LIFE OR DEATH IN APPALACHIA: SOAR’s Urgency of Connecting Rural Kentucky to the World Wide Web

Back in October, technology, business, education, storytelling and healthcare leaders met in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Their goal was pretty specific at AccelerateKY’s 2021 Connect. Inform. Inspire. conference: to continue the discussion on how the future of work can benefit Kentucky’s communities. For one presenter, the event offered an opportunity to focus on how internet access will promote entrepreneurship in Eastern Kentucky.

Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR) has expanded the definition of “community driven.” Led by Executive Director Colby Hall, the organization represents the 54 Kentucky counties that makeup the Bluegrass’s share of Appalachia. Centrally, SOAR aims to promote entrepreneurs, small businesses, educators, and, above all, residents of Eastern Kentucky as the region recovers from the decline of the coal industry. Their primary goal is to introduce a new high-speed internet infrastructure across the region, one that will provide substantial economic, educational, and health benefits.

What SOAR’s Mission Means for the Region

SOAR is a community-driven, direct impact organization that was founded in 2013. As communities in Eastern Kentucky have continued to face economic challenges, regional leaders have begun to look internally for solutions. Colby Hall and SOAR have built a team of innovators looking to cultivate a culture of growth and connectedness in the region. “We're resource limited, we have our limitations, and we're a small team,” Hall told us. “So all the things that we talk about and things that we know that are important, these things are in our blueprint plan, things that we know are going to be critical for the region to achieve to get back to prosperity. We're not gonna be able to do all that work. And so the idea of that is it's community driven.”

Courtesy of the University of Kentucky

Hall finds the work his team has taken on to be necessary for greater opportunities in the region. “All of our efforts are being channeled not just to move forward,” he said, “but to move the right way forward. The work has to be led by people in communities, the people that live and work in those communities across our 54 counties day in, day out.”

Specifically, SOAR offers direct guidance and support to organizations and entrepreneurs across Eastern Kentucky in a variety of ways. From helping companies build new brand identities to pointing organizations in the right direction to receive public or private funding, SOAR works to introduce a framework that will stabilize the area’s economy. “It's a partnership where we can provide a vision,” Hall said. “We can provide the plans, we can draw up playbooks, but we've gotta depend on people across the region to do the work.”

All of these motivations are personal for Hall. “I've had so many people help me throughout school and give me time to make sure that I was successful,” he recalled. “So I always kind of had this sense of wanting to come back to the region and give back in some way. I'm very proud of where I'm from. I've had the ability to get out and do and see probably more than most already in my young life. And by traveling all around and meeting people from all around, I love my roots and I love our region.”

Announced as the Executive Director for SOAR in 2020 by Representative Hal Rogers and Governor Andy Beshear, Hall is an alum of the University of Kentucky and was previously the director of sales for Atlanta-based FLS transportation.

“There’s no greater sense of pride and there’s no greater sense of where my determination and focus comes from.”

Providing Internet Access to Eastern Kentucky

To drive the area toward economic stability and prosperity, the region needs widespread, accessible broadband internet. But for Hall, the struggle to bring internet access to the region is a tale as old as time. “Rural broadband is a classic economic example of a market failure where there's a public need for a good,” he said. “But the private market can't provide on its own. When you have rural areas that have experienced severe population loss, there's just not enough potential customers there to provide an ROI for a private company to build a live network on its own.”

For a number of reasons, Hall considers the introduction of broadband internet to be a “life or death” situation for the region.

Eastern Kentucky’s natural makeup makes installing broadband internet almost impossible. Hall suggests that the “topography, our geography, the lack of or, at least, lesser amount of developable land compared to other areas” makes building these infrastructural improvements nearly impossible. Additionally, when compared to other areas in Appalachia, “all that traditional infrastructure, even the water, everything's harder in our region because of the way it's situated.” Importantly, there is no interstate that runs through Eastern Kentucky. The same cannot be said for Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and West Virginia. 

Even though the challenge looks greater for Eastern Kentucky to install high-speed internet infrastructure, Hall finds its reward to be that much more significant. “It's an equalizer that democratizes opportunity,” Hall told us. “And when you think about jobs, we can shift the conversation from thinking about how we create jobs, to how we fill jobs that are already created.”

Recent public initiatives have begun to address this problem. At the time of this writing, the KentuckyWired project, which “is a state-run project constructing over 3,000 miles of high-speed, high-capacity fiber optic cable in every county in Kentucky,” is 83% complete. The goal with this project is to provide internet access to households and businesses across the state as our economy becomes increasingly connected, digital, and online.

How Broadband Access Will Combat Brain Drain

Outside of the obvious economic benefits to building broadband infrastructure in Eastern Kentucky, Hall also finds it will have a greater impact in another area: brain drain. Hall asks “how do we create more economic opportunity to keep our best and brightest?” By building internet infrastructure, which Hall believes is different from traditional economic development, Eastern Kentucky’s talented and educated young professionals will be much more likely to stay.

“If we focus on the skills and the training and the development of our workforce,” he said, “we're able to plug and play into jobs that are available right now online and are going to continue to be available.”

There’s also a messaging component that will drive young professionals to stay, too. By building and utilizing high-speed internet in Eastern Kentucky, professionals “can still progress professionally right here in the region, make the money that you wanna make, move up in your career because of the opportunities that are afforded online.”

Courtesy of SOAR Summit 2021

Importantly, Hall has a more expansive definition of brain drain. “Really when I say brain drain, I think population loss,” he reflected. “Because brain drain kind of just limits you to strategies for retaining more of your own, which is important. But I also think we have an opportunity to bring new people in from the outside.” Hall is confident that Eastern Kentucky offers many unique characteristics to newcomers. “Communities are paying money, doing stipends, and reverse scholarships,” he said. “Everything should be on the table and anything counts.” And with continued access to high-speed internet, people in the region will be more likely to stay while people from outside of the area will be better convinced to move in. 

Internet infrastructure will have a profoundly positive impact in other areas, too, according to Hall. As far as education goes, “if students are completing school from home and they don't have functional internet, it's impossible.” Similarly, health care will be a massive bonus for a region that struggles with many health outcomes. While healthcare continues to be a field that expands in the area, widespread broadband access will help those who need medical and health services the most. “If we get broadband installed,” Hall said, “telehealth will be a big win and provide greater access to care transportation.”

For Hall, installing broadband infrastructure and supporting entrepreneurs will help elevate the region as a whole. “Rural Eastern Kentucky, and rural areas in general,” he offered, “now can enter into an arena where they can compete better than other places across the country.”

This blog post is part of an ongoing series exploring the economic resilience and future of Kentucky’s workforce. To subscribe to updates, sign up for our newsletter.