We have more people arriving but they will be uh sherdsherd. I want to thank you for joining us today for this lunch of our lunchtime dialogue series americas rural opportunity, i want to thank all the people in the room, as well as hundreds of people livestreaming and those watching live on cspan3. I wonder how many there are. I am jeanette executive director of the Aspen Institute director, we do a lot of work out in the country connecting, motivating and equipping local leaders to build more prosperous regions and advance those living on the economic margins, since 1985 Aspen Institute has focused most of its work in Rural America and through our experience over those years we have learned full well that Rural America is not fly ovover country, rather live in, work in, start a business in, and raise a family in country, recent media headlines have focused on the decline of critical sectors, Community Health crisis and more. It reveals an important but less publicized invasion and collaborative local invasions to turn challenges into opportunities. So to launch this series today we wanted to highlight just three representative stories of innovation, were happy to be joined by the people you see on the podium. Entr entrepreneurs, and partners with them and deeply engaged in Economic Development. Before we get their stories and insights you should way i want to introduce president of the northern four center. Hes going to tell you what that group is. Rob. [ applause ] thanks, janet and thank you all for joining us today. Im president of the northern four center. The center works across the 30 million acre in Northern New England and upstate new york, building economic and Community Vitality while fostering sound stewardship. Our work over the past twenty years has focused on local communities to transition a Rural Economy once dominated by one sole industry, pulp an paper, to one that can capitalize on a industry, but secure prosperity that capitalize on our Natural Resource base, its been long and painful but also very inspiring. Back in late 2015 on the ververa verranda, anybody been there . Thank you, thank you, we would like you to come back. The idea of the Rural Innovation Group was born. It was a need to focus more on Rural Development. We are tired if not exhausted by the story line that janet mentioned of challenge and economic stress and wanted to create a new narrative, as a National Asset that it is, while at the same time acknowledging a need for effective investment and innovation to unleash potential opportunity. The u. S. Endowment for foresting communities we recruited a group of rural innovators to meet for a year and has been almost a year to provide expert advice to accelerate the impact of our own work, identify emerging opportunities for the rural and collectively Learn Together and now highlighting and hoping to inspire Public Sector and fillen throp i can sectors. The Innovation Group has invested their time and hard work, the really hard work they do back at home with the work they do there, raising up practices to support rural opportunity. Lastly i do want to say on a slightly sentimental tone but one laden with ultimate practicality is that this is very personal work for many of us. Personally i grew up working on my familys farm in southern vermont that was hewned, i wondered what the future might be for my family and my community. I know im not alone with those challenges of what the future brings to improve rural places so thank you all for being here. Janet. [ applause ] thank you, rob. And we do want to acknowledge and thank several organizations for their inaugural support of this series besides our own group, these include the northern four center, the u. S. Endowment, the Lower Foundation which partners in the inner Mountain West and includes all of whom have contributed significant time and effort. If youre not in the room out there in the twitter, you can use rural innovatiinnovation r. If you have a question and not in the room, we have someone monitoring, so when we have a q and a session, we will get to you, visit us at as. N rural. Im going to use been there done that journalist, ray suarez, was al jazeeras daily news program, he spent 14 years in pbs hour and talk of the nation, ray, here is your chance to talk with innovators from our rural nation. Thank you very much. [ applause ] i want to apologize at the out sset of the stair yo typical but who else would you invite to do this than a puri puerto rican guy from brooklyn, but this is a topic of vital importance to me as well as to the country, so happy to be here. Of all the splits and tears in the National Civic fabric there are few as vast and wide k between those between the metropolitan counties and Rural Counties, hardens, solidifies the lines and i think even the hardest of hard core urbanurban. Places that are able to provide for themselves and the people who make their homes there, School Systems need to be funded. Roads need to be maintained. Courts and sheriffs departments need their employees paid. They are places of accumulated capital that needs to be maintained and for that to happen people need another microphone. And for that to happen people need to be able to thrive in those places and as we have heard, there are great ideas, great ideas working in Rural Counties and they are represented by my guests here today. To kick us off well start with the Appalachian Partnership for economic growth. Thank you very much. Very pleased to be here today. Im going to start by telling you a little bit about our region, we are a third of ohio that nobody thinks about. About 18,000 square miles, heavily forested resource rich country. We culturally and our population both the way you may think about an appalachian population, one that struggles with poverty, immigrants, as well as very substantial and expanding amish population. The economy of appalachian ohio has always been focused on resource extraction and manufacturing, and thats still true today. We have gone through periods where our timber, our clay to make bricks, iron, ore, and bidding cities in the east today shell natural gas continues to play a huge role and seeing in timber industry, it is mixed in with highly skilled manufacturing workers and artisans trying to cope with the erosion of jobs in factories and industries in the region and were beginning to see a rebirth. The coal and steel jobs have mostly been lost but being replaced by the shell gas industry, and in a resurgent of Wood Products industry. Our story is going to focus on that, our fine appalachian hard woods that we grow there because of some economic displacements in the Great Recession we just came through are no longer primarily used in the region, 80 are exported. Mike workman from contracts furniture in mcconnellsville is taking that on and driving more value back into our communities through higher value forced use of those products. Thank you. This is a 20year story thats hard to tell in five minutes, but ill do the best that i can. I worked for a furniture manufacturer in south eastern ohio about 20 years and in 1994 the company was sold by our Investment Banking firm who owned us to a Regional Bank in cincinnati, the reason it bought all the assets of the Investment Company was to get a seat on the new york stock exchange, but not interested in manufacturing, nothing to do with it. As a result in 1995 they closed our factory and put 160 workers including myself all on the street, without jobs, including myself, and i thought im going to start my own business. That was in 1996, my partner and i in our little town of mcconnellsville purchased some of the equipment and started manufacturing stools and hired three employees from our previous employer and we went into store production immediately and it was a very easy business. It was almost like a hair pin. There wasnt a lot to go wrong with this product. So life was good from 19972002 we concentrated just on stool production, and in 2003, i go to a call from a gentlemen most of you have heard of, his name is chuck williams, hes the founder of williams sonoma, and ive gotten to know chuck over the years of business, and he said workman, what are you doing . I said well, were making stools for you, life is good, shipping these to you every week and really enjoying life and he said well, workman, i want some tables and i said chuck, we dont do tables, were just doing the stools for you. He says youre not hearing me. He said i want tables and i want you to do them. I said okay, give me a couple weeks, chuck. So i knew a lot of people in the industry and went through my list of people in appalachia who were small manufacturers, backwoods people, not interested in marketing, not interested in Product Development or in sales and i asked them if they would be sbreinterested in making cum furniture for me and say they had yes, they would be very interested in doing that, so between 20052009 we put 20 factories in the region to do Custom Furniture and in 2004 chuck had asked me to do cabinets as well, so the answer was the same, ill figure this out. In 2010, i got a call from eric berkman the president of the ohios Manufacturer Association and he asked if i would go to the amish country, they werent really interested they were only interested in manufacturing furniture, so i gave them some tips to find out about the business, steered them on the right course, and then eric asked me on the way home, well what did you think . And i said, i see a big opportunity here, eric, that i think what you should do is network these people and brand it. Think chiquita banana and he looked at me and said why dont you do it. So eric set up a meeting with the Ohio Department of development. Received some money to vet this whole idea of working and were looking at what model are we going to use here, how are we going to organize this . We decided to organize it as a hub and spokes system and its be been operating since 2011, our annual revenue has green by 15 a year in the last six years, our goal by 2020 is to increase it by an additional 6 million. And so far impacted 300 income workers and created 100 new jobs from this effort. [ applause ] so, i think that the story that mike tells has a couple of really telling points. First it was the local entrepreneurial shi entrepreneurial spirit that made this work, but second there was assistance required. So channelled through the state of ohio helped pay for pulling together the plan to pull together these companies. Subsequent to that theres been additional manufacturing support thats helped with work force training. Mike mentioned there are 100 new workers, someone had to train them specifically in these industries. Manufacturing extension helped with that. Weve also gotten some department of labor funds to help with skill upgrades and Going Forward this is plugged into a larger Cluster Initiative found on mikes work to drive more value in the cluster work and back in ohio so that innovation cluster is something it supports like aero space and advanced energy. Were focused on the products that we have been making since people lived in caves. Thank you for coming in on time. Its an example much to be emulated by other panels. From ohio well move next to the state of oregon. And well hear from neil chris tofers christofers christoferson. Our story a little different, it addresses the challenges of Forest Restoration and job creation across the rural west and the invasion were going to talk about emerged in northeast oregon a threecounty area nearly the size of new jersey will less than 50,000 people. More than 50 falls within the National Forest. Our communities in that area have always been tied to the land where isolated communities very far from urban innocents and markets but rich in Human Capital. There may not be many of us but a wealth of skills and knowledge and enduring work commitment and to land stewardship. The forest and Wood Products sector used to be the highest sector payroll provider in the region are, providing very high wages and good private health insurance. Most of those jobs were lost in 1995 when the mill shut down. Following dramatic reductions in forest harvests, schools were shut down, people laid off. Its not just another story about a mill closure, its about the decline and condition and function of our National Forests. In 1995, fire made up 16 of the forest annual budget. Last year it consumed over 50 of the annual budget. 1. 3 billion were spent fighting fire, in some of the largest the costs exceed a Million Dollars an hour. Left unchecked the situation will worsen. In just ten years predicted two out of every three dollars from congress will be spent on fire programs. Those come at a cost of the rest of the agencys programs. The restoration work thats needed to reduce the risk of fire is cut as well as protection of water sheds, wildlife, cultural resources, up keep of frominfrastructure, and others. Its a new Business Model that converts the biproducts, into r Renewable Energy and provides a new market and reduce the threat of fire, it highlights an important Public Policy and investment opportunity. One that generates significant local, and National Economic and environmental returns. Its an example of Rural Development opportunity offered by a renewed investment and land stewardship. To give that story, im going to hand it over to David Schmidt. The coowners of in oregon. Thank you. We have been working on this together for quite some time, over ten years, and seven years ago jesse and i moved to start this business along side with his organization and really start addressing the challenges that he spoke about. So one of the questions we were asked was what cattal lized our innovation . Changing forest conditions, the need for markets to be able to pay for the way for that Forest Restoration to be done. As mentioned lack of budget ares require we find market incentives to do that, so it was an ecological need but economic need. How do you chief to be able to pay for the material to get its way out. So that was one of the drivers, federal land managers dont have the money to do it without the revenue from biproducts, then as we started to address that problem, another problem of the economy comes into play. What to you do with a broad range of materials . So youre restoring the forest, removing mostly small diameter timber, diseased timber, dying timber, trying to get our forest back into a healthy situation, so its not just a material that you have to find value from, its a wide range of material and not just one product that can fix that. So as we started to look at and how do we innovate around this problem, part of the challenge was part of the products people looking at is how do we roll this to electricity because can make most of it into one product. Or lots was put into biomass ethanol. None were actually getting it done. We knew we had to have smaller added value products. Thats where our business, innovation started, we looked at opportunities to be able to take a mixed basket of wood and have multiple value added products. So we started looking around the count country, i saw lots of good examples across the west, post and poll mills, making agricultural products, firewood taking dying and diseased trees and making it into bundled firewood. Some small sawmills going in, taking some of the material and making timber, the problem was none was addressing the bigger issue of combining them all together. All have waste and inefficiencies, so our invasion is looking at it and not going at it from the economies of scale perspective but what we call economy of integration, so what are the benefits of integration in reducing costs by reducing handling, avoiding r replicating costs, if we are replicating have a yard, sorting the logs, you end up with replicating infrastructure costs, then also increasing Revenue Streams by having multiple products which helped us address some of the other issues, season nalt and other variable markets. We wanted to have an integrated facility to take care of those i think things. 2007 we started buying with we started taking their residuals and making them into dense heat logs for heating systems, soon we realized that still wasnt addressing the issue, we knew we needed to get on one sight and get this integrated together. So we worked to purchase the last existing mill sight, and started to build on an operation where we take in material, mixed material, to recuse the dduce t the woods. We have five products, we reduce handling costs because it never is handled again by Big Equipment until its in one of those five finished products so we sort out saw logs, were lucky enough to still have a regional bill and sort out small diameter timber, make bundled firework and use a new modern cogen system to create heat for our kilns where we heat treat all of our firewood to sell pest free firewood, so were using every bit of the product, not only are we creating extra efficiencies