Jacob Hanna, CEO of Coalfield Development, announces a partnership with Wild Country to train workers in landscape design and heavy equipment on reclaimed mountaintop-removal sites in Appalachia. The Wild Country Fellowship will teach permaculture and remediation techniques, with plans to expand across West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia.
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My name is Jacob Hanna. I'm the CEO of Coalfield Development, and today I'm on top of a former moonscape mountaintop removal site here in my birth county of Bloody Mingo. Places like this, there's about 800,000 acres across Appalachia, sites that used to employ thousands of coal miners in our region, folks like my dad, and are waiting for what comes next. And oftentimes there isn't a really good answer. Our team at Coalfield Development challenged ourselves to say, what would happen when you combine our workforce development model, our place-based revitalization model, and our focus on new social enterprise incubation all together to create something better? And this is one example of that thought process. This is our high wall site. Just across the field are multiple cabins co-owned with local businesses, built by folks in our construction workforce development program. And then further down the road is our sustainable agriculture hub that is focusing on providing fresh produce to food desert regions in the community. Thousands of acres that we've been involved with across Central Appalachia for different strategies involving water control, soil restoration, renewable energy deployments, agritourism, construction developments, and more. It's sort of been a sandbox of experimentation for us at Coalfield Development, and now we've proved the concept. I'm able to stand on a site that is no longer just You know, a drawing on a piece of paper. It's real. It's tangible. Folks come here all the time to stay, to explore, to eat from our gardens, to work on our farms, to stay in our cabins, to learn our trades. This doesn't just happen overnight around me. It takes intentionality. It takes strategy. It takes funding. And it takes folks like Caleb Hanshaw to say, I'm willing to be patient. I'm willing to commit to restoring this land as I help fund I grew up in Mingo County.
I stumbled upon this crazy Australian guy on YouTube named Geoff Lawton who was turning the desert green. And from then on, I began to study permaculture design, how to bring back life into a landscape. I had the honor of meeting Geoff Lawton. I'm Geoff Lawton. Working for Coalfield Development for now 6 years, and not just growing as a designer, but growing as a leader and learning so much in this organization. But what I found was not only is the land reclaimable, but also the people that we get to interact with every day as we're putting hands in the dirt. And I got to see us really tackle that workforce participation rate through this work.
The gentleman who has been not only chief sandbox digger player in that process, making that happen and leading this work to its next chapter, is now the executive director of Wild Country, a new social enterprise that will take all of this experimentation and catapult it forward into new opportunities, new contracts, new scopes, new sites. And we're really excited to partner as Coalfield Development with The Wild Country to move this work forward together. Combination of our model with workforce development and The Wild Country's model around ground-up approach for remediation and restoration.
And now as we pivot to an exciting new direction with The Wild Country, we get to take over management of just a special piece of property that I had the pleasure of working 6 years on and opening it up to the world. And we're excited to unroll this new training program. We teach people how to design landscape, how to map, how to run heavy equipment. We also get to partner and bring in voices like Jeff Lawton, who is influential in our permaculture education courses. We still share the same mission, is to help people that are facing barriers to employment Find purpose, people that want to learn how to replicate this model, how to take it to other communities.
We want to take that to the next level. I want to take it to the next mining community, to the next county, to the next project, whether that be in West Virginia or Kentucky or Ohio or the coalfields of Virginia. How can we deploy and replicate this model and do so in a way that is nimble and adaptive and right-sized for each approach in each community and each project. All right folks, you heard it here, the official launch of the Wild Country Coalfield Development Collaboration. This is an extension of our strategy to rebuild the Appalachian economy from the ground up. We've got a lot of exciting projects already in the pipeline for this collaboration, so please stay tuned. If you're interested in getting involved, if you have A big old mine site or just a farm that you're interested in how to maximize and make the most of, this guy's your man here.
If you want to get a hold of us or know more about our work, you can find us at www.thewildc.com, spelled out right here. And there's a tab right there on the end that says the Wild Country Fellowship. It's our workforce development program, and we're just excited again to collaborate and to see the future of Appalachia. We believe that Appalachia has her best days ahead, and we're excited to be a part.
