About
About ICS
Innovative Community Solutions is a West Virginia nonprofit that helps communities protect and interpret their own history. We work in the places where the record is thin and the stakes are high — unmarked cemeteries, disappearing structures, oral histories still held in living memory, and public interpretation that has left whole populations out of the story. Our job is rarely to speak for a community. It is to build the research, the partnerships, the documentation, and the organizational footing that let a community speak for itself, with authority, and be taken seriously when it does.
That work now runs through Appalachian Roots, our framework for community-led heritage across the region, and through the Affrilachian Trail®, its flagship initiative centering Black Appalachian history and public memory. Both grew out of something older.
On this page
How the work evolved
ICS started as a community development organization. We worked on entrepreneurship, access to capital, and inclusive economic opportunity — particularly for veterans, women, and young people in the Eastern Panhandle who were locked out of conventional pathways. We learned the machinery of that world: how grants are structured, how institutions decide who is credible, who gets consulted, and who gets studied.
That education turned out to be the point. Because the more time we spent in these communities, the clearer a second kind of loss became. Land was leaving families through heirs’ property and tax sales. Cemeteries were being mowed over or forgotten. Buildings with a century of meaning in them were being condemned. Elders were passing and their accounts were going with them. And the region’s public history — the markers, the museums, the school units, the tourism copy — kept describing an Appalachia that many of our neighbors could not find themselves in.
None of that was fixable with a business plan. It required research, documentation, preservation strategy, interpretive skill, and the patience to build institutional relationships that did not extract. So ICS grew into that work rather than away from what came before. The earlier programming was not a false start. It was the training.
“Economic tools could not recover what these communities were losing. So we learned different tools.”
Why heritage, and why now
Heritage work is often treated as sentimental — a nice thing to do once the serious problems are handled. In practice it is one of the most concrete forms of community power available. What is documented can be protected. What is interpreted shapes what a place believes about itself. What is designated affects land use, development pressure, tourism revenue, and who gets a seat when decisions are made. Preservation is not a museum activity. It is a claim on the present.
There is also a timing problem that will not wait. The people who remember the schools, the churches, the work, the segregation, and the resistance are in their eighties and nineties. The records that survived are in attics and church basements, not archives. The window for doing this work with primary sources still living is closing, and closing unevenly — fastest in exactly the communities whose histories were least documented in the first place.
What we hold to
Community authority
The people who carry a history are the authority on it. Our research supports their interpretation; it does not replace it. When we disagree with a community about their own story, they win.
Non-extractive partnership
Recordings, photographs, transcripts, and research products belong with the communities and families that made them possible. Institutional partners get access on terms the community sets, in writing, before the work begins.
Rigor
Community-led does not mean loosely sourced. We hold our documentation, citations, and interpretive claims to a standard that survives scrutiny from historians, agencies, and skeptics alike — because our partners are the ones who will be questioned.
Durability
We plan past the grant. Every project is built to leave behind something the community still controls when the funding cycle ends: records, agreements, skills, or standing.
Where we work
ICS is based in Inwood, West Virginia, with deep roots in the Eastern Panhandle — Berkeley and Jefferson counties in particular, where much of our fieldwork, partnership, and interpretive work is concentrated. Appalachian Roots is regional in scope by design, and our projects extend outward through partnerships across the broader Appalachian region.
Work with us
If your community is holding a site, a story, or a question that deserves more than it is getting, start
there. That is usually how our best projects begin.
there. That is usually how our best projects begin.