2025 Annual Gathering Recap

In late April 2025, the Appalachia Funders Network came together for its Annual Gathering. In the Network's 15th year, the event served as both a reflection on our founding purpose, to accelerate a Just Transition, and a recommitment to that charge. As we considered how far our communities and the philanthropic ecosystem have come since 2010, we returned to a central question: how do we ensure the continued Appalachian transition is just?

With 175 attendees representing over 100 organizations, our largest to date, the Gathering was a rendering of Appalachian self-determination following a string of devastating climate events across the region, and amid widespread uncertainty and disruptions to funding at multiple levels.

Thus set the stage for the 2025 AFN Annual Gathering, the backdrop being the Historic Bristol Hotel and Birthplace of Country Music. Both were revitalized in part through New Markets Tax Credits secured by some of our own members, and as such the event embodied the region's potential. Together, funders, investors, artists, cultural organizers, and local leaders from across the region and nation spent time in the community, exploring innovative efforts driving change. Bristol itself embodies the regional collaboration that has long been required for Appalachians to exist – a city that crosses both the Tennessee and Virginia borders.

Our Pre-Convening focused on Faith, Philanthropy, and Third Spaces, during which we meditated on the intersections of, and important opportunities in faith communities, community-driven redevelopment, and creative space reuse to build civic infrastructure throughout our region. We learned about projects like the country's first fully digital, non-federally subsidized PBS station and the reimagining of Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, Ohio's oldest surviving antebellum Black church, as a community-led historic site and cultural center. We were told the rich history of place, of Bristol's Historic Black Bottom in the footprint of the hotel, and how the retelling of it is empowering a new generation. All these stories reminded us of the deep link between economic development, culture, and civic engagement, and the power of place-based leadership to inspire transformation.

Our 2025 theme, Building Bridges: Tradition, Transition, and Transformation in Central Appalachia, centered the moment we are in, the legacy we inherit, and the collective work ahead. We recognized that to move from extraction to equity, we must build bridges that connect our histories to our futures and place communities at the center of that work.

This Gathering, like those before it, was more than a conference. True to its name and our region's tradition, we gathered. We sang and danced. We held medicinal herbs in our hands. We made tea from those herbs. We broke bread, eating well enough to make any mamaw proud, and celebrated Appalachian foodways reimagined. We experienced Appalachian art in its many forms, traditional and contemporary, and listened to music live in the Birthplace of Country Music.

We talked about mutual aid, care, and resilience in the face of intensifying climate crises and chronic disinvestment. We lifted up solutions already taking root and celebrated their success. And we dared to look beyond the horizon, not just imagining what a Just Transition could look like, but actively shaping a future defined by equity, vibrancy, and community-led prosperity. A future that has place for joy.

Above all, we asked: how do we get there? And we continued the work to answer, together.