Editor’s Note: This blog shares an adapted and abridged version of the comments provided by PA Wilds Center Founder & CEO Ta Enos during the 2024 PA Wilds Dinner & Awards program, where the 2024 Champions of the PA Wilds were recognized. The theme of the dinner was “The Road Less Traveled Makes All The Difference.”

 

I’d like to share a brief story before providing the PA Wilds Center’s update during tonight’s program.

Before we founded the PA Wilds Center for Entrepreneurship, I was the “PA Wilds Small Business Ombudsman” – some of you may remember those days. My job was to travel around the region working with rural entrepreneurs and artisans and helping them connect to resources. 

As part of that, I worked with a good number of artisans. A joyous hazard of the job was that I got to see and buy their creations.

One of the first artisan pieces I purchased – personally, for my home – was a framed scratchboard print by Lynn Kibbe. It was of a barn in Lycoming County, where the farmer had collaborated with the Lycoming County Visitor Bureau to paint a huge Pennsylvania Wilds logo on the barn. Kibbe was selling the print at a booth she had set up at a festival being held at the then newly opened Elk Country Visitor Center. 

There were a lot of things I loved about the picture. Barn murals are such a rural thing, so I appreciated the nod to our heritage. I also loved that the picture spoke to the regional community we were building through this landscape-level collaboration and the new economic opportunities and pride of place it was spurring. Finally, I loved it because it was beautifully crafted.   

I hold this story up to illustrate that growing tourism in our region could have gone down a different way. In this case, the visitor bureau could have skipped the collaboration with the farmer and the nod to our past and put the marketing dollars toward a more traditional “visit now” billboard. We could have left artisans out of our economic development strategy. But we didn’t.

We took the road less traveled and, 20 years into this, it HAS made all the difference.

Honoring our past, lifting up local businesses, working across traditional lines, creating and innovating, leveraging partner strengths … these things take time, but they are what makes this work special and impactful, and these things have turned our collective approach into a nationally recognized model. 

So thank you to Lynn, and to all of this year’s award winners, for contributing to this important work in your own unique ways, and for being champions for it.

I have a few updates but before I get into those, I wanted to thank our Board of Directors, amazing staff and contractors, and our sponsors — The PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources; PA Wilds Planning Team; Allegheny National Forest Visitors Bureau; Lycoming County Visitors Bureau; Grow Rural PA; The Center for Rural PA; PA Route 6 Alliance; and Lumber Heritage Region — for helping to make tonight’s event possible. 

Instead of recapping what we’ve accomplished over the last year through this work I wanted to focus my update on looking ahead to some planning that we are doing. 

This work has always been locally informed and we want to keep it that way, even as the Center continues to grow and the work accelerates.

We want and need your input to do that. 

This year and next, into 2026 really, we will be doing A LOT of planning, market analysis, etc. These plans and studies will help guide our work in the decade ahead. 

In tonight’s remarks, I will touch on each plan and offer some updates related to them, but my main message tonight is this: if you get tapped for a survey or 1:1 interview or facilitated session through one or more of the studies we are doing, we GREATLY appreciate you taking the time to participate.   

First up in the queue are two plans that will have MAJOR stakeholder engagement.

The Wilds Cooperative of PA Governance Plan (2024) – 

• This network represents the onramp to participating in our entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s how we help rural entrepreneurs involved in this work – artisans, service sector companies, manufacturers, creative services companies – use our regional brand to help them thrive.
• We have now surpassed 600 members, and it’s really important at this stage of growth to evolve how this network is governed. How do we enable deeper ongoing conversations with this network to inform where our programs are headed? How do we strengthen our referral processes and better leverage partner strengths? Are there ways we can leverage our network for better pricing for small businesses on common expenses?
• Through a competitive bidding process, we recently brought on Alchemy Accompanied as a consultant to help us with this. They’ve done some great work in rural West Virginia and broader Appalachia, and we are excited to be collaborating with them. Please watch for facilitated sessions and join in the conversation.  
• Also, if you have not yet had a chance yet to meet him, please introduce yourself to Marc Wilken, our Economic Recovery Corps (ERC) Fellow. Marc is assisting us as a thought partner on the Governance Plan, as well as looking at social impact investment vehicles and approaches we might consider to help advance this work in the region. He is also working with Potter County on their efforts to integrate outdoor recreation and the PA Wilds strategy into their comprehensive planning efforts for population and workforce retention, a model that we hope to share with the full Planning Team so that other counties can leverage it in their own planning efforts.
• Marc is with us for 2.5 years, at no cost to us, part of an incredible new fellow program offered through the International Economic Development Council. Through the program, 65 fellows were placed with host communities out of 500 applicants. Many rural areas are represented, and many are working on outdoor recreation development initiatives.

 

Update to 2007 PA Wilds Planning Study (2024)

• The PA Wilds Planning Team has been a critical stakeholder group since the beginning of the work. It brings together all of our county governments, local development districts (LDDs), and many nonprofits.
• Formed by a groundbreaking intergovernmental cooperative agreement (ICA) in 2006, the Planning Team has its own bylaws, committees structures and projects. PA Wilds Center serves as its fiscal and administrative home.
• Their first Planning Study helped guide the Team’s work for a good decade, and it brought us tools like the PA Wilds Design Guide for Community Character Stewardship, which we’ve since used to stand up mini-grant programs and façade grant programs.
• A lot has changed since that first study. Major assets like the Elk Country Visitor Center, Kinzua Bridge State Park Skywalk, the Trails at Jakes Rocks, and even the PA Wilds Center, did not exist at that time. So, we must ask ourselves anew, what are the challenges and opportunities we are seeing now as a 13-county tourism region, and what of those are appropriate for the Planning Team to help address as a collective, so each county doesn’t have to do that lift on their own? How can the team strengthen its own capacity and better engage new members?
• Again, this is a core stakeholder group, so we appreciate everyone’s attention to it. It is critical for us to continue to get this right. There is a Request for Proposals (RFP) available now for those interested in helping to develop this new Planning Study.

 

The rest of the plans are really related to our programs or long-term sustainability. I want to share these briefly to help everyone see where the PA Wilds Center is headed.

• Strategic Plan for Fundraising (2024) – This is the smallest of all the plans, but we wanted to put a flag in the ground. This is generational work. How do we get the backbone nonprofit responsible for stewarding the regional systems and infrastructure we’ve collectively built, set up to live on beyond any of us here now? Part of that is the work we’ve been doing: robust grants strategy, social enterprise programs, strong partner networks, building a skilled staff and company culture. Now we want to explore how or if giving programs make sense as part of our long term sustainability strategy.

• Licensing Plan (2024-25) – One of the really cool things about a place-based brand is that it has applications beyond attracting visitors. It can also create opportunities for rural businesses to bring new products to market to meet consumer demand. This plan will look at the strategies and products we’ve done to date, and it will provide recommendations on how to grow over the next decade in a way that is in line with our mission and supports local business and communities.

• Mobile Platform to Advance Rural Tourism Economies + Related Supply Chains (2024-25) – We are also doing multiple studies and a market analysis about what we believe could be a powerful new tool, which we hope to have more updates on in 2025. This platform would have the ability to serve the PA Wilds region and other similar landscapes across Appalachia.

• DEIA Plan (2025) – Rural PA is a historically underserved region, and we are really proud that this work has a true impact in rural communities. But we don’t want to rest on those laurels. We can always improve, so in this plan we will be looking at our programs, systems, marketing, stakeholder networks, and more, with an eye toward how we can be more welcoming and inclusive in the decade ahead. 

• Franchise Plan (2025-2026) – In case you missed it, we opened two new PA Wilds Conservation Shops this summer. These shops are a really important part of our entrepreneurial ecosystem, in that they focus on selling local products made by small businesses in rural PA while achieving many other mission points, such as orienting visitors, building capacity at key recreation assets, and passing foot traffic to gateway communities and small businesses. This plan will do market and mission analysis for expanding this program over the next decade. 

• Regional Marketing Plan (2026) – We mindfully left this plan for last because we know some of the others will inform its strategies. One strategy that is likely to be included is one we’ve started on this year – around PA Wilds branded books and maps. As some know, we’ve engaged Purple Lizard Maps to assess what it would take to map the entire PA Wilds region in their maps, the gold standard in recreation mapping. In addition, we’re collaborating with the Keystone Trails Association (KTA) and writer Ben Cramer on a PA Wilds-branded hiking guidebook. You will see movement on those projects in 2025.
  

We hope that this helps provide a roadmap for where we’re going in the next couple of years, and we will be providing updates along the way.

I wanted to close with a shout out to everyone who made their voice heard on the Duke Low Military Operation Area (MOA) proposal.

For those just coming to this story, the Maryland Air National Guard wanted to create an area where they could fly fighter jet training missions over large swaths of the PA Wilds region, as low as 100 feet above ground level.

As a regional nonprofit, we are pretty careful about weighing in on local issues. It is not our role to decide what’s best for any given community. That’s up to the people who live there. On projects with significant impact to our mission and the work we’ve been entrusted with, we see our role as educational – we try to make sure our communities or potential actors in those projects understand the collective work we’ve all been doing, and its impact, so they understand what’s at stake.

One stand we do take and advocate for is that transparency and appropriate planning are critical to good decision making. Neither of those things were happening with the Duke Low MOA.  

A whole host of communities and businesses and nonprofits and local and state governments made their voices heard. And many brought up our collective work through the PA Wilds movement.

So with the support of my board, the PA Wilds Center joined the chorus to help with a sign-on letter demanding more engagement and further study.

This thing was not about if we support our military – of course we do. Our region is so patriotic it is a theme in our Design Guide for Community Character Stewardship. Many of us are veterans or have veterans in our families. This wasn’t even about whether the MOA should be established or not. It was about rural communities wanting more studies to be done to truly understand what the impacts of the proposal would be so they could best be mitigated.

The PA Wilds work – and outdoor recreation nationally – has always been non-partisan. And we saw that big time with the Duke Low MOA.

Senator Casey, Senator Fetterman, Governors Wolf and Shapiro, Congressman Thompson, Congressman Meuser, Senator Dush, Rep. Armanini, Rep. Borowicz, and Rep. Causer were instrumental in helping defeat this proposal. 

Many county commissioners signed on and, in some cases, Boards of Commissioners in some of the most potentially impacted areas, like Potter County and Clinton Counties, took a stand. Community members launched a Facebook page, a newsletter group, and wrote letters.

DCNR took a strong stand, and just as importantly – put resources to it. Nicole Faraguna at DCNR and a retired US Air Force colonel, Susan Beck, volunteered countless hours helping these ad hoc groups understand the byzantine military jargon and processes they were trying to decipher. Many media outlets covered the debate.    

The PA Wilds Center did not lead this effort – not by any stretch. But we were proud that our communities, and our state and our elected officials, stuck up for the PA Wilds region – the most rural part of the Commonwealth – and for this collective work we are all doing that is making such a positive difference in our communities.

So congratulations and thank you. And we look forward to hearing from you as we continue to strengthen the PA Wilds stakeholder networks and programs even more in the decades ahead.

 

ABOUT THE PA WILDS CENTER

The PA Wilds Center for Entrepreneurship, Inc., is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose mission is to integrate conservation and economic development in a way that inspires the communities of the Pennsylvania Wilds. The Pennsylvania Wilds is a 13-county region that includes the counties of Cameron, Clarion, Clearfield, Clinton, Elk, Forest, Jefferson, Lycoming, McKean, Potter, Tioga, Warren, and northern Centre. The PA Wilds Center promotes the region and its 2+ million acres of public lands as a premier outdoor recreation destination as a way to diversify local economies, inspire stewardship, attract investment, retain population and improve quality of life. The PA Wilds Center’s core programs seek to help businesses leverage the PA Wilds brand and connect with new market opportunities, including: the Wilds Cooperative of PA, a network of more than 575 place-based businesses and organizations, and the PA Wilds Conservation Shop, a retail outlet primarily featuring products sourced from the WCO. For more information on the PA Wilds Center, visit www.PAWildsCenter.org. To learn more about the WCO, visit www.WildsCoPA.org. Explore the PA Wilds at www.PAWilds.com. Find regionally made products at www.ShopThePAWilds.com. 

 

Media Contact

Britt Madera | Communications Manager

PA Wilds Center for Entrepreneurship, Inc.

[email protected] | 570-948-1051