Fahe Staff and Members Take on Performance Challenges to Advance Mission and Scale Impact

At a moment when Appalachia faces both a deepening housing crisis and increasing pressure on nonprofit resources, Fahe is investing in something essential but often overlooked: how emerging leaders inside an organization learn, adapt, and act in the face of complexity.

A select group of Fahe staff and Fahe Members are currently engaged in a series of self-designed performance challenges—ambitious, real-world efforts they believe have the potential to be transformational. These challenges are not assignments handed down from leadership. They are problems staff and Members have stepped forward to own because they matter to Fahe’s long-term ability to deliver on mission, manage resources responsibly, and scale what works.

This approach reflects a core belief at Fahe: solving today’s housing challenges requires more than technical expertise or incremental improvement. It requires leaders who can step back, ask better questions, and mobilize others around solutions that cut across silos and traditional ways of working.

Fahe CEO Jim King has endorsed the effort as a critical investment in the organization’s future—one that supports stronger execution today while preparing Fahe to grow. That readiness is essential as Fahe and its network pursue an ambitious regional housing challenge: doubling productivity to build or rehabilitate 60,000 homes and improve the lives of one million people by 2030. Achieving this challenge will significantly advance Fahe’s mission to build thriving Appalachian communities.

The performance challenges span a wide range of functional areas—from talent and organizational capacity to membership, lending, partnerships, and decision-making frameworks. What unites them is not the topic, but the discipline behind the work: defining the real problem, understanding historical context, testing assumptions, and building shared rationale for change.

This leadership development work is being facilitated by Santiago Bunce of Viabosque, who is guiding Fahe staff and Members as well as five lead coaches through a structured strategic leadership capacity building process. Participants are encouraged to identify challenges that have true organizational growth potential—efforts that cannot succeed without collaboration, alignment, and collective ownership.

The experience is intentionally reflective as well as practical. As Bunce describes it, participants are learning to move from “the dance floor,” where day-to-day work happens, to “the balcony,” where leaders can observe patterns, surface tensions, and make more intentional choices about how change occurs.

What is emerging is a culture shift as much as a set of projects. Staff are strengthening their ability to bring forward ideas, engage colleagues, and lead through influence rather than authority alone. They are learning how to honor what has worked in the past while recognizing that this moment may demand new approaches.

In a sector where urgency often crowds out reflection, Fahe’s performance challenges represent a deliberate commitment to learning while doing. They are a reminder that lasting impact is built not only through capital and construction, but through leadership that is willing to pause, adapt, and step forward together.