The Active Economy is a model for developing diversified portfolios of community project clusters that stimulate a regional economy. It is a way of developing a region that begins from what a community already has rather than from what an outside investor might someday bring. It treats local people, places, institutions, and relationships as the raw material of development rather than the backdrop against which development happens. Projects are conceived and directed by people connected to the communities they serve, and they are structured so that the wealth they generate — in jobs, in property, in local ownership, and more — stays where it was created.

The name “Active Economy” is a deliberate counterweight to a longstanding regional habit. Many residents and institutions in Southwestern Pennsylvania have spent decades waiting — for a plant, an anchor employer, a megaproject, or some other outside force to restore what was lost during the collapse of the steel industry. That fundamentally passive posture unnecessarily puts a community’s future in the hands of decisions made somewhere else by those who do not call Southwestern Pennsylvania their home.

The phrase “Active Economy” directly and intentionally calls the region into a more engaged future, one that resists the tendency to wait for change from without, and that instead proactively initiates change from within. An Active Economy is one where the many kinds of capital that already exist in a community are deployed, developed, and resourced to generate a more vibrant and prosperous future that is both by and for those who initiated such forward movement. In this way, the phrase “Active Economy” deliberately names the thing we are asking the region to stop doing as much as it calls for the thing we are asking it to do even more of.

The Active Economy Report presents the findings of an independent analysis conducted by the University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) at the University of Pittsburgh, led by economist Chris Briem. Over the course of six months, UCSUR examined a portfolio of 21 community-led projects across Beaver and Allegheny Counties, measuring what they produce using two established frameworks: traditional economic impact analysis and Social Return on Investment analysis.

According to UCSUR’s research, over a 20-year horizon, the Active Economy Portfolio is projected to produce $844.5 million in Gross Regional Product, 6,640 Job-Years of employment, and $122.7 million in social value. Further analysis by RiverWise and New Sun Rising shows that the Active Economy creates jobs at a total cost of roughly $162,000 each — about a third of the $456,000 in public subsidy that the average corporate megadeal costs taxpayers per job. And, the portfolio returns $9.08 in Gross Regional Product for every dollar invested.

The report was published by RiverWise and New Sun Rising in August 2026.

The Active Economy Report was written for individuals and organizations who set economic development priorities and direct resources toward them: elected officials and their staffs, planning agencies and government entities, philanthropies and grantmakers, and investors and lenders.

The report was also written for the many leaders and organizations who do the type of work described within its pages. Community project leaders rarely lack conviction about the value they create; what they lack is a shared language for describing it and a credible method for measuring it. The Active Economy Report offers both — a communication framework and an impact modeling approach that nonprofit and municipal leaders, small business owners, cooperative founders, main street and business district managers, neighborhood associations, and the intermediaries who support them can apply to their own work and carry into the rooms where funding decisions get made.

Although not written with a broader audience at the center, we are hopeful that the report contains insights and data that may also be of value to those outside the region who are interested in community and economic development, particularly those working alongside communities that have long suffered from extractive practices, disinvestment, and economic stagnation.

The community projects included in the Active Economy Report have been supported by RiverWise and New Sun Rising in a range of ways and over many years. Such support has come in the form of direct technical assistance, capacity building, fiscal sponsorship, marketing, grant preparedness, direct investment support, and more. Each of the projects has its own unique history and relationship with the organizations that commissioned the report. The nature of support provided has been similarly unique, adaptive, and developmentally appropriate.

In 2024, most of the projects in the Active Economy Portfolio came together to develop a $20 million Community Change Grant proposal for the Environmental Protection Agency. New Sun Rising and RiverWise were the lead applicants for that proposal. Throughout the process of generating that proposal, and after the EPA ultimately terminated the program, we recognized the need to understand and better communicate the economic impact of this portfolio of activity — both individually and in the aggregate. Due to our longstanding relationships and work together, this portfolio of 21 projects naturally lent itself to the kind of research project at the center of the Active Economy Report.

The Active Economy Portfolio contains projects in Beaver and Allegheny Counties, in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The 21 projects serve 38 census tracts covering 25.17 square miles. The impacted tracts are home to 105,275 residents.

The 38 census tracts included in the Active Economy Portfolio are not a representative sample of the characteristics most common in communities across Beaver and Allegheny Counties. To the contrary, the portfolio includes — both deliberately and on principle — many of the region's most disinvested communities, as outlined in the report itself. What the Active Economy Report presents, therefore, is not development occurring where conditions were already favorable. The portfolio instead demonstrates what is possible in precisely those places our region has long viewed as unlikely candidates for robust economic growth or contributed social benefit.

The kind of unusual success demonstrated in some of Southwestern Pennsylvania’s most distressed communities suggests that the returns described in the Active Economy Report may represent a floor rather than a ceiling. For communities with deeper existing institutional infrastructure and more capital already in place, there are plenty of reasons to believe that the compounding benefits documented throughout this report would accrue to them on even more favorable terms.

The analysis provided in the Active Economy Report covers a 20-year window, from 2016 through 2036, combining what the portfolio has already produced with what it is projected to produce. Individual projects were analyzed only for the years in which they have actually operated or are expected to operate, rather than across the full two decades.

Various presentations of data throughout the report distinguish between past, current, and future activity so that readers can weigh documented results separately from projections.

The clusters identified in the Active Economy Report include Real Estate Development, Small Business & Workforce, Energy, Food & Nature-Based Infrastructure, Creative Industries, and Active Mobility. RiverWise and New Sun Rising identified the clusters based upon our understanding of how community capitals reinforce one another between different projects in the portfolio. Although the clusters are not at all arbitrary, one could conceivably have devised a different set to describe their activity. Additionally, in another region — or for another group of community projects — it is highly likely that a different set of cluster descriptions would provide a more appropriate description of how a particular collection of initiatives is working together. Stated differently, the particular clusters identified in the Active Economy Report represent only a handful of the ways that mutually reinforcing community development can be organized and described. There are many other sectors that undoubtedly contribute to vibrant regional economies, and communities elsewhere may choose to focus on clusters that are better suited to their own context and strengths.

What matters most is not these six categories but the underlying principle at the heart of the entire Active Economy: that projects gain value from proximity and connection to one another, and that measuring them in isolation misses much of what they collectively produce.

RiverWise is a Beaver County–based nonprofit that organizes community voice and power so residents can exercise greater agency over the places they call home. It does this through storytelling that challenges the idea that Beaver County’s best days are behind it, through project identification and management, and through building the partnerships and securing the resources that enable residents to realize their own vision for the region.

New Sun Rising is a Pittsburgh-based community development nonprofit that envisions a future where all communities are vibrant places of culture, sustainability, and opportunity. The organization works as an intermediary between grassroots innovation and institutional investors, providing fiscal sponsorship, technical assistance, and capacity building to communities across Greater Pittsburgh.

RiverWise and New Sun Rising are independent entities, with separate boards, staff, and funding. They have worked alongside one another for years and together hold roughly thirty years of combined history in this work. Across the portfolio examined in this report, each has played different roles at different moments — sometimes leading a project, sometimes resourcing it, sometimes encouraging it, and sometimes reinforcing work that others began. Neither organization claims sole authorship of the Active Economy Report or of any project within the portfolio. To do so would be at odds with the spirit of the work and manner in which it has been described throughout the report.

Project-level inputs were collected directly from the lead organizations in the Active Economy Portfolio. This data includes things like financial records, headcount and payroll, square footage, program and beneficiary figures, energy savings estimates, construction project budgets, and so on. Using those inputs, researchers at UCSUR applied two parallel analyses: a regional economic analysis using the REMI Transight model and a Social Return on Investment (SROI) assessment. Each economic impact figure in the report is traceable to the insight provided by one or both of these two frameworks.

For more information on how the analysis was conceived, informed, and conducted, please see UCSUR’s full methodology report, entitled Impact Analysis for RiverWise and New Sun Rising — Methodology and Individual Project Reports.

Yes. UCSUR’s full methodology report, Impact Analysis for RiverWise and New Sun Rising — Methodology and Individual Project Reports, is available on the Active Economy website, linked from within the Active Economy Report itself, and published directly by UCSUR on their own organizational website.

UCSUR’s full methodology report contains extensive detail on the inputs collected from each project, how those inputs were used, the monetization proxies applied, and the reasoning behind the judgments the analysis required. UCSUR’s full methodology report also contains the base figures underlying the cluster totals found in the Active Economy Report.

We strongly believe in transparency, and are committed to ensuring that the data presented throughout the Active Economy Report are easily available to others. Anyone interested in better understanding how a given figure was derived should have access to all the information required to do so.

Throughout the research and writing process, the authors of the Active Economy Report have tried to model what a credible and transparent process ought to look like when anyone — community organization or corporation — seeks support for significant public subsidies. The full methodology employed by UCSUR has been made public. The assumptions behind every monetization proxy are stated and sourced. The distinction between what UCSUR measured and what the authors of the Active Economy Report concluded is marked throughout. As a result, anyone who wishes to check our arithmetic, question our proxies, or reach different conclusions from the same evidence has everything required to do so.

Economic impact projections accompanying a proposed corporate facility, on the other hand, are ordinarily commissioned by the party seeking public money, conducted using proprietary models, and released as summary figures rather than as carefully auditable methodology. Rarely, if ever, are they reviewed by a wide range of community stakeholders before their conclusions are made public. The review processes at the heart of the Active Economy Report were neither burdensome nor exotic. They made the final product a more accurate and reliable account of the value produced by the projects studied. Something akin to this easily replicable process should be commonplace for any party seeking substantial public subsidy.

Most of the projects in the Active Economy Portfolio belong to more than one cluster, and the overlap is one of the most important features of the Active Economy. To understand this overlap, consider what a single building actually provides when it is part of an integrated and resilient local economy. A commercial real estate site in Millvale or Ambridge may simultaneously house a small business, train a workforce, expand food access, and generate its own power. When this kind of layered impact occurs, a single asset contributes to the assessed impact of the real estate cluster, the small business cluster, the food cluster, and the energy cluster — because it is genuinely producing value in all four sectors.

The kind of economic reciprocity described above is what we refer to in the report as a Virtuous Cycle, where value compounds as project activities reinforce one another, and where the same underlying asset creates returns along several dimensions at once. As presented in the Active Economy Report, the cluster figures are showing the portfolio from multiple intersecting vantage points rather than partitioning it into exclusive categories. When understood in this way, the fact that the percentages sum past 100% can be recognized as a feature of the model rather than a problem with the math.

It is only when demonstrating the economic impact of clustered activity that we represent the data in this way. None of the other impact figures contained within the report rely on counting the benefit of any project more than one time. Readers who wish to see the base figures, counted once, can easily access them in UCSUR's full methodology report, Impact Analysis for RiverWise and New Sun Rising — Methodology and Individual Project Reports.

When a corporation proposes a facility in Southwestern Pennsylvania, it routinely arrives accompanied by economic impact modeling, projected job counts, and multiplier effects — the familiar apparatus by which public bodies determine whether something is worth supporting. When a community organization proposes a food hub, a workforce training program, or a solar installation, it often arrives with stories, testimonials, photographs, and conceptual plans. Both are seeking to represent the value their project is expected to produce. But only one of them is speaking the language in which large-scale decisions about regional resource allocation are routinely made.

For over a decade, those of us engaged in this work have understood its value intuitively. We have watched vacant buildings come back into use, small businesses take root, residents gain a foothold in local ownership, and neighborhoods begin to recover a sense of their own possibility. But intuition, however well-founded, is not evidence, and we have never before been in a position to say with any precision what all that work amounts to in economic terms. Recognizing this, we engaged UCSUR and asked them to examine the portfolio as they would examine anything else, using frameworks we did not design and could not influence.

The Active Economy Report was created to provide greater insight into the performance of community project portfolios, demonstrating how they can benefit from standardized economic analysis, and highlighting how they compare to the more familiar large-scale corporate projects that Southwestern Pennsylvania tends to consider as the primary option for economic growth.

The Active Economy Report was funded by the Just Transition Fund through its Inaugural Coal Communities Get Ready! Challenge. That grant covered the cost of UCSUR’s research along with a portion of the staff time and organizational capacity required to complete the project. Because the project became a year-long effort that drew widely on staff across both organizations, RiverWise and New Sun Rising also committed operational reserves to complete it.

UCSUR produced the analysis and the underlying data upon which the Active Economy Report was constructed. The analysis of and commentary on UCSUR’s findings are a product of co-authors Daniel Rossi-Keen and Scott Wolovich.

Economist Chris Briem’s essay in Part Four of the Active Economy Report was drafted in response to what he found while studying the portfolio, and it is reprinted here with his permission. UCSUR has carefully reviewed the full report as published.

The Active Economy Report has been subject to significant, layered, and diverse review in order to ensure its quality and justifiability. The methods UCSUR employed in its analysis were developed by a team of researchers who have collectively spent decades applying these frameworks to regional questions. The research and calculations at the heart of UCSUR’s findings have been published in full alongside the Active Economy Report. A penultimate draft of the report was circulated by the co-authors to more than fifty reviewers drawn from a range of sectors and disciplines — economists, community development practitioners, funders, planners, and residents of the communities described in these pages. The report was also sent to the boards of both RiverWise and New Sun Rising, and to every project partner whose organization appears in the report, each of whom had the opportunity to verify how the report represented their work. The responses of those many varied reviewers shaped the final form of the document in ways large and small.

The full report, the underlying methodology, and profiles of every project in the portfolio are available at ActiveEconomy.org.

RiverWise — getriverwise.com · [email protected]

Instagram and Facebook @getriverwise · X @GetRiverWise · www.linkedin.com/company/riverwise/

RiverWise maintains a YouTube channel of documentary and community storytelling work, available at youtube.com/@RiverWise.

New Sun Rising — newsunrising.org · [email protected]

Instagram and Facebook @newsunrisingpgh · linkedin.com/company/new-sun-rising

Questions, corrections, and additions are welcome. Reach the report’s authors at: [email protected] or [email protected].