MORGANTOWN W.Va. — Top innovators, educational leaders, and government officials across the region will soon be making their way to Morgantown for the fifth annual Focus Forward symposium to discuss how the state can advance.
The event host, the West Virginia Public Education Collaborative formed five years ago to help transform public schools in West Virginia by identifying educational and economic needs, barriers, and possibilities. Appalachian Regional Commission Federal Co-Chair Gayle Manchin, a keynote speaker at this year’s event and a former chair of WVPEC, told MetroNews that Focus Forward was created to further help drive such transformation along.
However, beyond that, she said the event was started as way to address certain challenges such as the lack of coordination between pre-K, K-12, and post-secondary educators, among other relevant challenges.
“We felt that there needed to be a better communication between education and economic development, and the public sector and the private sector needed to have better conversations together,” said Manchin.
Manchin, who had former involvement with the Hunt Institute out of North Carolina, was inspired by Governor Jim Hunt’s aim at bringing leaders together to discuss challenges of their own, and WVPEC used the institute as a model to conduct their own way to address challenges, thus forming the Focus Forward event.
The event now brings various sectors together to contribute ideas on a wide array of topics. This year’s main topic for the event is energy diversity, and speakers will be discussing anything from Green energy, fueling innovation, and the regional impacts of the Clean Energy Transition.
Manchin said it allows conversations on the topic from a number of different professional perspectives.
“I think it’s a combination of coming to listen, to hear some of these people from these various sectors as they talk about their expectations and certainly some of the challenges that they will be facing,” she said.
She added that the event is also about finding solutions to those challenges.
One of the government sectors expected to be in attendance at the event is the West Virginia Appalachian Regional Commission, which Gayle Manchin currently sits as the federal co-chair of the organization.
She said they will be providing an exciting update regarding a generous financial endowment that Congress has provided to ARC.
“We’ve been very fortunate in that President Biden has truly understood the needs of rural America,” said Manchin.
With the funds, however, she said comes the responsibilities as they work with the 13 other states that are a part of ARC to focus on how they can tackle specific problems along with opportunities throughout the Appalachian region.
She said that while the future of energy production is a topic that poses many challenges, it’s also one that Appalachia has conquered.
“We have every form of energy there is right here in our beautiful state and throughout the Appalachian region. I think everyone in this country recognizes that up and down the Appalachian region it was the energy that came out of these mountains, the timber that came out of our forests, the water that came out of our rivers,” Manchin said.
The fifth annual Focus Forward will be held at the Morgantown Marriot at Waterfront Place.