Before there was a flagship program, there were conversations with the people who lead rural places. In Corbin, Kentucky, RGI held information sessions with rural and regional leaders, making the case that the remote-work era gives Appalachia and the rural South a real chance to reverse decades of population decline.
Drawing on RGI's remote-worker research in Virginia and South Carolina, the sessions walked leaders through the data — how population has shifted across the region, and what a single new remote household can mean for a recovering community: a household earning $100,000 represents an estimated $47,000 in new annual local economic output.
These early briefings were foundational. The ideas they advanced and the relationships they built helped lead, in time, to the creation of Project Hometown SC — RGI's multi-town resident- and remote-worker-attraction initiative in South Carolina.
