The rural Virginia town of Dungannon is home to fewer than 300 people. It has one main road, a post office, and community members who would love to see some shade while taking a walk with their kids along the town’s recently added sidewalks. Trees, residents said at a recent community meeting, would solve that problem.

The meeting was organized by nonprofit organizations Appalachian Voices’ and New Economy Network, and  in collaboration with Virginia based organization New Ec that has advocated for environmental protection and healthy communities throughout the region for more than two decades. 

After receiving a $500,000 Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem Solving grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the organization kicked off community resiliency projects in five coalfield communities. Many of them are federally-designated energy communities due to their proximity to environmentally harmful industries. Funding for the grant was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by the Biden-Harris administration, so organizations can help communities address local environmental or public health challenges.

“Trees are something we hadn’t thought about and something that everyone was vocal about,” Emma Kelly, new economy program coordinator for Appalachian Voices said of the community feedback. “And, it’s something that is super attainable from a project standpoint.”

The grant funding allows the organization to work with Dungannon, as well as the communities of Pennington Gap, Pound, Dante, and Clinchco. They’re collaborating with locals to find solutions to challenges linked to climate resiliency, energy efficiency. While the communities collectively experience similar challenges, they each have unique priorities, which is why the community meetings were so important. 

“Turnout was great and every session had an incredible amount of engagement and conversations,” Kelly said. “One of the things this grant process has allowed is so much more community transparency and conversation between community residents and community leaders. It helps build that trust.”

It also allows Appalachian Voices to work with a larger pool of funding. Where the organization regularly has to piece together multiple grants to fund a single project for a community, this level of funding allows the organization to think bigger and work faster. And that improved speed and scale can already be felt in the communities with which Appalachian Voices works. 

Other communities are still in the planning process. Beyond a need to acquire shade trees, the five communities are addressing other issues. including rising energy costs, a lack of recreational opportunities, a need for job creation, and plans for dilapidated and abandoned buildings. 

To that end, Pound is using its grant funding from Appalachian Voices to retain a structural engineer to address an abandoned building. Another is using its funding for building demolition, and in Dungannon they’re using the funding for land acquisition. To move the projects along after the planning stages, Appalachian Voices will piece together funding the way it always has — bit by bit from multiple sources. 

But without up-front grant funding for this planning phase, the communities’ prioritized projects would go “unaddressed for a lot longer,” Kelly said.

While Appalachian Voices has invested in communities long-term, rather than provide one-off support for individual projects, its overall goal when working with municipalities is to support and shore up their capacity.

“We’re not trying to make a pipeline of grants and projects where the localities are dependent on us. We’re working with localities deliberately and going after the technical assistance and training opportunities for staff and money to hire more staff, ways to make sure the communities themselves are building up their structure to be stronger,” Kelly said. “We should always be working to put ourselves out of a job.”

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a piece of federal legislation that aims to reduce inflation by lowering the cost of prescription medications, investing in domestic energy production, and promoting clean energy, among other objectives.