Building on its remote-worker studies in Virginia and South Carolina, RGI developed EKY Remote — a concept for Eastern Kentucky's first dedicated remote-worker attraction program — in support of SOAR (Shaping Our Appalachian Region).
The work modeled the local economic impact of attracting remote professionals to recovering coal communities: for example, a single household earning $100,000 relocating to Harlan County represents an estimated $47,000 in new annual economic output, with comparable projections across Pike, Letcher, Floyd, and Johnson counties. It's a data-driven case that the remote-work era can help repopulate the places hardest hit by the energy transition.
