On a chilly November afternoon in Harlan County, a struggling former mining hub on the edge of the Eastern Kentucky Coalfield, Geoff Marietta (MBA 2007) surveys the bustling village he has helped build.

Marietta is executive director of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, a community nonprofit whose campus occupies 26 buildings surrounded by 800 acres of forest on the northern side of an Appalachian mountain ridge. As he walks the grounds, Marietta points to evidence of what a thriving, diversified economy in eastern Kentucky can look like.

There’s a group of boisterous fifth graders on a three-day school trip weaving woolen swatches on a collection of old-fashioned floor looms. Later that day, he notes, the students will learn about—and even pet—indigenous Appalachian wildlife (including a pink-eyed albino corn snake) before wading into nearby Greasy Creek to study the impact of pollution on local fauna. That evening, just up the hill in the high-ceilinged dining room of Laurel House, those same children will eat a meal served by a recovering opioid addict whom Marietta hired fresh out of a treatment program. Before filing past the school’s stone-and-timber chapel to find their beds in the West Wind dormitory, where Marietta broke ground on a $475,000 renovation project last fall, they’ll burn some calories learning traditional Appalachian folk dances from a teacher who attended day camp at Pine Mountain as a youngster, came to work for Marietta through AmeriCorps VISTA, and with Marietta’s support, recently completed her undergrad degree.

Pine Mountain’s approach is holistic: In addition to offering more than a dozen environmental education courses for schoolchildren that integrate science, ecology, and Appalachian culture, it holds a variety of workshops for adults and families, and also hosts conferences and retreats for groups both large and small. Taken together, the programming presents a forward vision for the region, Marietta says. “If our future economy is going to be based on outdoor recreation, hiking, tourism, biodiversity, local food, authentic rich culture and heritage, technology, and health care—what does that look like? It looks like Pine Mountain Settlement School,” he says.

Marietta wastes no opportunity to interweave the seemingly disparate aspects of the social enterprise over which he presides. Entering one of the guest rooms in Laurel House, he walks by a dresser bearing a runner woven by a student, along with a note explaining that similar runners are for sale at the school’s gift shop, which Marietta’s wife, Sky, has stocked with locally produced body products, wood carvings, and knickknacks. West of Laurel House, just beyond West Wind, he passes the high-tunnel greenhouses that Pine Mountain provides to local farmers.

“In many ways, it’s like running a small town,” says Marietta, casting his eye across the potato fields and chicken coop that help supply the school’s kitchen.

And that’s the insight that drives Pine Mountain: Marietta knows there is no silver bullet for jump-starting the region’s economy and curing the many ills brought on by the collapse of coal and an ongoing opioid epidemic. (Nearly one-third of Harlan County’s almost 28,000 residents live in poverty, and life expectancy in the county is nearly eight years below the national average.) But with its manifold offerings and programs, all of which feed one another in ways both obvious and subtle, the school is a model for a radically diverse approach to economic development that combines creative risk-taking with sensitivity to local needs and assets—a model that might well hold promise for other parts of rural and postindustrial America that are struggling to reinvent themselves.

“I’m here to create jobs and economic opportunity,” Marietta says. “Not just talk about it, but actually show people what it looks like.”

Pine Mountain Settlement School was founded in 1913 by a local mountaineer named William Creech Sr., who donated 136 acres to establish a school that would address the many problems afflicting the region—including lack of education, alcohol abuse, and moral decay. Pine Mountain owes its name to the late 19th-century settlement movement to improve the lives of poor, urban Americans; the movement would go on to inspire a whole slew of Appalachian settlement schools that functioned as both educational institutions and community centers.

After serving as an elementary school, a boarding school, and a public school, Pine Mountain transitioned in the 1970s to a center for environmental education that offered programming on the natural and cultural heritage of eastern Kentucky. By the turn of the millennium, however, financial instability, lack of a strategic plan, and leadership churn had begun to eat away at what had once been a vibrant institution with deep ties to the local community.

Unfortunately, Pine Mountain began to fail just when the region needed it most. The advent of coal mining more than a century ago (the first rail shipment of eastern Kentucky coal rolled out of Harlan County in 1911) transformed a sparsely populated rural area dominated by subsistence farming into a vibrant network of towns dominated by companies like International Harvester and US Steel. But over time, automation steadily reduced the number of workers required to extract the mineral, while competition from natural gas and cheap, low-sulfur coal from out west did the rest.

As a result, more than two-thirds of coal mining jobs in Harlan County disappeared between 2008 and 2016. Today, Harlan households earn less than half the national median income, and the unemployment rate is nearly 60 percent higher than the national rate. And like many rural communities across the country blighted by economic collapse, Harlan County has fallen prey to skyrocketing rates of opioid abuse. “Every single one of my staff members has been affected in one way or another,” Marietta says of the opioid epidemic. “It’s wiped out an entire generation of people aged 20 to 45.”

By 2015, Pine Mountain, too, had reached a nadir of sorts. Some 60 percent of its operating revenue came from a dwindling endowment, and the school had been through four executive directors in two years. Relations with the neighboring town of Harlan, the county seat, were at an all-time low: The nonprofit had targeted its environmental education programs at school groups from beyond the region, causing many townsfolk to see it as catering to outsiders. And after successfully petitioning the state to deem the lands adjacent to the school unsuitable for mining, some started to view Pine Mountain as an enclave of coal-hating environmental activists.

Appalachians are justifiably wary of outside experts telling them how to better themselves. Since 1965, the Appalachian Regional Commission, or ARC, an economic development agency established as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, has poured nearly $4 billion into the area. Yet despite improvements in poverty, education, and infant mortality rates, the ARC and the word salad of state and local agencies that it funds have failed to redress the enduring social and economic problems faced by communities like Harlan.

So when Marietta arrived at Pine Mountain in 2015 with Sky and their two young children, he was facing not only substantial organizational crises but a deep-seated cultural challenge as well.

Marietta had the pedigree of an outside expert, with a master’s and a doctorate of education from Harvard along with his MBA. At HBS, Marietta spent much of his time working with the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a collaborative effort with the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) that employs management concepts and entrepreneurial strategies to improve student performance in large school districts.

But there was precedent to Marietta’s arrival at Pine Mountain. His mother-in-law had taught at Pine Mountain in the 1960s, and he and Sky had been married in the school’s chapel. Plus, the couple named their first child Harlan long before they considered moving there.

Marietta also had a sense of the region’s entrepreneurial potential. During his doctoral work at HGSE, he cofounded Giant Otter, a startup that developed anti-bullying software designed to make both a social impact and a profit. The company’s foreign-born coders, however, lacked the cultural competency to develop the conversational artificial intelligence engine that powered its anti-bullying software. So when a family friend suggested that Marietta use talent from eastern Kentucky instead, he promptly set up a pilot office in Letcher County, just northeast of Harlan, and hired four recent high school graduates who had completed a media production internship program at Appalshop, a local nonprofit dedicated to place-based media, arts, and education, to do the work.

“They were self-taught, and they were amazing. It really showed me the promise of the people of eastern Kentucky,” says Marietta, who later drew on the same talent pool to launch Mountain Tech Media, a digital marketing firm that provides design, branding, and technical services to businesses in the area.

Marietta also had an ideal mix of skills and experience. In addition to launching Giant Otter at HGSE, he founded a consultancy that helped schools across the country improve labor, management, and community relations; so he knew something about building trust and shoring up distressed educational institutions. The son of a nurse and a power plant worker raised in Hibbing, Minnesota—a mining town in the state’s Iron Range that is famous for being both the birthplace of Bob Dylan and the site of the world’s largest open-pit iron mine—Marietta also knew the scars that boom-and-bust cycles could leave on rural and postindustrial America. And having taught special education at a high school on New Mexico’s Navajo Nation reservation as part of Teach For America after finishing his undergraduate degree, he understood how widely distributed talent and potential really are, and how much an individual’s trajectory in life may depend on circumstances beyond his or her control. All of which gave him the kind of egalitarian temperament and innate respect for others that you just can’t fake.

At lunch in downtown Harlan, a Pine Mountain maintenance technician named T.J. Falce says this was obvious the first time he met Marietta.

At the time, Falce, who had previously worked as a mine electrician, was doing shift work at a manufacturing plant several hours away. His wife, Megan, a teacher at Pine Mountain, pressed him into helping Marietta and his family move into their new home, and it wasn’t long before Marietta hired him full-time—albeit with a qualification.

“I told him he wasn’t going to be here long term,” Marietta says in between bites of pizza. “I could tell he was entrepreneurially minded, and I told him he needed to start his own business”—which Falce ultimately did, launching a general contracting business after upgrading his carpentry and masonry skills through a historical conservation workshop that Marietta hosted at the school.

At that point, Falce—a native of the region with a dry wit—looked Marietta dead in the eye. “What struck me about you was you didn’t judge me.”

“Why would I?” Marietta asks, sputtering with incredulity. “You could have been me.”

That attitude, coupled with a penchant for transparency and consensus-building, helped Marietta earn much-needed goodwill as he set about rebuilding Pine Mountain. In short order, Marietta told his staff exactly what kinds of challenges Pine Mountain faced and how he planned to meet them; conducted a series of town hall meetings to reestablish trust with the community; and commissioned a strategic assessment to identify the school’s key strengths and weaknesses and establish a plan for moving forward.

Among other things, Marietta created a fundraising and development arm to take pressure off the school’s endowment; modernized the environmental education programs that are its primary moneymaker; upgraded its internet and Wi-Fi capabilities to attract conference and retreat groups; secured more than $1 million in grants to renovate the aging West Wind dormitory, provide technical assistance to local farmers, and establish a commercial kitchen that local growers can use to make value-added agricultural products; turned the gift shop into a showroom for local artisan crafts; and built the café.

At the same time, Marietta expanded the school’s partnership with the nonprofit Grow Appalachia, which combats food insecurity and malnutrition in the region by helping local residents cultivate their own food; and made Pine Mountain a guaranteed buyer of local produce. In addition, he enlisted Sky (who also earned a doctorate from HGSE) to relaunch the school’s early childhood program—once a model for the national Head Start initiative—while adding a USDA-funded summer feeding site component that offers free meals to local children. (Nearly 22 percent of Harlan County residents face food insecurity according to the nonprofit Feeding America, but many do not qualify for federal nutrition assistance.)

Over time, Marietta has also established a workforce pipeline to groom local interns and AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers for full-time positions at the school, where he pushes them to pursue postsecondary training. And he’s hired a number of ex-miners and other refugees from mining-related industries, helping them retrain for new careers or preparing them to launch their own businesses.

These projects were all designed to put the school back in the black while restoring its original purpose of improving the lives of students and community members through Appalachian place-based education and development. And it worked: The operating budget rose from $750,000 to $1 million, with only a third now coming from the endowment, and Marietta has increased his core staff from 19 to 27 (including 3 VISTA volunteers) while raising salaries. Meanwhile, he recently launched a traveling educational program that brings Pine Mountain’s environmental education curriculum into local schools, many of them in underprivileged and underserved communities. Overall, more than half the schools Pine Mountain serves fall below the poverty line, and many have populations that are more than 80 percent minority.

In and of themselves, those accomplishments would have been impressive enough. But once Pine Mountain was on solid footing, Marietta began spreading his efforts at revitalizing the local economy more broadly. Today, he maintains a stake in Mountain Tech Media and is transforming two vacant buildings in Harlan and the nearby town of Corbin into multiuse retail/coworking/residential spaces. Marietta also tirelessly coaches local business owners and entrepreneurs, advising the owner of a crafts store in downtown Harlan on payroll management one day and helping a local high school science teacher refine his pitch for a videocasting startup the next.

Building startups will soon be his full-time job: This fall, Marietta will step down as executive director of Pine Mountain to launch the first business incubator and pitch contest in eastern Kentucky. Funded by a $500,000 grant from the state’s largest private foundation, the new initiative will partner with the school and other regional nonprofits to recruit and develop entrepreneurs and business owners.

It’s the ideal position for a guy who is equal parts educator and entrepreneur. “If you rely on manufacturing or extractive industries, you do not build the capacity or the knowledge or the entrepreneurial skills necessary for a diversified economy,” says Marietta, who believes his most valuable contribution might be his ability to nurture in others the same entrepreneurial acumen that helped him succeed both in Cambridge and in Kentucky.

“At heart, I think I’m a teacher. But I also have a very financial, economic kind of mind—a business mind. And it’s business skills and aptitude that this region needs.”

Marietta’s work at Pine Mountain holds broader lessons for economic redevelopment in other parts of the country that have been battered by automation, globalization, and the shift away from manufacturing and extractive industries. “If I had my wish, it would be that other people could learn about the work that we’ve done here—learn from the mistakes that we have made, but also from the things that we are finding to be successful,” he says, while briefly coming to rest in his book-lined office, the shovel he used to break ground on the school’s dormitory renovation project leaning against the wall.

One of the lessons that Marietta learned is that there is no substitute for building on local strengths. In the case of Pine Mountain, those include the natural beauty of the campus and the traditional mountain culture that infuses the school’s offerings, from the workshops on beekeeping and pottery-making to the wood carvings and herbal products in the gift shop.

“It’s the oil that makes the engine move,” Marietta says of Appalachian culture. “It took over 150 years to develop, and it’s dependent on the geographic isolation and biodiversity of the area. You can’t replicate it.”

Another is that success depends on community support. Rural areas are not simply urban ones with more farms and fewer Starbucks: Their populations and talent pools are smaller. Their infrastructure, in terms of transportation (roads) and communication (broadband internet and cell phone service), is more limited. And they are relatively inaccessible: If you live in Harlan and want to hop a plane, for instance, you’ll have to drive two to three hours first. Consequently, building something that suits the local community’s size and needs is crucial.

Marietta himself discovered this by dint of hard experience. The local farmer’s market that Pine Mountain helped establish has struggled in part because it failed to focus on a sustainable niche—namely, conscientious consumers seeking high-quality, locally grown produce. An industrial hemp-growing project he undertook under license by the Kentucky Department of Agriculture failed in part because the fabric designer who had signed on to craft high-end artisanal hemp-based clothing decamped for Los Angeles. But the café he built at Pine Mountain met a local need and was perfectly scaled to local demand. As a result, it has been packed with community members from the outset and continues to provide local students with their first real jobs.

Those mixed results illustrate another lesson: Like entrepreneurs everywhere, those in small towns and rural communities must be nimble and have a high tolerance for failure. HBS senior fellow Allen Grossman, who worked with Marietta at PELP, sees social enterprises like Pine Mountain as laboratories for experimentation, as does Marietta, who describes the school as a test bed for pilot projects. If they fail, like the hemp foray, he moves on. If they succeed, he sees how far he can take them.

That, in turn, suggests something else: When seeking a solution for the problems facing rural and postindustrial America, cast a wide net.

“It doesn’t have to be one thing, it could be many things,” says senior lecturer and PELP cochair John Jong-Hyun Kim, whose daughter performed community service at Pine Mountain during her gap year. In its variety, he adds, Marietta’s multifaceted approach may provide “a great model for other efforts to rejuvenate rural areas that have been blighted by changes in industry.”

Finally, Marietta says the lack of resources and infrastructure means that anyone committed to growing local enterprises and organizational capacity beyond the big city must be prepared to tackle several problems at once.

Leaning back in his chair, his desk littered with papers and a full email in-box glaring at him from a flat-screen computer monitor, Marietta pauses for a moment to consider the bewildering array of tasks he has had to manage since coming to Pine Mountain. At no juncture, he says, did he have the luxury of addressing just one pressing need, just one hot-button item, at a time.

“You’ve got to build everything at the same time,” he says. “You’ve got to build the pipeline, you’ve got to generate income—you’ve got to do it all.”

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