July 2, 2026 - At the West Edge Factory in Huntington, West Virginia, a former industrial clothing factory has become a vibrant community hub that supports multiple local initiatives. The building now houses local art displays upstairs, logistics management and t-shirt manufacturing along the main hallway, a food-growing space for the community, a basement black box theater, and a main event space alive with activity from crew members and program graduates. 

This reimagined hub is home to Coalfield Development, a 501(c)(3) in West Virginia whose mission is to “empower the people who have been cast aside to transform the places that have been left behind.” Building on the dynamic environment described above, our visit to this site to experience Coalfield’s Workforce Readiness and Professional Success (WRAPS) program graduation was influential in the development of our capstone research Policy Analysis Exercise, “From Replication to Results: Measuring WRAPS’ Role in Rebuilding the Appalachian Economy,” which looked at Coalfield’s WRAPS program replication across Coalfield’s partner network.   

Rebuilding the Appalachian Economy 

Appalachia spans 420 counties across 13 states and is home to more than 25 million people. For generations, the region powered America. After the Civil War sent coal prices soaring, mining companies poured into the mountains, and between 1880 and 1920 Central Appalachia's population swelled from roughly 2.5 million to over 4 million. By the 1920s, coal supplied 63% of the nation's energy, fueling steel and shipping. 

However, the coal economy eventually collapsed. U.S. production peaked in 2008 and fell by more than half between 2001 and 2021; in Appalachia, output dropped 64%. Cheap natural gas from the fracking boom, mechanized mining that slashed labor needs, and tightening regulation all accelerated the decline. Institutional responses lagged, leaving communities without alternatives. West Virginia's educational attainment still trails the national average, and the gap has widened since 2000.

Workforce development attempts to give workers the skills that are needed by current and future businesses to give them the best chance at employment while meeting employers' needs for skilled labor. Coalfield Development, founded in Huntington in 2009 by Brandon Dennison, had a goal of building "resilient" rural communities anchored by diverse, thriving local economies. Coalfield runs real businesses such as rehabbing abandoned buildings, apparel manufacturing, local food production, that double as training grounds and reinvest revenue locally.

Once a major transportation hub for the region's coalfields, Huntington suffered significant economic and social decline as the mines shut down, making it emblematic of the broader challenges facing the region. Huntington additionally became a focal point of the opioid crisis as pharmaceutical companies concentrated marketing and distribution efforts in regions with high rates of workplace injury, chronic pain, and economic hardship: conditions Huntington embodied acutely. 

Since 2009, Coalfield has created more than 1,200 jobs and renovated hundreds of thousands of square feet of property in rural West Virginia. Coalfield’s flagship workforce development model, Crew Membership, offers up to three years of training through 33 hours of work, 6 hours of higher education coursework, and 3 hours of personal development weekly. WRAPS offers an entry-point for participants through a similar six-month model. Understanding that trusted local nonprofits can reach people and places that a single organization cannot, Coalfield began working with a network of partner nonprofits in West Virginia to replicate WRAPS in 2017. WRAPS Partners are distributed throughout the state, and many pursue missions beyond economic and workforce development, including substance abuse recovery, support for foster care transitions, and strengthening local food systems. 

Our research focused on how Coalfield and its partners can work together to evaluate and communicate the impact of WRAPS across contexts. We focused on three questions: What should the core metrics of success be for WRAPS? What barriers do partners face when trying to evaluate WRAPS programs? And what systems would help partners collect, store, share, and learn from information? To answer these questions, we interviewed Coalfield staff, WRAPS partners, and national workforce experts, examined workforce development evaluation literature, and visited Coalfield and several partners on site.

What we found 

Existing research suggests that targeted, sector-specific training can boost earnings. The gains can be substantial: reviewing four major randomized evaluations, Katz et al. (2022) find earnings increases of 12-34% that persist five to six years after training. The decisive factor is not simply getting people employed but placing them in higher-wage industries, paired with wraparound support and strong employer relationships.

But the strongest evidence comes with a catch. The best-studied programs screened out most applicants (Katz et al., 2022; Schaberg and Greenberg, 2020), meaning their participants were far more job-ready than the populations Coalfield serves. By refusing to screen people out and placing personal development at the center of its model, Coalfield is built to reach exactly the people in the evidence base leaves behind.

There is significant opportunity with Coalfield and its partners to expand the workforce system research and evaluation base. The below core findings outline gaps and opportunities to measure WRAPS replication:

What should the core metrics of success be for WRAPS? 

Building the capacity of West Virginia’s nonprofit ecosystem is critical and is a core goal of WRAPS replication. WRAPS Partners often do a lot with very little, with Executive Directors balancing direct service and resorting to creative but insufficient data collection mechanisms such as daily Facebook updates from volunteers. 

At the national level, intermediaries supporting program replication typically measure success either in terms of person-level or organizational impact. Coalfield cares about measuring both, reflecting its dual goals of serving individuals and building partner capacity.

Workforce development literature shows commonly tracked measures across logic model frameworks such as employment, wages, educational attainment, benefits receipt, and legal system involvement. Partners also emphasized confidence, self-direction, and the importance of allowing participants to define success on their own terms.

What barriers do partners face when trying to evaluate WRAPS programs?

Capacity is the binding constraint for evaluation, with partners overwhelmingly believing in the importance of data collection but lacking the staff and skills to maintain data systems. No partner organization has a dedicated data or evaluation staff member. Constraints have only tightened with recent federal funding losses and government shutdowns that pull partners into crisis mode.

Some of the most meaningful outcomes are the hardest to count. Partners can often track who participated and what happened during the program, but long-term employment, earnings, alumni trajectories, and broader community ripple effects are much harder to measure quantitatively and may burden participants.

Partners adapt WRAPS to different missions, populations, capacities, and local contexts, making the program more responsive to local needs but making shared measurement more difficult. For WRAPS, the challenge is adapting this structure to partners with varying activities, outputs, and outcome goals.

What systems would help partners collect, store, share, and learn from information?

Flexibility and adaptability are central to the WRAPS model, however, Coalfield has limited visibility into the details of replication models, which creates a tension in reaching tangible and future program evaluation. While partners need flexibility in program replication to meet the needs of their community, Coalfield should balance this with program outcomes and evaluation. Case studies of workforce development organizations that operate affiliate models show that a centralized data system and technical assistance is successful in supporting shared data collection and evaluation.

There is interest in a long-term data collection and governance system that supports community engagement, such as alumni engagement, and aids program decision-making rather than just for funding proposals and program evaluation.

Takeaways 

For nonprofits similar to Coalfield and its partners, data and evaluation should support learning and capacity, not just reporting. We recommended prioritizing a small set of shared participant and organizational metrics, common infrastructure like data collection and management tools, technical assistance, and opportunities to benefit participants in an evaluation strategy through strategies like a shared alumni network. 

For policymakers and funders, data capacity should be thought of as program capacity. Shared alumni follow-up, incentives to build partnerships across nonprofits serving the same individuals, and links with public workforce and education data systems would help Coalfield, its partners, and place-based policymakers to better understand long-term outcomes by enabling frontline organizations.

Coalfield and its WRAPS Partners show the power of community-led economic development. These efforts appear to do more than prepare people for work: they help participants build confidence, communities build capacity, and places imagine a future beyond extraction. An evaluation strategy that captures these strengths can help Coalfield, WRAPS Partners, and similar place-based efforts learn, improve, and grow. 

We are deeply grateful to Coalfield Development, the WRAPS Partners, and our faculty advisors at HKS who generously shared their time, experiences, and insights with us throughout this research.