What We Are About

At the Appalachian Center for Sustainable Communities (ACSC), we help communities lower the everyday burdens that shape quality of life. These burdens show up in four places every household feels: energy, food, transportation, and waste. When those burdens become too heavy, families struggle, local economies weaken, and communities lose resilience. Our purpose is to change that trajectory — practically, measurably, and close to the ground.

We begin with the household, because that is where people actually live the numbers. Budgets, time, stress, and access all take shape at the kitchen-table level. By listening to households and understanding lived reality, ACSC can see where resources leak out, where basic needs fall short, and where small changes can make a real difference across a community.

To make this understanding useful, we organize what we learn into a clear, household-centered view of community life — identifying what burdens exist, where they come from, how widely they are shared, and how they accumulate into larger social and economic problems.

From there, we use structured tools to help communities see themselves clearly and evaluate their options honestly. These tools translate lived experience into shared understanding and help decision-makers compare real choices — not just by cost, but by how they affect households, local resilience, and the commons.

This approach — grounded in household experience and supported by disciplined analysis — allows ACSC to help communities design policies, programs, and cooperative ventures that retain value locally and strengthen long-term capacity rather than draining it.

ACSC is not an ivory-tower think tank. We are a working partner for communities that want to lower household burdens, build resilience, and create local prosperity. Through councils, coalitions, and co-ops, we help people organize information, weigh options, and move from insight to action.

Our work is rooted in the Appalachian tradition of local knowledge, mutual responsibility, and practical problem-solving. We believe strong communities are built from the household outward — and that sustainable progress begins when people can clearly see their burdens, understand their choices, and shape their future together.

That is what we’re about.