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Q&A: The Making of a Regional Outdoor Recreation Destination [1]
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Date: 2025-08-15
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
“Proudly Made,” a new book by Ta Enos, is part memoir, part how-to about her experience as the first CEO of the nonprofit Pennsylvania Wilds Center for Entrepreneurship. The Pennsylvania Wilds is both a place and a movement, she explains. Made up of 13 rural counties, the region is the size of Massachusetts and contains 2.4 million acres of public land. Its assets include remarkable dark skies, the largest wild elk herd in the Northeast, wild and scenic rivers, and a vibrant maker culture.
Enjoy our conversation about the importance of public lands, state leadership that makes good on its promises, and a book eight years in the making, below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: The Pennsylvania Wilds (PA Wilds) had an interesting origin. In seeking a solution for the problem of growing elk tourism in a highly rural area without visitor infrastructure, state and local partners envisioned more: connecting distressed rural communities to public lands on a regional scale for economic uplift. Can you tell us more about these beginnings?
Ta Enos: Regional efforts that cross giant landscapes and so many jurisdictions often need a big actor to help bring everyone to the table. For the PA Wilds, that was the Commonwealth. It started under Governor Ridge with an elk tourism study, and then when Governor Rendell came into office he was really taken with the beauty of the region and saw an opportunity that was bigger than just this incredible elk experience. This is a region with all this public land and charming small towns, surrounded by these major tourism markets and no one knows about it. So the idea was, let’s try to grow outdoor recreation as a sector to help revitalize rural communities and create the next generation of stewards in the process.
Governors only have four to eight years in office so they move fast. The state held meetings in affected communities. Many locals expressed appreciation for the Wilds concept, but were nervous because, at the very start, it had a pretty narrow marketing focus. Local communities pushed for a more holistic approach. Part of the reason we’ve had good outcomes is because very early on, locals spoke up, state leaders listened, and together they created a genuine partnership. Every state administration since Ridge and Rendell, both Republican and Democrat, has invested in the Wilds work alongside local communities, including, in a big way, our current Governor, Josh Shapiro, whose administration has made important investments in the regional effort and in establishing a state Office of Outdoor Recreation. He and the First Lady have also lifted up the special role public lands play in the lives of Pennsylvanians and people who visit here, which is great to see, especially given recent efforts nationally to sell off public lands.
DY: Tourism done wrong can be extractive. Can you share some of the key decisions and strategies you implemented to avoid that?
TE: Some really important decisions and approaches happened before my time, but I researched them for my book because I’m just so grateful local leaders had the foresight to prioritize them. For example, one of our early regional stakeholder groups, called the PA Wilds Planning Team, pushed for a major focus on supporting rural entrepreneurs, and state partners supported that. That still shapes the work today. Directing visitor and investor dollars toward local businesses has a huge return, both as job and wealth creators in rural communities and because money spent locally stays in the community longer, supporting families and other businesses.
In addition, we have emphasized community character stewardship. Each community has a unique sense of place. Our Planning Team understood how valuable that is and created the PA Wilds Design Guide for Community Character Stewardship, a free tool that gives guidance on how to build to fit the landscape and local culture, so we don’t lose that as we grow.
DY: What are some of the ways you specifically support entrepreneurs?
TE: The first important step was to network our entrepreneurs together so we could create community where so many of us are geographically spread out. That program is free to join. It started with 50 retailers and artisans and today it is a whole variety of 700-plus businesses and organizations. Once in-network, entrepreneurs can connect to financing and other small business service providers. We also help market the businesses. We manage the PA Wilds trademarked logo, so members can use our licensing program to bring new products like souvenirs to market. We have also directly built market access for rural entrepreneurs. Our branded commerce platform includes an online marketplace and regional brick and mortar stores located at recreation assets. Our supply chain for these retail operations is 90% from the region. Millions of dollars of rural products have been sold across our platforms, driving wealth back into rural communities through small businesses.
DY: Keeping everyone at the table is one of the biggest hurdles for regional efforts. How do you generate and maintain cohesion across such a huge landscape?
TE: Partnership work and trust-building is absolutely critical. This is often hard to fund but we’ve been really fortunate to have the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which has institutionalized support for our efforts through their Conservation Landscape program. Early on, the state making good on its promises related to branding, marketing and recreation infrastructure was huge and kept a lot of partners at the table. Another key underpinning was having all 13 counties in the region sign an Intergovernmental Cooperation Agreement, a legal instrument that provides a platform for a unified local planning voice. Early work done by the local visitor bureaus and the state tourism office, around the principles for the regional brand, and then our nonprofit’s work with small businesses to engage in that brand for economic uplift – all of that has helped with cohesion. The founding of the PA Wilds Center in 2013 and the subsequent reorganization of the initiative’s many components under its umbrella was also incredibly important to long term sustainability.
DY: What resources have you found that support the type of community and economic development work you are doing?
TE: In addition to our state partners, there are federal funders like the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Economic Development Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and many philanthropic partners that are investing in rural place-making and revitalization efforts like ours. That funding is incredibly important. We also look to the nonprofit Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR), who is doing a great job at the national level telling the sector’s story and fostering bipartisan support with a strong focus on rural. ORR just released fantastic recommendations in its Trail Map for Rural Development in America, which highlights voices and wisdom from rural communities and experts in the rural development space. The Aspen Institute’s Community Strategies Group has an incredible suite of resources we have used, such as their Rural Development Hubs, value chain, and Thrive Rural frameworks. Headwaters Economics has done important studies on outdoor recreation trends, impacts and sustainability strategies. I’m also a huge fan of Tony Pipa and the Brookings Institute’s Reimagine Rural initiative. Finally, and I write about this in my book, we are fortunate to be part of a growing peer network of rural places doing this kind of work.
DY: How do you articulate the PA Wilds successes?
TE: We track a lot of metrics. How many visitors we receive and the region’s growing visitor spending, which is now at $1.9 billion annually. How many businesses participate in our entrepreneurial ecosystem, gross sales across our commerce platforms, and money donated to our charity checkout campaign for stewardship. Harder to track, but just as important, is pride of place. You can feel it here. The work has become an important catalyst that inspires people to move back, as it did for me, or make other investments in our rural communities. Those multipliers are critical in places that have seen decades of population loss, as we have. Finally — are staff, board and partners engaged? Those commitments of time, talent and treasure at the local level are just huge. You really can’t do anything without them.
DY: Why did you decide to write Proudly Made and what was your process like?
TE: My first career was as a journalist in Alaska. The PA Wilds work helped pull me back home to rural Pennsylvania, first through small business and outfitting, then as a small business ombudsman where I worked for five years with rural entrepreneurs across the region. When I saw firsthand the impact the work was having, I thought “someone has to step up and found a nonprofit and build the team, systems, and funding to transition the work from state-led to locally-led and sustain it for future generations.” That all sounded pretty intimidating so for a while I convinced myself others should do it. And then one day I looked in the mirror and realized, YOU need to do it, Ta. So I just started. My book came about in a similar way. I was on this journey learning to lead and watching this collective regional story unfold. And I kept thinking: someone needs to tell this story! Narratives about a place are powerful things. Too often in rural America, and definitely in Appalachia, they are told by people from outside and through a lens that is often negative. The Wilds work had some rocky moments, but our region stuck with it, and to me what we’ve accomplished together is such an inspiring story. I mean, there’s a lot of ways to get tourism development wrong. And rural Pennsylvania is doing a lot of things right. We’ve become a national model because of it. I felt a responsibility to try to tell that story. It took eight years of stealing away 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there. Locally-led, place-based development is happening in communities all across the country and is so deserving of support.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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