"It's about the person."

It's not easy to write about the region where you grew up. This past week I thought frequently of the Yiddish parable that Professor Marshall Ganz used frequently in our community organizing class - "Who discovered water? We don't know, but it certainly was not the fish." When you have grown up shaped by a region, it's a challenge to uncover the deep currents running under that region - an even greater challenge to determine how best to channel them.

Growing up in Salem, Virginia in the early 2000s, my friends and I had always heard that the cities, towns, and counties to our Southeast were on the brink of crisis. Just beyond the Roanoke Valley and through the rolling hills at the foot of the Appalachian mountains, we knew there were silent giants in the mists of Bassett and Martinsville - smokestacks of factories that had shut down long ago, sending thousands of workers away with children to feed and no clear road to a new job. Years later, when I worked in Governor Kaine's Constituent Services Office at the start of the Great Recession, we heard far too many stories of expiring unemployment benefits and proud breadwinners having to ask for help. Far too many of these calls came from Southside.

The stories were tragic, vivid, and anyone who wants to understand the region has to know them. We were fortunate on our trip to hear the incredible reporting and research of Roanoke Times reporter Beth Macy, working on her upcoming book on one of these manufacturing giants, Bassett Furniture and the people in the town of the same name. I also managed to drag with me from town to town a copy of Dale Maharidge's and Michael Williamson's amazing book Someplace Like America: Tales From the New Great Depression. Like Macy, Maharidge and Williamson brought to life vignettes of the human tragedy of the economic transformation of the past three decades. Tragedy isn't the full story of course, but we shouldn't pretend to understand economic transitions without bearing witness to the stories of those lost in transit - those, like the title of Maharidge's previous work, who found themselves left out of the new economy and stuck on a road to nowhere.

How do you rebuild an entire region? That was the question on my mind from the moment this trip started, and the answer came at a lunch at Patrick Henry Community College on Thursday. Student Body President Melvin Johnson is a former truck driver from Baltimore who, having driven through countless regions, chose to park once and for all in Southern Virginia. In the course of telling us his powerful, personal story, he told us, "Growth isn't about a place; it's about a person." In other words, revitalization of these communities had to focus on the people themselves, on investing in human capital. As we heard many times, the region did not want to incentivize another factory to set roots into town that would simply leave once those incentives disappeared. Melvin had captured perfectly the policy response to the shifting American economy and the decline of the American manufacturing sector. Invest in your people.

The trip laid out a beautiful range of examples for Melvin's summary. I'll briefly touch on four:

First - education. One of my fellow classmates, Alejandro, made a powerful point. In every single meeting, whether professional or political - every leader focused on the importance of investing in education. Martinsville, and its partner in development, the Harvest Foundation, have invested millions of dollars in the New College Institute so that Martinsville residents can get a bachelor's degree, master's degree, or certificate without leaving the area. In neighboring Danville, they built a gleaming monument to advanced study known as the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research. Measured by investment, education has become a huge focus of local leadership.

Second - lowering the barriers for entrepreneurship. Whether in Virginia Tech's KnowledgeWorks or Danville's small business incubator (currently at full capacity), or Martinsville's incubator (currently at 85% capacity), local governments in partnership with educational institutions are investing in hubs of entrepreneurial spirit - where new businesses can get off the ground and potentially swap ideas and inspiration.

Third - protecting home-grown businesses. We saw this most vividly in Floyd, where our attempt to get pizza from a chain was politely corrected - because it was a chain. Whether by rebuffing the expansion of chains, or by boosting local businesses, the belief that each dollar spent in a local store as opposed to a chain (a higher multiplier effect for the Econs out there) was widespread and widely accepted.

Finally - the retraining of the former manufacturing workforce. At Melvin's school, Patrick Henry Community College, the average age is 27 (I won't disclose Melvin's age without his consent, but suffice it to say he's above average in many respects). The schools in this region are overwhelmingly open for former plant and factory workers looking to retrain. And with federal programs like Trade Adjustment Assistance through the Department of Labor, many of those workers can receive federal assistance to get the skills they need for today's job market in Southside.

The investment in human capital was astounding and powerful, but it certainly isn't perfect. There are far too many older workers caught at the worst moment in this transition. They find themselves too old for retraining, and too young or too poor to retire. And the Virginia social safety net has some particularly wide holes - to be eligible for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, an adult without children cannot make more than $8,940 in an entire year. And the jobs in this new economy lack the stability and security that was a staple of this region in the heyday of American manufacturing. While investing in the next generation of Southwest Virginia entrepreneurs, the Commonwealth should make sure it takes care of the previous generation and builds a secure net to catch those entrepreneurs who take the jump and fall short.

Leanna, one of the leaders behind Martinsville's New College Institute, talked about the nontraditional approaches this area of Virginia is taking as it rebuilds. "If we just thought in the box of what an economist thought we should be," Leanna told us, "We just wouldn't be here." Instead, this part of Virginia has chosen to invest resources in its people - spending money on education, incubating small businesses, protecting home-grown entrepreneurs, and retraining workers for the jobs ahead. It's a truly democratic form of economic revitalization. Leaders are spending money not to recruit some larger manufacturing firm, but to give each and every citizen a powerful education and the skills to attract new jobs or even create their own. Though the smokestacks of Southern Virginia have gone quiet, the classrooms and office hallways are livelier than ever.

----
A quick note of thanks - to Hy and Dan for organizing an incredible experience, and to every single person who packed into that fifteen-passenger van with me all week. There's no better way to "discover the water" of your own home than a guided tour with some brilliant, insightful, and hilarious friends.