The PA Wilds Center for Entrepreneurship has received a $387,500 grant to work with partners to research and plan a mobile app to promote tourism in the PA Wilds and in southeast Ohio.
The grant for the “Mobile Platform Development to Advance Rural Tourism Economies” project is being funded through Appalachian Regional Commission’s ARISE Initiative, which is designed to drive large-scale, regional economic transformation through multi-state collaborative projects across Appalachia.
The PA Wilds Center is partnering on the project with the Outdoor Recreation Council of Appalachia (ORCA), a council of governments that serves multiple rural counties in southeast Ohio and is home to the Baileys Trail System. PA Wilds Center founder and CEO Ta Enos said she is grateful to ARC and other partners for investing in the project.
“The PA Wilds is not the only region that is working to grow its outdoor recreation and tourism sectors in an intentional way that supports local businesses, inspires stewardship, helps attract workforce, keeps more dollars in the rural economy longer, and similar goals,” Enos said. “Many communities across Appalachia are championing similar efforts. We’ve seen from our own work in the PA Wilds, and in talking with our peers across Appalachia, that there are gaps and barriers in the tools and technology available to rural areas for advancing this kind of work in the 21st Century.”
Based on the early R&D, the Center and ORCA are looking at the feasibility of a progressive web app platform with functionalities across six main areas: supporting a region’s efforts to grow visitation; advancing local supply chains and business-to-business sales; harnessing impact data to help inform local economic development strategies and decision-making; supporting stewardship causes; improving access to capital for small businesses; and helping to recruit workforce.
“We’re thrilled and honored to partner with the PA Wilds led team on this innovative project,” said Jessie Powers, the executive director of ORCA. “ORCA’s partners representing 17 Ohio counties and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources are excited to investigate integration of strategic app functionalities to accelerate growth and sustain our respective rural economies.”
Enos said the early vision is to build a tool that empowers locally led rural outdoor recreation and tourism strategies and local businesses and one that leverages and accelerates the incredible ground-level development already happening in many communities across Appalachia.
The Center and ORCA will complete six plans over the next 18 months with the ARISE planning grant: a master business plan, ownership structure and standards of practice plan, a research and development cost analysis of each new functionality, a third party review of the cost analysis and scaling plans, a user adoption playbook, and a user adoption guide for partnerships. The development of the progressive web app itself will take place during a different stage of the project, using other funding. ARISE planning projects are eligible to compete for $10 million in implementation funds.
Ultimately, Enos said, the goal is to use the findings from the planning grant to attract investment to develop the new technology, with the pilot rollout occurring in the PA Wilds, Southeast Ohio and possibly other regions in Appalachia identified during the planning process. But first, she said, they need to see what the market and cost analysis shows.
“After doing this work for fifteen years, I am more convinced than ever that if we want a mobile platform solution that actually works for rural in a big way, its design is going to have to emanate out of rural,” Enos said.
The ARISE planning grant is being matched with $133,000 in state funds from the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, a foundational investor in the PA Wilds work, and $125,500 in local funds, bringing the total project funding to $646,000. This includes funding from the Ohio Recreation Council of Appalachia, the Richard King Mellon Foundation,
