Mined Minds came into West Virginia espousing a certain dogma, fostered in the world of start-ups and TED Talks. Students found an erratic operation.
BECKLEY, W.Va. On a spring day in 2017, Stephanie Frame sat down in her hilltop home deep in the mountain hollows to record a video.
She began with the litany of local decline: the vanishing jobs in the coal mines, the shuttering stores, the school that closed down. During one stretch of unemployment for her coal miner husband, the two had resorted to selling ramps, ginseng and yellowroot that they had dug up in the forest.
But this video, aimed at her neighbors, was an announcement: Redemption was here. A nonprofit called Mined Minds, promising to teach West Virginians how to write computer code and then get them good-paying jobs, was looking for recruits.
I wholeheartedly believe, and will always believe, Ms. Frame said to the camera, that God has sent Mined Minds to us to save us from what could have been a very bleak future.
She had every reason to believe. Joe Manchin III, her Democratic senator, had invited the group to come into the state. The National Guard hired it to teach at its military-style academy. County commissioners arranged space rent free. National news outlets gave glowing coverage.
Many West Virginians like Ms. Frame signed up for Mined Minds, quitting their jobs or dropping out of school for the prized prospect of a stable and lucrative career. But the revival never came.
Almost none of those who signed up for Mined Minds are working in programming now. They described Mined Minds as an erratic operation, where guarantees suddenly evaporated and firings seemed inevitable, leaving people to start over again at the bottom rungs of the wage jobs they had left behind.
Over two dozen former students in West Virginia are pursuing a lawsuit, arguing that Mined Minds was a fraud. Out of the 10 or so people who made it to the final weeks of Ms. Frames class in Beckley, only one formally graduated. He is now delivering takeout.
It was a too-good-to-be-true kind of deal, said Billyjack Buzzard, 33, who attended another class and was the only former West Virginia coal miner to finish classes and get a job with the program. He was fired after 14 months and went back underground. Just false hope.
Mined Minds came into Appalachia espousing a certain dogma, fostered in the world of start-ups and TED Talks, and carried with missionary zeal into places in dire need of economic salvation. The group was premised on the notion, as one grant proposal read, that anyone can have a successful career in the technology industry, and that if enough people did, the whole area would be transformed.
Amanda Laucher, one of the founders of Mined Minds, spoke at a tech conference in 2017 of the groups ambitions, which were swiftly expanding. Yeah, we helped a town, we actually made some small impact, she said of Mined Minds early efforts. But can we scale it and actually diversify the economy of an entire region?
This would be an audacious goal even in the best of circumstances. But Mined Mines was operating with a limited amount of personal cash and public funding, and was mostly staffed by people who had spent little time in tech.
Ms. Laucher now acknowledges that while she is still committed to the groups mission, the work has not been easy. Progress is difficult, she said in an email, with the current atmosphere in Appalachia which is deeply interested in maintaining a culture.
She blamed the opioid epidemic and the poverty culture of the region, mentioning Hillbilly Elegy, the best-selling memoir by J.D. Vance, who, like Ms. Laucher, went from working-class Rust Belt roots to success in the tech sector.