Founding DirectorAccelerating Appalachia
Saraday Evans founded Accelerating Appalachia (ACAP) to marry her years of work in sustainable economies, environmental protection, and social justice into a program to accelerate a regenerative, socially-just economy. Saraday is a thought leader in regenerative regional evonomies, a specialist community planning, sustainable economies, geology and hydrogeology with a US Presidential commendation for her work to build healthier people and places in the southern Appalachian region - a region known as a global biodiversity hotspot as well as the most impoverished region in the US. When Saraday’s sustainable economy program for high unemployment counties in North Carolina lost its funding, she launched Accelerating Appalachia to continue the important work of regenerating a regional resilient economy in food, fiber and forest products, restoring the people and place of one of the most biologically diverse, yet poverty-stricken and over-extracted, regions in North America: Appalachia.