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 community meeting, would solve that problem.

The meeting was organized by the nonprofit organization Appalachian Voices, which 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. All 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. 

The grant funding allowed the organization to kick off work with Dungannon, as well as the communities of Pennington Gap, Pound, Dante, and Clinchco, in 2024. They’re collaborating with locals to find solutions to challenges linked to high energy prices, flooding and other concerns.

But a month after President Donald Trump took office, the EPA terminated the grant agreement, which turned the tables on a series of projects that local community leaders were developing with Appalachian Voices. In Pennington Gap, progress toward demolishing an old grocery store in a floodplain was halted the same week as another devastating flood. In Pound, the design process for a flood-mitigating riverwalk was stopped in its tracks, despite the hopes that the project’s construction could align with an already-planned Public Service Authority project.

These projects were all the result of community input gathered over a series of local events. 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,” said Appalachian Voices New Economy Program Manager Emma Kelly. “One of the things this grant process allowed is so much more community transparency and conversation between community residents and community leaders. It helps build that trust.”

Appalachian Voices has continued to partner with these five communities to move projects forward, including by seeking new funding, and the organization is also taking action to restore its grant. In June, Appalachian Voices joined a class action lawsuit arguing that the EPA unlawfully terminated its Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program. Attorneys filed an appeal to the D.C. Circuit in August. 

“This case is not only about the need to continue the critically important work that was supported by these grants across the nation,” said Appalachian Voices Executive Director Tom Cormons. “It is about defending basic tenets of the rule of law and our Constitution that are necessary for a healthy democracy to function.”

In July, three community leaders joined Appalachian Voices staff on Capitol Hill. 

“The community leaders spoke personally and passionately about their homes’ limited capacity for applying for replacement funds, the ticking clock on disaster mitigation before another catastrophe strikes, and the trust that has now been destroyed between our local communities and the federal government,” said Kelly.

The grant had allowed 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 allowed the organization to think bigger and work faster. And that improved speed and scale was being 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. 

Prior to the termination of the grant by the current administration, Pound was able to use part of its funding from Appalachian Voices to retain a structural engineer to address an abandoned building. Another community was negotiating the use of its funding for building demolition, and in Dungannon, they had begun to explore the possibility of a land purchase. 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. 

If it weren’t for the months of grant funding for the 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.