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Across rural America, from the timber towns of the Pacific Northwest to the coalfields of Central Appalachia, two interconnected crises threaten long term prosperity:
- Population flight. More than half of all U.S. rural counties have experienced net resident loss between 2010 and 2020. Prime working-age adults (25-54) leave at the highest rates, draining local tax bases and shrinking consumer markets (U.S. Census Bureau).
- Labor-force disengagement. Nationally, prime age labor force participation sits above 80 percent (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey). But in many distressed rural counties, it hovers below 60 percent (U.S. Economic Development Administration, Recompete Pilot Program). Tens of thousands of adults are sidelined by justice involvement, behavioral-health recovery, caregiving responsibilities, or credential gaps.
These trends are not merely demographic footnotes; they undercut everything else communities try to do, whether recruiting employers, maintaining main-street businesses, or justifying new housing and broadband.
Yet the policy and practice meant to address them remain divided into two largely separate silos.
The first is economic development, focused on business attraction and retention, infrastructure and incentives. The second is workforce development, focused on training, placement and wrap-around support.
The High Cost of a Split System
There are several high-level examples of how workforce and economic development strategies are pursued in parallel, but rarely intersect.
Labor Force Development
One is when economic development is focused on the recruitment of outside businesses with incentives, while the workforce development system is focused on training disconnected adults for “available” jobs. What often results are companies arriving to find no ready workforce and trainees earning credentials with no clear pathway to a career.
Infrastructure Investment
Another example is when economic development is focused on investment in industrial parks, roads and broadband, while the workforce development system is focused on case management and short-term training slots. What often results is infrastructure that’s underutilized and case managers who lack employment partners.
Different Measures of Success
The last is when economic development measures success by capital investment and jobs, while workforce development measures success through the lens of completions and placements. What often results is no shared metrics for labor force reattachment, which some argue is the true precursor to growth and prosperity.
The result that can be seen is familiar in many rural regions: half-empty business parks, training programs with modest placement rates, and an ever-shrinking population that erodes the fiscal capacity to try something new.
Reuniting the System: A Personal Journey and Lessons from the EKY Runway Program
Born and raised in the coalfields of Appalachia, I left the region post-grad school to pursue opportunities that were found elsewhere. Having spent decades working in the economic development field, partially perplexed by the signs of a siloed, and at times broken, system, I was attracted to an inaugural program that promised the idea of a new way of thinking about economic development: The Economic Recovery Corps.
This program, launched through a public-private partnership, placed 65 fellows in some of the most underserved areas throughout the country. In doing so, it gave me the remarkable opportunity to take my decades of learnings and come back to a region that raised and molded who I am.
A region I’ve always called home.
Eastern Kentucky faces one of the steepest population declines in the country. Counties in the coalfield region have seen double-digit percentage drops in residents since 2010.
Many of those leaving are working-age adults, often between 25 and 54. And their departure reinforces a cycle of economic stagnation: Fewer workers mean fewer businesses, which means fewer jobs and less incentive for young people to stay or return.
Yet underneath the surface is an underutilized workforce of thousands of individuals sidelined by barriers such as mental health challenges, substance use recovery, lack of credentialing, and criminal records. These should not be seen as just social challenges.
They’re workforce and economic development opportunities waiting to be unlocked.
- Over 34,000 prime-age adults in 12 of the most coal impacted communities of Eastern Kentucky are disconnected from work (U.S. Economic Development Administration, Recompete Pilot Program). Even reengaging half would result in billions of dollars in lifetime earnings and local GDP growth.
- Reentry participants who overcome barriers like substance use recovery or criminal history are statistically among the most loyal and stable employees when supported appropriately (U.S. Department of Labor).
- Stabilized populations contribute to stronger local tax bases, higher school enrollments, and increased housing demand — all key to attracting business investment.
Eastern Kentucky offers an opportunity for new change to see what can potentially break this cycle of population loss and disengagement.
The EKY Runway Program, launched by Shaping Our Appalachian Region in 2025, treats human capital development as core economic infrastructure. Its genius lies in its systems thinking: By braiding together coaching, credentialing, and employer partnerships, it treats talent development as a regional economic development strategy, not merely a workforce training initiative.
While there are many nuances to the overall design of the program, three design principles merit immediate national attention.
Lesson 1: Coaching as Infrastructure for Economic Mobility
Every EKY Runway Program participant, from previously incarcerated individuals to parents re-entering the workforce, receives long-term support and empowerment coaching that addresses key barriers to employment. This includes transportation, childcare, expungement, and mental health referrals alongside individualized career training guides.
The real secret sauce is the proactive, human-centered approach to the process, delivering services one person at a time.
Lesson 2: Credentialing Aligned with Employer Demand
Fast-tracked and skills-based training programs and certificates codesigned with partners and regional employers. Focus on sectors already driving site selection decisions nationwide like health care, advanced manufacturing, clean energy and technology/AI and remote work.
Lesson 3: Employer Led Pipelines and Direct Employment Connections
The EKY Talent Network, part of the EKY Runway Program, is a people-first, place-rooted system designed to reconnect Eastern Kentucky’s sidelined workers with real opportunities. Through stabilization, upskilling and direct support, it turns potential into purpose and disconnection into economic momentum. The pipeline is shaped with employers from the beginning, ensuring that employers aren’t the end of the process, but co-creators of the process.
Early metrics of EKY’s Runway Program are striking: lead generation far exceeding original estimates, participation and retention rates above 80 percent, and perhaps most telling, growing interest from companies that once dismissed the region for its shallow labor pool.
Eastern Kentucky doesn’t need separate conversations about jobs and people.
It needs a unified strategy that recognizes the mutual dependency between economic and workforce systems. The EKY Runway Program isn’t just a workforce initiative.
It’s a population stabilization strategy. It’s a business development platform. It’s a vision for what it looks like when we stop treating people as problems and start treating them as the region’s greatest potential. Let’s stop asking whether we should focus on economic development or workforce development.
The answer is yes. And it’s called the EKY Runway Program.
Why This Matters Beyond Appalachia
What makes the EKY Runway Program especially promising is its replicability.
The tools being developed for this initiative are designed not just to support a few hundred participants, but to transform how every Appalachian community thinks about its future. It also illustrates a broader economic truth. Population stabilization and labor force reengagement are the pre-conditions for virtually every other form of rural investment.
- Site selection: National surveys of corporate location advisers rank available skilled workforce at the top of their desired list of attributes, often above tax incentives or land cost.
- Entrepreneurship: Returning residents and newly attached workers form the customer base and talent pool for startups, now the fastest growing source of net new jobs in America.
- Public finance: Each prime age worker who reconnects to employment, at the outset, contributes an estimated $22,000 to $30,000 annually in local GDP and tax receipts. These are essential revenues that underwrite roads, schools, and main street revitalization, crucial for the revitalization of small-town rural America.
Put simply, without a workforce there can be no prosperity and growth. Reuniting the systems that build both is not Appalachian exceptionalism, it is a universal rural imperative.
A Blueprint for National Action
Moving from pilot projects to widespread practice will require policy shifts at every level.
Combine Funding Streams
There’s potential for regional entities to braid Workforce Innovation & Opportunity Act dollars with economic development, behavioral health, and justice reinvestment funds, rewarding integrated outcomes instead of siloed outputs.
Measure Labor Force Reattachment
Taken from the EDA’s most recent Recompete Challenge Grant example, add prime age labor force participation to the federal scorecard for distressed community grants, alongside traditional metrics like unemployment or poverty rates.
Invest in Coaching Capacity
Treat community-embedded coaches as durable infrastructure, budgeted like transit or broadband, because they connect human potential to economic opportunity.
Establish Flexible Wrap-Around Support Grants for Short-Term Life Needs
Enable this to be seen as core workforce infrastructure.
These funds would support critical, short-term life needs, such as transportation, housing deposits, utilities, work uniforms, legal fees for expungement, and childcare gaps, that otherwise derail reentry efforts and reduce program retention.
Key components could be a dedicated line item in workforce grants; participant-centered flexibility, requirements around outcome tracking and not just uses, match incentives for local Philanthropy and employers.
Incentivize Inclusive Hiring
Expand tax credits or wage subsidy pilots for employers that co-create rural reentry pipelines, rewarding job quality and retention, not just headcount.
Replicate Proven Playbooks
Fund technical assistance to adapt models like the EKY Runway Program for timber, energy-transition, and tribal regions, accelerating learning across geographies.
Conclusion: The Great Re-Attachment
Rural America doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ingenuity or grit.
What it all too often lacks is a system that values its people as the starting line of economic strategy rather than the finishing touch. The artificial wall between workforce and economic development has outlived its utility.
The first step in tearing down that wall is recognizing, at the national level, what practitioners in Eastern Kentucky are proving: Reengaging sidelined workers is the most powerful form of economic development we possess.
As federal agencies and national foundations seek to close equity gaps and revitalize rural America, the lessons from Eastern Kentucky are clear: Economic development that overlooks workforce disconnection will fall short. The EKY Runway Program presents a new blueprint for economic mobility, one that restores agency to workers, coherence to systems, and viability to regions.
“Battling population loss with meaningful employment” as a North Star positions the EKY Runway Program not just as a workforce and economic development effort, but as a population stabilization and regional revitalization strategy. To extend this idea and build a strong body of work around it, through a series of upcoming articles I’ll be diving deeper into the components of this strategy and lift up lessons for rural regions nationwide.
For now, the takeaway is clear: If we want rural regions to thrive, we must reunify growth, people and place, workforce and economy, in one coherent strategy.
The Great Re-Attachment has begun.
About the Author
Will Warren was born and raised in Eastern Kentucky and professionally has worked for almost two decades in various capacities to create economic and community development opportunities. An expert in small community economic redevelopment, he is a recent graduate of the Appalachian Leadership Institute (ALI), a Certified Economic Developer (CEcD) and an Entrepreneurship Development Professional (EDP). He currently has focused his professional work as a consultant revitalizing distressed and underdeveloped communities throughout the Appalachian region and beyond. Throughout his career he has managed public and private development projects in a variety of domestic locations (both large and small as well as urban and rural) and has experience at the local, regional, state, and federal levels focused on financial analysis and feasibility, sustainable growth and equitable community investment.
Learn more about Will and the Economic Recovery Corps Fellows.