Funding Rural | Episode #1 | Season 4: Rev. Dr. Ryan M. Eller, “Action is the Oxygen of Organizing”
Ryan Eller is a ninth-generation Appalachian who deeply understands his region—and where generations of their wealth went. As Executive Director of Appalachia Funders Network, Eller leads a coalition of more than 80 funders who are committed to socio-economic transition in Central Appalachia. Eller began his career in community organizing and wishes more funders had that valuable experience, which taught him that thoughtful action is the oxygen needed to effect change and help remedy longstanding issues.
“Action is the oxygen to all organizing.” — Rev. Dr. Ryan M. Eller
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About Rev. Dr. Ryan M. Eller
Rev. Dr. Ryan M. Eller is the Executive Director of the Appalachia Funders Network, a collaboration of more than 80 philanthropic organizations working to accelerate a just transition in Central Appalachia. AFN’s private foundation members collectively oversee more than $461 million in annual grantmaking, making it one of the most influential funder networks in the nation.
A descendant of more than ten generations from Appalachia, Ryan brings a deep regional grounding to his national and global work. Prior to AFN, he spent two years at Watershed Partners/Coeuraj, a global social impact firm founded by Canada’s wealthiest family, where he led projects spanning climate and net zero strategy, Indigenous engagement, and major initiatives with HBCUs and communities across the American South. That work led him to
launch his own impact firm and to serve as President of The Beloved Community Foundation, an organization born out of his leadership organizing faith leaders in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor.
Earlier, Ryan served as Executive Director of Define American, the nation’s leading narrative and culture change organization focused on immigration, citizenship, and identity. Under his leadership, Define American was recognized by Fast Company as one of the world’s most innovative companies in both 2019 and 2020 and called “one of the most effective social justice organizations of our generation” by the Center for Media and Social Impact. Ryan previously served as the U.S. Campaigns Director at Change.org, and as Executive Director of CHANGE, the largest broad-based community organizing group in the Southern U.S. at the time.
His commentary and work have appeared in The Hill, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fox News, CNN, NBC, and other national outlets. He is a frequent guest lecturer, having taught or presented at institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Wake Forest, and Appalachian State University. Ryan holds a B.S. from Appalachian State University, an M.Div. from Wake Forest University, an M.P.A. from Penn State, and a doctorate from Duke University. He is also a former officer in the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps and was the inaugural Bill Moyers Fellow at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
“What rural places need is long-term investment, not to be fixed. I actually get a little bit allergic when we just talk about programs instead of talking about the long-term relationships that I think funders should have with the places that they’re investing in.”—Rev. Dr. Ryan M. Eller
Discussion Questions
- Ryan talks about how funders need to embrace more trust-based and solidarity-based practices. Reach out to another funder you know and ask them which trust-based practices they are using and how it is going.
- Ryan talks about how extraction of resources, wealth, or even regional culture can cause harm to generations in rural areas. Where was the wealth from your organization acquired? Which place did it come from and which resources were employed in the process?
Resources
- Appalachia Funders Network
- Press Forward | Central Appalachia
- Reimagining Appalachia: Ryan Eller on Hazard, Kentucky’s renewal, rural narratives, and the future beyond coal | Brookings
- Appalachia Funders Network Aims to Make Climate Disaster Giving Easier
“We have to start embracing more trust-based and solidarity-based practices, partnering more with local funders and intermediaries… on one hand, we can’t grant our way out of structural problems, but we do have to organize our way towards stronger ecosystems, and that organizing takes investment, but it takes investment in partnership and in collaboration.” —Ryan Eller
Transcript: Episode #1 | Season 4: Rev. Dr. Ryan M Eller “Action is the Oxygen of Organizing”
Erin Borla 00:10
You’re listening to Funding Rural. I’m Erin Borla with the Sisters Oregon-based Roundhouse Foundation. I often say on this show that rural communities are not the same. If you’ve gotten to know one rural community. You’ve gotten to know one rural community. It’s easy to assume that the challenges faced in places like rural Oregon are completely different from those faced in Appalachian Kentucky. The truth is, there are so many parallels to explore as funders between rural communities in all corners of the country. Our job is to get out there and make those connections. That’s one of the many reasons Ryan Eller and I clicked when we first met. He is so good at making connections, organizing people, and taking action to solve challenges in the rural communities he loves. Ryan is the executive director of the Appalachia Funders Network. It’s a group of 85 different funders across six states throughout Central Appalachia. I started out by asking him what kind of funders make up the AFN.
Ryan Eller 01:08
We have community foundations, we have family foundations, we have several national foundations that that do grant making within the region. We have regional foundations, some of which were born out of legacies from the coal economy, and others are health conversion foundations. And so we’re pretty diversified in that respect. We’re also a little unique among networks in that because of the nature of how things often work in rural, we include government funders, so we have some state agencies that are members, humanities and arts councils, for example, the Appalachian Regional Commission. We’ve worked with for quite some time, and then the Cleveland Fed and the Richmond Fed. So we even have some quasi-governmental agencies that come together to partner as a part of our our network, but I think over the years where we may have had the biggest impact is in the incubations that we start. Like one of our first incubations was the Just Transition Fund, and so you know many years ago, we realized that the dollars coming down, especially from federal agencies, were not coming down equitably. Certainly, to rural communities, and they were largely missing a lot of the communities across Central Appalachia. And there are several reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that you know, as as you know and have talked about on the podcast with other partners, it is awfully difficult for a rural community to even have the capacity to apply for a large federal grant, let alone absorb that capital, report meaningfully back on all of that capital in a way that Congress and taxpayers looking into it would would have you know great trust that those dollars were all spent accordingly. And so, if you’re a county with one staff person, you just you can’t even dream of being able to apply for a grant given the process, which I would critique heavily that process, but nonetheless, we knew it was an issue. So our our members got together and formed the Just Transition Fund in many ways to help communities across the country now that have been coal impacted access federal capital. So they give substantial grants to communities to add that capacity, and then to add reporting capacity on the back end of those major projects that have, since its creation, really delivered hundreds of millions of dollars into our rural co-impacted communities across the country. They also, in partnership with the Appalachia Funders Network, we used to have a Just Transition Fellows program, of which now many of the leaders across regional philanthropy and the nonprofit ecosystem were were really forged in that leadership development program. In more recent years, we have incubated what’s now our Appalachian Helene Response Fund. This is a fund that our members, really, while the rain was still falling as Hurricane Helene was hitting, asked the network to put together because it was becoming increasingly clear that our most directly impacted members may not even be in their offices for quite some time. We didn’t know at that time how long power or even water was going to be on, and we needed to mobilize our folks quickly. And so we created this Appalachian Helene Fund, which. Has done really incredible work across the region as our communities tried to recover and have started to to rebuild for the long term. We’ve now moved towards a conversation about resilience and resilient infrastructure with that fund. Our hope for all of those incubations, Aaron, is that they will grow to a point where they can become thriving, sustainable, you know, parts of our ecosystem, and then AFN can move on to the other structures and systems that are are needed for our people to thrive.
Erin Borla 05:36
It’s so interesting to hear you talk about all these different components. I could close my eyes and go, “Oh, we’re talking about those same things here. You know, we may not be talking about coal impacted communities, but we’re talking about the loss of the timber industry or other extractive economies. And so it’s so fascinating to hear how how you all have come together in a way that really uplifts some of those challenges that we think maybe so far apart, but really, so many different communities are facing the same same types of things. Can you give some examples about some of the programs that that Just Transition Fund has helped to uplift over the course of the last several years?
Ryan Eller 06:16
Yeah, I’ll definitely do that, but I also don’t want to list, you know, lose the thread of sort of similarities that many rural communities are facing that you just brought up. Because I do think, in our rush to define our programmatic solutions, which I’ll definitely get to, we we may miss the sort of fundamental history and the question about why these places are the way that they are. Why why are we seeing intergenerational divestment, perpetual challenges with persistent poverty in some of our communities? And so, I just want to start by saying I think, you know, we have to acknowledge that with the timber industry, which is where my great grandfather actually started, he he started in Western North Carolina when they were clear cutting the majority of the the mountains, really almost everywhere in Western North Carolina. That timber company moved up to Beckley, West Virginia, which is where he’s buried and and ended up, and when that company folded, he joined the the coal company and went into the mines. And so, the reason I I tell that history is twofold: one, to acknowledge that for the majority of his career, he worked in an environment where the company came in, purchased through a broad form deed our family’s property, which meant that our family thought they owned the property; they actually didn’t. All of the minerals were extracted from that property, so its value was significantly decreased afterwards, even if they were to reacquire it, which they couldn’t. And for the majority of that career, he and most people working in those extractive industries didn’t get paid money. They got paid company scrip, which you could only use at the company store. I say all that to say we have a couple generations, certainly in places like Central Appalachia, that have lost intergenerational wealth, and so when we hear narratives about the problems that our communities are facing that have anything to do with who we are as a people and a culture, not because of those conditions that created intergenerational wealth, which I would I would argue similarly are faced in our indigenous communities, many of which were uprooted from their land, and many of the predominantly black communities in the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the South that had to undergo, you know, from enslavement to sharecropping to you know forced segregation, there are these structural realities that create the conditions still today for a lack of intergenerational wealth. I say that to say my great grandfather father’s timber company that he worked for sold it. It sold to Georgia Southern Pacific in the 1980s, and I recently looked up whether or not that family company that he had worked for for most of his career did any philanthropy with the dollars that significant wealth that was created on the company’s sale, and they do. All restricted to Connecticut, and it’s a family foundation that seems to do some wonderful things, all in the state of Connecticut, despite the fact that generations of communities and wealth was created from Central. Right, so when we think then about what programs and interventions we’re deploying today, I just you know say that to say I you know we’re very proud of past programs like the Just Transition Fellows, current learning journeys that we take people on around Appalachia 101 and arts-based and civic engagement projects like Opportunity Appalachia, which you know get about a dozen or so every couple years. Major capital interventions where our members team up and make these major hotel projects happen, and outdoor economy-you know-interventions like building bike trails and those sorts of things. Those are all incredibly exciting. I think the bigger picture takeaway that I I wanted to offer, given that background, is just that I think what rural places need is long-term investment, not to be fixed. And so I actually get a little bit allergic when we just talk about programs instead of talking about the long-term relationships that I think funders should have with the places that they’re investing in.
Erin Borla 11:26
So let’s say you could wave a magic wand and have folks that have foundations in other places to encourage them to invest in the places that you serve. How do you? And they’re not from there. That’s the question we get all the time. I’m not from a rural place. How do I? How do I invest? How do I? Other than them calling me and saying, “What are you doing? Can I come alongside? Right? Or calling you saying, “What are you doing in Kentucky? or “What are you doing in you know south southwestern Ohio? How do we how do we make this work? What are you telling?
Ryan Eller 11:59
Well, first they have to call you, and they have to call me, and they have to call the local funders. Right? It’s it is astonishing to me that we in the philanthropic community don’t utilize and leverage our relationships effectively in the way that so many other ecosystems do. I can’t imagine basically walking into someone’s home and sitting down for dinner and then dictating what was going to be on the menu and without talking to them and calling first and say, “Hey, I’m thinking of coming over, you know, to your home, your community. So I just I think that’s the first, and then I would say you know you ask a very good question because how someone shows up is really important. I mean we we have not only intergenerational divestment in rural, you know I think most people now know that at the best estimates have seven to 8% of all philanthropic grant making going to rural, which is less than half of what it should per capita. In Central Appalachia, we are more than twice worse than that. In in in our rural communities, our state of funding in Appalachia reported that we only have about $93 in philanthropic assets per person in the region compared to San Francisco, which is over 1000, we get about 1/20 per capita in grant making in our rural Appalachian communities. That’s that’s you know a fraction of even what rural communities get elsewhere, and so I think it’s a it’s a challenge, but it’s also a challenge because I think the way that funding has flowed in Central Appalachia over the years, unfortunately, seems to have caused more distrust than it has the other way around. It has been fairly episodic, and you know I kind of reflect on my my first week, actually, in in my role at the Appalachia Funders Network, I was on the phone with one of the eighth largest funders in the world, and they said, “You know, Ryan, I’ll be honest with you. For us, Appalachia is a black hole. And I said, “What do you mean by that? And they said, “I don’t mean to be offensive, but it seems like our major investments in the region never seem to get the outcomes that they do in other places, or that we have expected. And so I said, let’s unpack that a little bit. And in three or four different follow-up conversations, we did, and it turns out, of course, that the programs that they were placing upon the region were developed in other areas, mostly urban areas. There wasn’t a sense of cultural competency being even necessary when deploying those same interventions into rural. They just. Oh well, the data says that we should be doing this here. I know this program that works. Let me call a couple of people in the region and see if they want our money, and they have to develop this. They have to you know put forward this program with this firm that where it worked, let’s say somewhere up in the urban northeast, right, and then it doesn’t work, and we throw their hands up, and instead of asking deeper questions about why it didn’t work, those program officers often then I find have to try and defend those investments to their higher ups, and and that doesn’t create a real condition for introspection about what could have happened if the entire design of that program had happened from Appalachians in their community who know best, are most proximate, and in partnership with local funders that probably have tried similar projects before, just without the level of capital that some of our national funders can can provide, and then the final thing I would just say, Erin, is that that I think is the deeper value of our network. We can provide front porches, front doors, on ramps for funders who otherwise don’t have the capacity are never going to be able to be close enough to the community to even know which leaders and which communities are prepared for deep investment, and we try to do that as intentionally as we can. We we hold an annual gathering of our members every year where we try to get everybody in person. We do online learning journeys where peers get together.
Ryan Eller 16:49
We have online communities of practice where peers get together in order to provide a variety of vehicles in which folks can connect according to whatever they are able to invest in their time, and then, of course, if someone decides, you know, I really want to be a part of the structural interventions, and I want to do a thing like creating Invest Appalachia and the Just Transition Fund, then they can get involved in one of our in one of our action teams.
Erin Borla 17:24
So lots of opportunities for folks. We funded a project here in Oregon when they’re when they were undamming the Klamath, which was the largest undamming of a of a river here ever in the United States, and it was a journalism program where folks came in to learn about from that community how how to tell that story, right? And one of the questions that I asked, there’s there’s several indigenous tribes that are right in that region. Was what what’s the advanced training you’re providing for the journalists that are attending? Oh, we do this great work working with Native communities, and they said, well, what’s your rural competency training? And they didn’t offer anything. Well, we don’t do that for rural. I’d love to hear a little bit about that rural cultural competency, and and what does that mean?
Ryan Eller 18:12
Yeah, it’s so fascinating that you had that exchange. I had a similar exchange with FEMA four days after Hurricane Helene. I flew with a few of our members up to D.C. We knew there was going to need to be a pretty immediate coordination, and I was in a place where I could get on a plane, unlike many other leaders in the region. And so, one of the first things I said to FEMA is, “Look, I know you’re about to have a lot of personnel on the ground in our region, I need you to hear me say this: that you need to hire local people. If you try to go into many of our communities and knock on doors, this may not go well for you. And they tried, and a couple months later, I was in a meeting, and they said, you know, Ryan, I think you were right. We’re going to start hiring local people after it did not go well. And could you help us spread the word about these positions that are available? I said, I’d be happy to. I think that you know, when you’re just thinking about programs and what human being needs is often easy to miss the fact that we are a makeup of generations of stories in our community. We have communities that remember when they were forcibly removed from their homes by the government for for whatever reason, that is going to seed distrust. Those are not stories that are just passed down a few years. They they are passed down generationally. We have communities in Appalachia that were really the only folks bombed legally by the federal government during the mine wars. Those are not stories that last even one generation, and I think that understanding that history is critical. Cultural competency really goes beyond that. It’s folk ways, language, ways of being. It’s a deep understanding in some places of one’s connectivity to the land, if you’re working in many indigenous communities, like I did before I was with the Appalachia Funders Network, if you go into a community and don’t recognize that it’s not only that people care about the land, it’s that you literally, in many indigenous communities, see the world as a interconnected set of relationships, you have a relationship with the piece of land, with the water, with the river, with you know all of the elements that you are in and surrounded by. You are not going to succeed very well in talking to that community about economic development opportunities because you’re going to have a different understanding of the value of what might be created, sold, potentially extracted, and so I just I think cultural competency is critical. It’s why we focus not just on economic development but on civics, on the arts, on our our culture, we we do have a pretty unique culture in Appalachia. You know, our our music is a bit different. We have a mix of folk and bluegrass music that is born out of the mountains from our African and our Scotch Irish ancestors. We have certain foodways that are present in Appalachia, just like many other places in the in the country, those are important. If you come into our area and are willing to embrace those folkways and foodways, you’re going to find trust that gets built much more quickly and readily. And I think that’s just important. Being willing to sit and do that and embrace that for what it is is not only a beautiful thing; it repairs trust from those generations where trust has eroded.
Erin Borla 22:14
Yeah, it’s as simple as showing up as who you are, but understanding who you’re visiting. I think I’ve probably shared this story before with on another episode, but we when we were first growing our organization, we were looking at different financial managers and making some shifts to be able to do some impact related investing. And one of the teams that we flew in for this particular work all showed up in four inch heels and suits, and we’re operating on a big cattle ranch, and it’s like, yeah, that’s not going to work, just from the get go. And they knew ahead of time; they knew where they were coming, they knew they knew what the invitation was, where the facility was. It’s just recognizing your your audience and how to be in partnership.
Ryan Eller 23:03
That’s right. That’s right. And reducing the inherent power differential when you show up in places as a funder, in particular, is just you know kind of critical. So yeah.
Erin Borla 23:20
So how we talk about that a lot, right? And I have have been known to share that it there’s no way you can get rid of power in its entirety, right? Where there’s money, there’s power, and even if they there’s a $6 million grant that’s given to one entity or or six different entities, the person or the organization giving that $6 million grant typically gets the credit, not the organizations on the ground as much as we’d like to see. So, what are some of those tips that you would give to folks to be able to recognize that power dynamic, but sort of live within it?
Ryan Eller 23:56
Yeah. Well, it’s in not recognizing it that I think is probably the most toxic or dangerous scenario because I think power will exist. Period. It’s really a matter of how power is wielded and whether or not it is towards the ends of justice and equity, and whether it’s a collective power in solidarity with a community versus over a community. I’ll phrase it two two ways, and I’ll explain to why I think this is. You know, since the 2024 election, we’ve been getting quite a bit of national news coverage in Appalachia, and I have come to believe that every national journalist, when writing about our region, really only has two questions. Fundamentally, they write the article based upon these two questions. The first really is, do they regret? They’ve done in Appalachia. They call us the heart of Trump country. They they cite certain counties in which an overwhelming majority of people who did vote voted a certain way. And then the second narrative question is: Do they deserve what they’re getting when we talk about the retrenchment of federal cuts, the pain that particularly rural communities face when the federal government decides it’s going to cut, frankly, a lot of resources and programs, and I and I I think about that a lot because if we’re willing to just put aside for a second the utter abdication of responsibility that those questions invoke, the you know generations of divestment and their own culpability, in especially in philanthropy, the wealth that continues to be created from generations of extraction from rural communities. The fact that none of our communities would eat if it were not for rural communities. If we kind of put that aside for just a second and acknowledge that human beings need to blame someone else, and it’s harder to acknowledge your own culpability in the reality that created our current political and economic conditions. What it causes is, I think, a very particular philanthropic frame that we have had to deal with in rural, and I think the first is that rural places deserve charity as opposed to trust and solidarity. So if you just want to give charitably, you’ll invest in programs that you yourself believe work. You won’t invest in people, communities, and places, and just trust that they know how to develop the solutions for their communities, and then the second, and this really gets to what I think your question aims at, is paternalism. We know what’s best, we know who you need to become or what you need to be about, and we know how to fix the rural places. We just need you to accept this money in order to do the fixing, because we’re certainly not going to move there and try to be a part of the fixing ourselves, right? And so, I I just think that we have to up in that way of doing philanthropy and how we show up, we we have to start embracing more trust based and solidarity based practices, partnering more with local, you know, funders and intermediaries, and and and so I would just say, like, yeah, on one hand, we we can’t grant our way out of structural problems, but we do have to organize our way towards stronger ecosystems, and that organizing takes investment, but it takes investment in partnership and in collaboration.
Erin Borla 28:11
So, your background as an organizer, how has that supported your work as the organizer of funders? Like, what what skills did you learn that you are like this? I couldn’t do this work without knowing how to do this. Or what what are those things that you’re looking for when you’re hiring others?
Ryan Eller 28:31
Well, I’m embarrassed, Aaron, to say. I mean, I learned more from my community organizing training and the mentorship that I got from incredible organizers than any other educational experience I’ve had, and I have two master’s degrees and a doctorate. Okay, so I’m embarrassed at at the level of money that has gone in to the ivory tower. Knowing that reality, I mean, I think part of that, though, is because in academia, I was never really trained how to be in community with others, and I really wasn’t even trained how to run organizations. And so, you know, some of the mentors that I’ve had had very little formal education, but they helped me how to sit up next to somebody at the pharmacy and the diner, and ask them about their life and what we had in common, and the barriers to success in their communities that they see, and the things they would want to change in order to make life easier for them and their neighbors, the importance of one-on-one relational meetings, and how to recognize in someone else what animates their life and what what gets them going and energized, and then agitate them just so lightly. Towards connecting with that other person who also has a shared vision, so that they might create something bigger than themselves. That’s what I learned in community organizing. I also learned key tactics that we really need to embrace more in philanthropy. One of which I repeat regularly, which is that action is the oxygen to all organizing. You can go quite a long time without oxygen, but not very long. In philanthropy, I used to have one of our founders, who’s a very controversial but loving figure and amazingly successful figure, Jerry Rolle, who founded. She was the founding head of the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky. She used to come back from national conferences all the time, and I’d say, “Jerry, how’d it go? And she would almost always say, “Well, it’s just philanthropy being philanthropy. And I knew then that what she was talking about was philanthropy getting together and talking to each other in a circle, in a very high-minded way, very often, and then we would kind of go about our way and do the same thing. Nothing would change. There was very little oxygen. There was very little action. That’s kind of what I try to bring to the network: is we try thoughtfully to identify when people just need to sit and think, when people need to listen, especially listen to the community, and then when people are ready to act, and the handful of people that are ready to actually act and get together, we put them in an action team and say, “Let’s go. What do we need to build together for the sake of our region and for accomplishing our larger mission, yeah, I think there are there there are so many takeaways from the organizing world. I wish, Erin, that more people who cared about organizing would actually get into philanthropy because I think we’ve done a decent job. At least we still have a long way to go training up some really incredible grassroots community organizers to organize people. What we don’t have a lot of folks doing is organizing funders and organizing money, and I think we have a great opportunity in this generation with the wealth transfer to really be about that work.
Erin Borla 32:18
I think you’re exactly right, and there’s there’s this thread that I keep thinking about while you’re chatting around around this lack of ability to to communicate one on one anymore, and being able to sit and have a conversation and sitting through the muck, especially when we’re talking about folks that have been disinvested in or folks that are going through a natural disaster recovery, all there-it’s-it’s ugly and uncomfortable and grief-stricken, and we have it-we have a hard time communicating when things are good right now. When there’s something positive, everything is really surface, right? I had a good friend lose her son maybe eight years ago now, and I had said to her, “I don’t have anything like I don’t have anything to say. I don’t want to talk about the weather, and she goes, “I stopped talking about the weather a long time ago. Like I don’t want to talk about that anymore. I want to talk about the stuff that’s real. And how do we do that? How do we get back to being able to communicate with one another?
Ryan Eller 33:25
Yeah. Well, I think you-it’s really hard to do unless you love people and you love the communities that you’re working in and and around. And I think that when people, you know, all of us go through trauma in life, and sometimes you you know even conversations about the weather can lead to some traumatic responses when you’ve gone through climate disasters.
Ryan Eller 33:52
Yeah, a founder, a dear founder of the Appalachia Funders Network, Sandra Mikish, who I had the great pleasure of organizing with when I was at the Industrial Areas Foundation years ago, said recently when we were interviewing her that if philanthropy is the love of humanity, the Appalachia Funders Network is the love of Appalachia, and I I really think that you can’t love somebody without then advocating and wanting justice for them and for their community, and what we happen to learn, unfortunately, the hard way in these moments of real disaster in our communities from Hurricane Helene, which is the the deadliest storm since Hurricane Katrina, and the most destructive in United States history. From the loss of newsrooms so rapidly, the loss of that civic infrastructure, and so many other challenges that we now face, is that really is. It’s organized networks and relationships that are the key civic infrastructure. They are our resilience. We thought it was just stronger roads, stronger ways to communicate. You know, stronger cell phone towers, and it was that too. But the life-saving elements that kept people alive through that trauma, when all other infrastructure was down, were the networks and the relationships that they had created. The fact that we already trusted each other because we had done some work together meant that when I or someone else showed up in the community. They could trust the information that I was sharing because they didn’t have the ability anymore to get the information online because online wasn’t wasn’t there. You know, it’s how we knew where mutual aid was needed. It’s how we trusted that dollars would come with the Western North Carolina Strong Coalition to try to save as many small businesses as we could. You know, I just think that you’re tapping into the multiplicity of impact that you can only have with relationships. I also just think fundamentally now, because of what we’ve gone through in the region the last couple years, that it is those relationships and those existing neural networks and relational networks that are the resilient infrastructure that will get us through to a brighter day. They also happen to be the spaces, if we’re wise enough, that will help us reimagine the the future when skies aren’t gray, and can help us in some ways align so that we drive towards those futures.
Erin Borla 36:52
We’ve covered a lot of ground. If I, if you and I connect again, hopefully soon, but in 10 years, what what would you say? How would you want things to be going,
Ryan Eller 37:04
Aaron? I would want it to be a celebration, not just between you and me, but you and all the folks you have on your podcast, because we will have achieved parity in the per capita grant making from from urban communities to rural, we will have achieved that parity in an equitable way, and all we’ll be doing is say, “Gosh, how do we sustain this amazing momentum? The work that our communities are doing, so that everyone has the agency to create the futures that that they want to see. That’s 10 years from now. That’s the podcast that I want to be on. All
Erin Borla 37:44
right. Well, we’re season four, so season 14. Here we come. We’ll be. It’ll be one big group, and it’ll all be everything will be solved. I can’t wait.
Ryan Eller 37:53
I’ll be there. Mark it down. Mark it down.
Erin Borla 38:06
I love people like Ryan, people of action that want to get out there and get stuff done. Philanthropy being philanthropy, that echoed so strongly with me, as when we go to events and we go to these opportunities, and we sit with one another, and we get inspired to make change and do different things and move forward collectively. And then we go home and go back to our office, and that movement doesn’t happen. I talk to people that listen to the podcast all the time about how inspired they are, and I can’t wait to hear about what actions they take. So let’s be people of action together, and start making some moves for community on behalf of community, and doing what we can where we are to really make impact. Join us at fundingrural.com for show notes, more information about Appalachia Funders Network, and other opportunities.
