The New River Valley cluster of teams in Virginia was selected in the first round of MIRA grants. Andy Morikawa of the Community Foundation of The New River Valley in Christiansburg, was instrumental in bringing the word to people in the surrounding counties. This part of Appalachia is a mix of growing towns and smaller ones that lost population over the past ten years. While Roanoake is the nearest large airport, the main town in the cluster is Blacksburg. A rural sprawl of retail stores, service centers and restaurants lines the highway to Christiansburg eight miles away. However, many of the outlying smaller towns are distant culturally and economically from this growth axis.

Blacksburg is the home of Blacksburg Electronic Village, a.k.a BEV, one of the most ambitious community networking projects every conceived. Originating at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, BEV provided high-speed connections to students, faculty, and townspeople in the early 1990's just as Internet service providers (ISPs) were just springing up in urban areas. While BEV helped the area get a jump on the rest of rural America, the disparities in services were felt in the area because the high-speed lines were not available to everyone. Apple helped connect the local library to the Internet about the same time, and they were able to provide mail accounts and and public access computers for citizens without equipment at home. Once other ISPs started to serve Blacksburg and the surrounding region, Virginia Tech decided that it would turn over personal accounts for thousands of individuals to local commercial ISPs. Still, the range of community services provided gave the citizens of this area a big head start over small towns where market forces would not bring in the Internet for several years.