Before Jarrod Birchfield and his wife, Kristi, bought Heritage Auto Service in Beckley, West Virginia a little over a year ago, Birchfield had spent the last 13 years as an electrician and maintenance chief at Kingston Mining, a local operation controlled by now-bankrupt Alpha Natural Resources. Birchfield was not laid off, but he saw it coming–he says that more than 100 employees have been laid off since his departure–and he had a new baby girl that he never got to see. At $35 an hour, the money was good, but he worked 12-hour shifts six days a week. Drawing on Kristi’s past experience owning a retail shop, the couple made a plan to go into business for themselves. They paid down debt, refinanced loans, and sold the new vehicles that the mining money had afforded them. Now, he works eight to five, five days a week.

A lot of Jarrod’s former coworkers are now customers. Many still have their jobs, but some have left for other opportunities. One started a delivery service. Another bought a pest control and home-inspection business. “There are people making their way out,” Kristi says, “but if you don’t have a lot of business knowledge or you’re afraid to do it, you’re kinda stuck.” There should be a workshop, she says. She isn’t the only one who thinks so.

With layoffs on the horizon, Jarrod Birchfield walked away from his career of 13 years as an electrician and maintenance chief at a coal mine. He took his mining helmet under car hoods at his new business at Heritage Auto Service.

The Hive, a business accelerator program in downtown Beckley run by business coach Joe Carlucci, works with new and existing businesses to expand and diversify. Here, where coal, the declining juggernaut of the state economy, threatens to take auxiliary industries like transportation and machinery down with it, that often means helping coal-dependent companies find new customers. After a company that builds mining carts (the Hive won’t disclose its client list) had to let go of eight employees, for instance, Carlucci helped it diversify its business overseas; eventually it was able to hire those employees back, plus five more. The Hive assists a wide range of businesses, from tech and tourism to consumer goods and software, and Carlucci also coaches business owners independently.

The Hive was supported in part by the New River Gorge Regional Development Authority (NRGDA), which has been working to grow new and existing business and improve quality of life in the New River Gorge area–Raleigh (home to Beckley), Fayette, Nicholas, and Summers counties–combining community development initiatives like growing farmers’ markets with economic development work like encouraging private investment across economic sectors it believes the region can excel in. It targets six sectors: tourism, wood products and forestry, agribusiness and food systems, distribution and logistics, manufacturing and back-office operations. The NRGRDA’s efforts are a microcosm of the patchwork solution so often touted as the way forward for Appalachia in the wake of coal’s decline: a network of diverse and strengthening economic actors.

“I think that’s the best thing that’s ever happened, that no one now talks about dominant industries,” says Chad Wykle, the executive director of the NRGDA (he’s since left the organization). “In the last three years that I’ve been in this job, I don’t hear anyone talk about dominant industries anymore. I hear them talk about cottage industries, or a pie. So you have eight pieces of the pie, and mining and gas may be a piece, but it’s going to be one-eighths and not seven-eighths. I think people get that.”

Has Drijver, Maartje Somers, and their daughter, Maike, traveled from Amsterdam to spend three days camping and whitewater rafting at the New River Gorge. “It’s very pretty,” Maartje says about the region. “I hope they can find their way out, economically speaking, by way of tourism.”

One slice, tourism, is riding the momentum of the Boy Scouts of America’s massive Summit-Bechtel Reserve, which broke ground near the New River this summer and accounted for some of the 2,900 jobs the area added (then lost) between 2010 and 2012. Young Life, a nondenominational ministry, recently purchased a 1,100-acre site on the Gauley River for an adventure camp. The tourism sector also plays off the existing appeal of the New River Gorge area, already a destination for mountain climbing and whitewater rafting. (When we stopped in nearby Fayetteville, home base for adventure outfitters, we met a family visiting from Amsterdam.) Continuing to grow that sector of the economy, which already accounts for 12% of the area’s jobs and is expected to grow, would mean more service jobs in hotels, restaurants, and shops.

“It’s not a panacea,” says Joe Brouse, NRGRDA director of business retention and expansion, “but there’s a lot of work to be done.”

Joel Sopher, 54, has been a self-employed electrician for 30 years and looks forward to the new opportunities that West Virginia University Institute of Technology will bring to his hometown of Beckley, West Virginia.

We stopped by Beckley on a hot and bright afternoon, when traffic was light and pedestrian traffic even lighter. West Virginia University is taking over the campus of a discredited local college, which stands to be a big economic boon, especially for the local health care economy–but classes weren’t in session yet, so the only evidence were the West Virginia University Institute of Technology banners all over town. On Westwood Drive, we met lifelong West Virginian Joel Sopher, 54, down the block from his business, Beckley Electric Co. Sopher got his electrician license at 16 and has been self-employed for 30 years, and he says this is the worst business has ever been (though he qualifies that he’s more selective about his clients now, too).