Appalachian history, held by the people who live it.
builds community-led heritage infrastructure across Appalachia. Through Appalachian Roots and its flagship initiative, the Affrilachian
Trail®, we connect story, place, and
public memory in ways rooted in stewardship and local authority.
What we do now
Public memory and
interpretation
We help communities document, interpret, and present histories that formal systems have overlooked. That includes oral history, commemorative interpretation, monument and marker work, and the research that makes a story defensible in public.
Place-based stewardship and preservation
We work on the ground: cemeteries, historic structures, cultural landscapes, and the sites that carry meaning long after the records go missing. Our approach centers local authority over outside extraction.
Community heritage capacity
We strengthen the organizational infrastructure behind meaningful public work — partnership agreements, project framing, governance, digital records, and the practical footing small groups need to steward history over decades, not grant cycles.
How we got here
ICS began in community-centered development work: helping people in the Eastern Panhandle build businesses, access opportunity, and take a seat at tables that had not made room for them. That work taught us how funding, power, and institutions actually operate — and it surfaced something we had not planned for. Again and again, the communities we served were losing something economic tools could not recover: cemeteries going unmarked, houses coming down, elders passing with their stories unrecorded, and public history that told the region back to itself with whole populations left out. So we followed the need. Over time, ICS grew from a development organization into a heritage organization — one that treats memory, land, and interpretation as community assets worth the same rigor we once brought to capital and enterprise. Today that growth takes shape as Appalachian Roots, and as the Affrilachian Trail®, its flagship initiative.
“We did not leave the earlier work behind. We followed it to where it was pointing.”
What we’re building
Appalachian Roots
The umbrella for our heritage work. Appalachian Roots is a community-centered framework for preserving, connecting, and activating the region’s layered histories — and for building the partnerships that make that work durable. Initiatives live inside it; it is designed to hold more than one.
Affrilachian Trail®
Our flagship initiative, centering Black Appalachian heritage, movement, labor, and public memory. The Affrilachian Trail connects sites and stories across the landscape into a public narrative shaped by the communities closest to it — not written about them from a distance.
Community heritage capacity
We strengthen the organizational infrastructure behind meaningful public work — partnership agreements, project framing, governance, digital records, and the practical footing small groups need to steward history over decades, not grant cycles.
How we work
Community authority. The people who hold a history decide how it is told. We build the structure that supports that decision, and we do not overrule it.
Non-extractive practice. Stories, records, and access stay with the communities that produced them. Institutional partners are welcome as partners, not as owners.
Built to last. We design for stewardship past the grant period — clear agreements, transparent records, and capacity that stays local.
Appalachia’s history is layered, and no single community holds all of it. Appalachian Roots is built to make room for initiatives shaped with community partners across the region, added when the relationship is real and the invitation is mutual.
Bring us a story, a site, or a question
partnership, a family holding records no archive has seen, or a funder trying to place resources
where they’ll hold — we want to hear from you.