I travelled to Christiansburg to meet Monica Appleby. Many of the contacts in Virginia were too busy to respond to requests for interviews and visits, but Appleby answered quickly and provided me with very useful suggestions about other places to see. Appleby works at Community Housing Partners Corporation, formerly VMH, Inc. a non-profit that helps low and moderate-income people with affordable housing all over the state, energy conservation, and provides micro-enterprise loans in the counties of the Virginia MIRA cluster. In addition, they have a treatment program for at-risk adolescents in the New River Valley. They also work with Appalachian by Design on a home knitting project for people to lease knitting machines and earn extra income. Janaka Casper, CHPC's executive director, also took part in the meeting. Because they deal with the economic realities of the surrounding counties they both were able to describe some of the changes they observed: the furniture plant opening in Shawsville, organic farming in Craig County (ginseng and shitake mushrooms), the Christiansburg area become a destination for new residents. Their original plan was to do a youth entrepreneurship program, but Kellogg encouraged them to build up their own organization. With the help of Vickie Creed from Knoxville, Tennessee, they worked on their own mission at the same time as they were redesigning their own web site. Appleby said, "We had never had to focus on ourselves and it was very useful." She felt that the use of email was powerful but perhaps not democratizing. Casper said it made his work more productive to use email, but we all worried about overload from too many messages within an organization. A primary goal was the establishment of a corporate database to track their client base, but this process went very slowly. Office phone and computer equipment was upgraded, and this allowed for much better contact between staff and clients. More of the staff became proficient with email, and they registered their own domain, but it has not changed with their recent name change. One difficulty they had was staying apart, as Kellogg madated, from the cluster teams. This was a common complaint from CSOs everywhere. None of them thought they would overwhelm the nascent groups that were forming in order to complete training and start on a project. CHPC did renew contacts and make new ones with other CSO groups such as Voluntary Action, Jacksonville Center, and Old Church Gallery.