Frequently Asked Questions

The Economic Impact Report is an independent fifteen-year analysis of community-led investment across the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio river valleys. It quantifies the economic activity and social value generated by a portfolio of more than twenty projects operating in parallel across southwestern Pennsylvania.

The dispatch is published as a single document in two halves: a regional argument framing the case for distributed, community-led investment, and a project-level appendix tracing every figure to its source.

The case for community-led investment has been made anecdotally for years. The dispatch was commissioned to determine whether that case stands up to standardized economic analysis, and to make the underlying data available for inspection alongside the more familiar large-scale industrial projects the region tends to debate.

Resource gatekeepers: foundation program officers, board chairs, civic and government grant-makers, philanthropic principals. The dispatch assumes a reader who arrives skeptical, scans first, reads selectively, and leaves needing to defend a continued-investment case to a peer.

It is also written to be useful to journalists, policymakers, and community members who want to understand or contest the findings on the same evidentiary footing as the funders.

Fifteen years is the period over which the portfolio's earliest projects have been operating. Shorter windows would understate compounding social value, and longer windows would reach back before consistent project-level records were kept.

The methodology and project-level inputs were reviewed by external economic and social-return specialists. The final dispatch is editorial rather than peer-reviewed in the academic sense; readers are invited to inspect the figures and the calculations behind them in the project appendix.

Project-level inputs were collected directly from the operating organizations: financial records, headcount and payroll, square footage, program and beneficiary counts, energy and material throughput. Each input was reviewed against publicly available filings and audited statements where available.

From those inputs the dispatch produces two parallel impact tracks: a REMI Transight regional economic model and a Social Return on Investment (SROI) calculation. Each figure in the report is traceable to one of these two frameworks.

REMI Transight is a dynamic regional economic model used by states, agencies, and academic researchers to estimate the economic effect of a project against a counterfactual baseline. The model captures jobs, gross regional product, and industry output across direct, indirect, and induced channels.

The dispatch uses REMI for its standardization: figures produced this way are directly comparable to the studies funders and policymakers already encounter when weighing large-scale industrial projects.

Social Return on Investment monetizes outcomes that markets tend to miss: workforce earnings, blight abatement, food access, carbon and energy savings, active transport, arts and programming. Each outcome is valued using published financial proxies, discounted for deadweight and attribution, and reported as a ratio against invested capital.

REMI and SROI answer different questions. The dispatch keeps them on parallel tracks rather than fusing them into a composite score, so a reader can weigh economic throughput and social return on their own terms.

Composite scores hide the assumptions that produced them. The dispatch's editorial position is that resource gatekeepers should be able to inspect each line of value separately and decide which weights to apply. Every figure in the report can be traced to either a REMI run or an SROI calculation, with no proprietary blending in between.

Where ranges are unavoidable, the report presents the conservative figure in the body and the broader range in the appendix. Forward-looking estimates carry an explicit "future" label and are never aggregated with realized impact.

The portfolio is the set of projects led, fiscally sponsored, contracted, or substantively supported by RiverWise and New Sun Rising over the analysis window. Inclusion required active community leadership at the project level and a record sufficient to support either a REMI or SROI calculation.

Projects that fell below the modeling threshold are listed in the appendix with a note explaining why they were not modeled.

A community-led portfolio is not a single launch event. Projects move through site preparation, capital campaigns, and operating phases over years. The dispatch reports realized impact and forward projections separately, so the present picture and the trajectory both read at a glance.

A community-led project is one whose strategic direction, governance, and benefits are anchored in the place it serves. In practice, this means a community-based organization holds decision-making authority, residents shape the work, and value generated stays in the surrounding economy. The dispatch is explicit about each project's relationship to its host community in the appendix.

Real estate is the most legible form of community wealth in the region's market: a building owned, restored, and operated by a local organization is a visible, traceable counterweight to vacancy and blight. The portfolio's real estate share reflects what was actually built, not a bias in selection.

The dispatch also reports significant non-real-estate work in food systems, energy, mobility, and education and organizing, each modeled on its own terms.

No. The dispatch examines a single portfolio because that is the analytical unit it can fully document. It does not claim to represent every community-led project in southwestern Pennsylvania, and the absence of a project from this report should not be read as a judgment about its work.

RiverWise is a regional intermediary that supports community-led economic development in the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela river valleys. It convenes residents, develops project capacity, sponsors environmental storytelling, and operates the Justice 40 Opportunity Navigator program.

New Sun Rising is a community development organization based in Millvale that supports and operates real-estate, food-system, and program-led projects across the region. It is the lead operator of the Millvale Food + Energy Hub and the Food Justice Fund, and a fiscal sponsor for several portfolio projects.

The two organizations operate independently but coordinate around shared portfolio goals: regional capacity building, environmental and economic storytelling, and the patient capital required to bring community-led projects through long development cycles. Neither organization claims sole authorship of any portfolio project; each project credits its lead community organization in the appendix.

Both organizations operate on a mix of philanthropic, public, and earned revenue. Funder lists for the analysis period are published in the appendix. The Economic Impact Report itself was supported by the foundations named on its colophon page; no funder reviewed conclusions prior to publication.

The dispatch succeeds if community-led investment is taken as seriously, and resourced at the same scale, as the large-scale industrial projects that have long dominated the region's strategic conversation. That includes longer time horizons, patient capital, and a willingness to weigh distributed value alongside headline employer counts.

Funders can use the project appendix as a portfolio map for continued or new investment. Policymakers can adopt the SROI methodology to weigh community-led work in their own analyses. Journalists and community members can audit any figure against its source. The dispatch is published with this in mind.

The dispatch is a fixed publication, dated and citable as written. The underlying project data will be updated periodically as the portfolio evolves; updates are noted on each project page in the appendix and summarized in a revision log on the home page.

The portfolio examined in this dispatch is fixed for the analysis window. Inquiries about future inclusion or about RiverWise / New Sun Rising's continuing project work can be directed to the contact below.

Editorial and methodology questions can be directed to the report contact below. Project-level questions are best directed to the lead community organization listed in the project appendix.