Since 2015, ARC has funded 564 projects under the Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) Initiative to empower Appalachian communities to expand or create new economic opportunities to drive growth.

To understand successes, challenges, and lessons learned through implementation, as well as to examine results of POWER projects, ARC secured Chamberlin/Dunn (C/D) as third-party evaluator beginning in Fiscal Year (FY) 2019. Released in FY 2022, the evaluation focused primarily on closed projects in order to gain insight into the longer-term impacts of POWER grants.