it was crazy, because it hadn't been done before. And people were more fixated on what hadn't been done before than they were on what was actually being proposed. And so that's where I'm like, look, we got a, we got to make some stuff up, we got to try some new things. Like though the only sure way to not make progress is to keep trying things that haven't worked. And so I think we've got to we've got to go big. That means big asks, and big advocacy, you know, I think the Build Back Better Grant is a great example of that, oh, five years ago, nobody would have imagined that dollar amount come into community based organization, and collaboration in a place like West Virginia. So that's like a big dream, that became a reality. And it required some sort of public policy, I want to do the same thing for investment. Right, I want to show that people's assumptions about investment readiness and investment instability are wrong. And that, you know, the Appalachian region actually is primed to do this incredible self led, regenerative you know, self determination, economic development renaissance. Right that like people want to make these economies work in the places where they live, and and they just need a chance and they just need the resources. And I think we're gonna have to overcome some old mental models, some some roadblocks that people have culturally and intellectually, to make that happen, take some risks and try some new things. But I think I think there's just incredible potential all that is is ready to be unlocked.
Brandon Dennison:And I absolutely believe you're going to succeed at this, I really mean that. And, you know, you taught us the difference today, you said there's investment in a poetic sense and there's investment in a financial sense. So I just want to say thank you for the investments you're making financially. But also more poetically, Andrew, I mean, just investing yourself and your spirit, and your skills and your intellect and your abilities with such passion, but also, just smart analysis and just pure ability. It is making a huge difference. It's fun to watch. And also, thanks for your time on the podcast.
Andrew Crosson:You know, it's been an honor, it's been a great conversation. You know, we're recording this on a Friday afternoon, before the holidays and it's a great end to the week, great end to the year so it's been a real pleasure.
Brandon Dennison:All right. Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew Crosson:Thank you.
Brandon Dennison:Change in the Coalfields is a podcast created by Coalfield Development in the hills and hollers of West Virginia. This episode was hosted by Brandon Dennison, and produced and edited by JJN Multimedia, become a part of our mission to rebuild the Appalachian economy by going to our website Coalfield-Development.org. To make a donation, you can email us anytime at info at Coalfieldevelopment.org and subscribe to our newsletter for more information on the podcast. You can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn by searching Coalfield Development. Check back soon for more episodes.