‘Work Is Dignity’ – Inside Huntington’s Recovery-to-Economic-Development Pipeline.

“Work is dignity.”

That’s how Brandon Dennison, founder of Coalfield Development and now head of Workforce and Economic Development at Marshall University, explained it last month at CEG’s Syndemic Summit in Huntington. It wasn’t the plan for Dennison’s workforce nonprofit to end up doing recovery work, but it became something closer to a recovery organization once it was clear that finding steady employment was one of the biggest barriers people faced coming out of addiction, a gap in the system Coalfield set out to close.

“For long-term recovery, [employment is] such a key piece of the puzzle,” Dennison said. “And not enough people have access to that dignity in Appalachia.”

“For long-term recovery, [employment is] such a key piece of the puzzle. And not enough people have access to that dignity in Appalachia.”

– Brandon Dennison

The word “syndemic” is in the summit’s name for a reason. A syndemic is what public health researchers call it when two or more health crises interact and amplify each other within the same population, rather than showing up as separate, unrelated problems. In Huntington and across Appalachia, that has meant the opioid epidemic, HIV and hepatitis C transmission, and economic decline. Addiction makes steady work harder to find and keep, and the absence of steady work makes recovery harder to sustain. CEG’s summit is built around that framing: you can’t treat the health crisis and ignore the economic one, because they’re the same crisis wearing two faces. Workforce development, in that light, isn’t an add-on to recovery programming. It’s one of the interventions the syndemic itself calls for. Dennison’s statement about dignity is the practitioner’s version of that same argument.

Marshall’s Role: The “Prosperity Platform”

Dennison now runs that same thesis through Marshall University, a public R2 research institution with a little over 13,000 students, which has organized its regional role around what President Brad Smith calls a “prosperity platform” – the idea that when the university raises the floor for the region, not just its enrolled students, everyone on the platform rises together. Dennison says most of his job isn’t actually about the four-year students technically enrolled at Marshall, it’s that broader platform.

Part of what makes that possible, Dennison said, is that Marshall and Huntington don’t have the university-town divide common elsewhere. 

“Sometimes there’s a breakdown between the university and the town,” he said. “It’s very different here… we talk about the we over the me.”

The Recovery Side: Dave Lavender and Healing Appalachia

Where Dennison’s remarks laid out the economic-development logic, Dave Lavender, speaking on behalf of Healing Appalachia, discussed what that logic looks like in practice, program by program, inside the recovery world specifically, and inside the syndemic CEG’s summit is named for.

What is Healing Appalachia?

Healing Appalachia is an annual music festival run by Hope in the Hills, a West Virginia nonprofit for which Lavender serves as board president. The organization traces its start to a single, brutal day in August 2016, when 26 people overdosed in Huntington in a matter of hours, a moment that became, as Dave Lavender and fellow co-founder Ian Thornton have described it, the “accretion point” around which they built the organization. Hope in the Hills launched in 2017; the first Healing Appalachia festival followed in 2018, co-founded with musician Tyler Childers, his manager Ian Thornton, and festival program director Charlie Hatcher. The festival, which has drawn headliners including Childers and Chris Stapleton, now has a local annual economic impact approaching $3 million, with proceeds distributed to on-the-ground addiction, recovery, and harm-reduction organizations across the region.

Lavender described a partnership between Healing Appalachia, Marshall’s Theater and Dance program, Recovery Point West Virginia, and Coalfield Development that built what he called the nation’s first recovery-to-work stagehand certification program, a direct, practical answer to Dennison’s “work is dignity” point: if employment is what makes recovery stick, then the festival economy that already exists across Appalachia is a workforce pipeline hiding in plain sight.

Two cohorts have graduated so far, moving into paid work at regional festivals: Mountain Music Fest, Boots on the Gorge, Domefest, and a Snowshoe Mountain festival [CONFIRM EXACT NAME]. The framing, per Lavender: giving people in recovery “a clear line of sight to new job opportunities they may have never known existed,” using the live-music economy not just as a stage for healing, but as a direct employer.

The Evidence, and the Limits

Why does any of this matter beyond Huntington? 

West Virginia has had the lowest labor force participation rate in the country for years: 54.3 percent as of early 2025, compared with a national rate around 62.5 percent, according to federal labor data. Researchers at West Virginia University and the Federal Reserve have tied a meaningful share of that gap directly to the opioid crisis, through failed drug tests, lost work capacity, and the disruption addiction causes to steady employment. That’s the stakes Dennison’s “work is dignity” line and CEG’s summit are actually pointing at: this isn’t just a recovery problem or an economic problem, it’s the same problem, showing up on two different spreadsheets.

So does the stagehand program, or Healing Appalachia’s broader model, actually move that needle? What’s notable isn’t that any one program has solved recovery or economic decline; it’s the repeatable pattern underneath both speakers’ remarks: pair a credentialing or workforce pipeline with something people already show up for, a festival, a stage, a golf round, a classroom, and use that draw to reach people who wouldn’t otherwise walk into a clinic or a jobs office. That pattern is the practical, on-the-ground version of what CEG’s summit is arguing for at the policy level: treat the syndemic as one interconnected problem, and the interventions start overlapping too.

But how would you know if it’s working?

What we know isn’t working is the old way of doing this: treating addiction as a health problem to be solved in a clinic, and unemployment as a separate economic problem to be solved by a jobs board, as if the two never talk to each other. West Virginia’s labor force participation rate has sat at the bottom of the country for years, and the state has run some of the nation’s highest overdose numbers over that same stretch. Those aren’t two crises that happen to coexist. Treating them separately is part of why neither one has moved.

Treating recovery and the regional economy as two unrelated problems, is the thing that’s demonstrably not working. 

That’s the “why not” underneath everything said at the summit: not certainty that this succeeds, but confidence that the old separation has already failed.