WV Makes its Mark at SXSW 2022

It’s been nearly a week since our team from West Virginia arrived back from South By Southwest, and it’s going to take some time to unpack all that was experienced and learned - for good reason.

?Birthed in 1987, as a music fest to highlight Austin as “The Live Music Capital of the World,” SXSW has grown into a 12-headed creative economics beast. It now draws in about a quarter of a million people from all over the globe diving into what SXSW fest writer Jordan Roberts calls “a ten-day whirlwind of enlightening and inspiring sessions, film screenings, music showcases, exhibitions, tacos, networking, art installations, competitions, awards, and beyond.” As a testament to the good tastes of my traveling companions, that “beyond” also included as much Texas brisket as time allowed.?

SXSW 2022 - back after a two-year in-person hiatus - featured more than 1,500 music showcases, 101 feature films, and a few thousand booths at the Creative Industries Tech Conference (We were Booth #717). SXSW was also packed with constellations of stars and a who’s who of music, film, tech and creative industry icons from Dolly Parton and Lizzo to Nick Cage, Anne Hathaway, Beck, Jared Leto - and beaming in from the Metaverse - Mark Zuckerberg.

So what was a team from the West Virginia Department of Economic Development doing promoting at the Conference between booths hyping the latest VR, blockchain, cryptocurrencies and NFTs?

We were there to tell the new - and somewhat yet undiscovered - true story of West Virginia today. WV is a low-cost, start-up state; one of the most affordable states to live in; and a gorgeous Mountain State packed with the best outdoor adventures anywhere. Conveniently located within a day’s drive of half of the U.S. population, WV is a prime spot for expanding businesses (see Proctor and Gamble’s largest facility in the world), and as Ascend WV’s popularity is proving -? a new red-hot location for the next generation of remote workers who want to live and work in a place where they can mountain bike, rock climb, ski, paddle whitewater and hike.

As the saying goes you can’t step into the same river twice, so it could be said for cities and states such as WV that are becoming wildly more economically diverse than the caricatures of their past, superficial images. At SXSW, one of my favorite exchanges of the week was with a Detroit native, who after two decades in Austin, is leaving America’s fastest growing city to go back home because Detroit too is thriving, is not over-populated and has room for her to make her mark and make a living. As WV is to states, Detroit is to cities, with a reality not exactly aligned with outdated outside perceptions.

?For the record, Detroit has the second largest concentration of theaters outside of New York City, it has America’s largest urban park (the more than 1,000-acre Belle Island designed by designed by Frederick Olmstead, the architect of NYC’s Central Park), and in addition to is world-class music scene and history, Motown also has an incredibly rich film industry as more than 70 feature films and a dozen television shows have been filmed in Detroit. Now we know.??

?Our team, which included Kelsey Staggers, Samantha Smith and myself from WV Department of Economic Development, Paris Winfrey from Ascend WV, Mitchell Williams, from Vantage Ventures, Julia Barrett, from Oktana, and Todd Cope, from Central App, had hundreds of fruitful interactions with folks - who were generally -? and it seemed genuinely - curious about West Virginia. Most knew of the New River Gorge Park and Preserve as America’s newest national park, were well acquainted with our senior senator, Joe Manchin, but beyond that their knowledge was often as dark and gravity-defying as the Mystery Hole.

It was our job then and now to do our best to fill folks in on some facts that we should all be sharing. West Virginia is home to NOAA, NASA, the FBI and Green Bank National Radio Astronomy Lab; we have more than two dozen aerospace companies; we are flush with dozens of tech companies (such as IBM, Oktana, Data Robot, Core10, Intuit and many others); we have the most miles of runnable whitewater in the U.S.; Huntington has a 100 percent LGBTQ+ friendly rating from the Human Rights Campaign, and was named the most affordable city for college graduates; WV has five downhill ski resorts and a wealth of crosscountry skiing; Snowshoe Mountain Bike Park is hosting the UCI World Cup for Mountain Biking for a third year; WV is home to Mountain Stage, the longest running live performance music show on NPR; the second fastest growing state for exports, and well-known tech CEOs and WV natives John Chambers (Cisco) and Brad Smith (Intuit) are all-in making sure their dream of transforming WV into a start-up state for tech entrepreneurs and remote workers becomes a reality.

We are not blind to our shortcomings. We are personally and painfully aware West Virginia has been the hardest state hit by the opioid epidemic. But as Audy Perry spoke into existence years ago, WV was not just afflicted with the epidemic but also given an opportunity to lead the world in recovery efforts, which it is doing. That leadership was evident by the hard-earned, practical wisdoms espoused by Huntington’s Jan Rader, a former Time’s 100 Most Influential People recipient, on the featured SXSW panel last Friday addressing Recovery. Rader explained some of our state’s groundbreaking initiatives from the QRT teams to creating holistic mental health and wellness programs for first responders. Rader is the embodiment of how empathetic leadership leverages teamwork and collaboration to create communities of recovery and healing..

While our SXSW time has drawn to a close, our fervor for telling folks about the new and true stories of West Virginia must grow. If we are to thrive we need a few more folks - and a few more of the cool kids -? to know about WV because we are right there with two other beautiful, but mostly rural states - Maine and Vermont - as having the oldest median age of residents, and thus a shrinking population, in spite of having top notch outdoors assets.?

As Jason Isbell said on the recovery panel Friday, “Everyone who is not in diapers should be in therapy.” He’s right. I wished I had started years ago, but we should all start now. Our Achilles heel in WV has often been self-inflicted-harm, being humble to a fault and, because of Appalachian fatalism, looking through the future’s glass darkly. So here we go West Virginia, we can do this, lie down and repeat the iconic phrase of SNL’s Stuart Smalley: "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me."

Dave Lavender is one of the Apprenticeship Program Coordinators for the West Virginia Department of Economic Development. Connect with Lavender at [email protected] as well as on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and www.davetrippin.com ?