Families in Transylvania County and the surrounding area benefit from the work of Get Set Transylvania. With a high concentration of resources and strong support network for young children, the initiative encouraged some families, like that of Kadie Sanders, to move there after driving over one hour for a year to take advantage of the programming.

Making new connections and sharing resources are the primary benefits from the Forsyth team’s experience with the Opioid Response Project. “We need new ways to rethink how we work,” said project manager Amanda Clark, a health educator with the Forsyth Department of Health. “There are resources out there but finding out what works well and how to implement new ideas can be a challenge. This project helped connect us, bringing the right people to the table to tackle big issues in new ways.”

Work in Burke, rather than working with a single company or industry, uses its collaborative partnerships to highlight the variety of jobs available in Burke County and how students can gain the skills they need to be successful. This program has been replicated in other places as a scalable solution in workforce development to connect education and employers.

Both Digital Charlotte and the CDIA are recognized as leaders in the nation for this work and can inform efforts in other communities. CDIA’s goal of digital inclusion touches on themes of racial, age, socioeconomic, and educational equity. Bruce Clark, the executive director of Digital Charlotte, says it can have a profound positive effect on individuals and families. “No child should have to go to the public library or buy a Coca-Cola at a restaurant in order to do their homework,” he says in an interview. Affordable internet access in the home and having a computer, rather than just a smartphone, are some of the key metrics by which the CDIA is measuring, and reducing, the digital divide in Charlotte.

A $25.3 million Community Connect Grant from the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service in 2010 made it possible for a collaborative partnership between the counties and Country Cablevision to install fiber optic cables in Mitchell and Yancey Counties. Mitchell and Yancey Counties now have over 97% of homes and businesses connected to high-speed fiber optic broadband, with speeds up to 100 megabits per second for homes and 1 gigabyte per second for businesses. These are some of the fastest speeds in the state, competing with metro areas like Charlotte and Raleigh.