For Amisha Agrawal 26BBA, the drive between Emory’s campus and her hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee, was a scenic and sacred ritual. She’d developed a muscle memory of the contours of the journey that began in the lush green canopy of Atlanta and took her into the mountainous heart of Appalachia, until the air cooled and the gears of her car strained. Familiar landmarks on the way felt like old friends.
Familiar, that is, until September 2024.
“I get chills thinking about the first time I took that drive after the hurricane hit,” says Amisha. “I saw whole homes that had been swept away. Businesses were just gone.”
That fall, Hurricane Helene took lives—and livelihoods. Many small businesses lost their storefronts, and those that stayed struggled to remain stitched together with interrupted supply chains and decimated infrastructure.
For Amisha, Appalachia isn’t an abstract idea or a distant cause; it’s home. And as a daughter of small business owners, business isn’t a major, but a way of life. The call to improve opportunities for her fellow friends and neighbors—and the plan of how she would do it—was already taking shape in her mind when the hurricane hit land. It was one more harsh blow to a region already fighting against the odds, and one more galvanizing reason for Amisha to put her plan to work.
Closing the gap, one client at a time
Around a year later, that plan earned a name: Appalachia Advisory.
Appalachia Advisory is a pro bono consultancy that pairs small business owners across the Appalachian region with teams of students and young professionals for short, project-based engagements. The organization is also primarily run by current and former Goizueta students, leading four different operational teams. Their goal is to deliver the kind of support many small businesses can’t easily afford without asking owners to shoulder fees.
Taking entrepreneurial risks appears to be in Amisha’s bloodline. When she was 12 years old, Amisha’s mother took a leap of faith and quit her job to open a Kumon center—a tutoring franchise that functions like a small business. As an immigrant from India with no prior business experience, her mother learned to navigate a largely unfamiliar local market.
“I watched her figure it out through sheer persistence and grit,” says Amisha. “I’d help when she was short staffed and through that, I started to absorb the ins-and-outs of running a business and the broader network in our area.”
Compared to her mother’s experience, Amisha’s journey to the business sector as a Goizueta student years later felt more like a red carpet.
“When I got to Goizueta and discovered consulting, I was suddenly exposed to a whole new level of resources and talent,” says Amisha. “I was fortunate enough to land dream opportunities through those resources. But I couldn’t stop thinking of home, and all the potential still there.”
With Appalachia Advisory, small business owners like her mother from many years ago will have more to lean on than just grit in finding their footing; they will have fresh eyes and business insight to help them realize their dreams.
A Unique Culture where Business Binds Community
Even before Hurricane Helene, small businesses across Appalachia have long faced structural headwinds, given their limited access to strategic support, thin margins, and economic volatility that hits rural communities first and hardest. The past several years have only amplified those pressures, with the COVID-19 pandemic straining local mom-and-pop enterprises.
And yet, Appalachia is also a place of momentum as one of the fastest growing regions in the nation and home to over 740,000 small businesses.
“Appalachia Advisory exists to meet that momentum with practical, high-quality support, all free of charge,” says Todd Hanson 27BBA, who serves as Director of Growth & Development at the organization.
“People have a very one-dimensional view of Appalachia,” says Amisha. “But it’s a diverse place with a deep cultural identity—even though this region technically spans 13 states, encompassing smaller rural towns like mine as well as bigger agrarian hubs. There’s a sense of resilience and pride here, and also the mindset that we take care of each other. The community’s response to Hurricane Helene is a prime example of that strength.”
For many of these communities, local businesses are a linchpin of local culture. Anyone who visits towns across Appalachia is likely to find cherished small breweries, excellent produce grown nearby at bustling farmers’ markets, and niche storefronts.
“From an economic standpoint, a lot of these places are held together by mom-and-pop businesses, and many of those businesses are generational, family-owned, or rooted locally,” says Amisha. “There’s a powerful emphasis on ‘shop local,’ because these businesses are not just economically important, they’re socially important.”
Adrian Thierry 25BBA, Co-President, came to understand this firsthand after joining the organization. “About 99 percent of businesses in Appalachia are small businesses,” he notes, “yet only around 17 percent receive any form of assistance. That gap really stood out to me. It highlighted just how much opportunity there is to create impact by supporting the businesses that are already driving these local economies.”
“In helping these businesses keep their footing, we are hoping to not just help individual people, but to preserve the unique culture of Appalachia,” Amisha emphasizes.
Pro Bono in Practice
Goizueta students on the Consulting Team recently completed a revenue growth strategy with a third-generation family owned business, Shipley Family Farms, in Boone, North Carolina. The client was so encouraged by the work that he expressed strong interest in a second phase of support—an important signal not just of satisfaction, but of trust and continuity.
“That project was very special because the owner, Gray Shipley, is beloved in the Boone area and his farm is cherished in the community,” says Appalachia Advisory’s Consulting Team Lead Yusuf Sulaiman. “We helped him comb through sales data and determine which channels were the highest growth and where they were leaving opportunity on the table; from there, they built a CRM tool to help him organize his relationships with customers. We identified which markets he could expand to that would still work with shipping logistics, and identified Greenville, South Carolina, as another lucrative market for his products.”
Appalachia Advisory has since kicked off new projects with a blueberry farm out of Alabama, and a mental health clinic in Kingsport, Tennessee.
Another exciting client is a historic lodge in Matewan, West Virginia. Tucked in the mountains, the Historic Matewan House sits at the heart of some of America’s most storied lore—the town that gave the world the Hatfield-McCoy feud and the Matewan Massacre, the labor uprising that helped forge the modern union movement.
A Goizueta Degree at Work
Although Appalachia Advisory’s work is rooted in the Appalachian region, its operational heartbeat has strong ties to Goizueta Business School—through students, alumni, and faculty who have helped shape the organization from its earliest days.
“Emory Goizueta has been an instrumental catalyst for the organization,” says Todd. “Faculty and staff are providing mentorship and guidance, and many students and alumni are both serving as a pipeline of talent and donating their time in the service of economic equity in Appalachia.”
Although Todd doesn’t have direct ties to the region, the draw was as much personal as institutional. “Service, philanthropy, and social impact are core values of mine—ones that are too often overlooked by college students and young professionals. This organization lets me act on those values in a meaningful way.”
That support shows up in concrete ways. Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Andrea Hershatter has served as an advisor on the board since the organization’s inception, and Assistant Professor in the Practice of Organization & Management Jake Jo and Managing Director of the Business & Society Institute Brian Goebel are among the faculty connected to the work.
Goizueta alumni also contribute through Appalachia Advisory’s advisory board, including Zaim Zibran 24BBA, Akshat Toshniwal O2C and Guyberson Pierre 25BBA, who have helped guide the organization’s construction and growth.
A symbiotic relationship built on experiential learning
The strongest student-community partnerships avoid charity framing; they treat communities as collaborators and create value that flows in both directions. Appalachia Advisory is designed to do exactly that. For Appalachian business owners, the benefit is clear: access to strategic support that can otherwise be expensive, time-consuming to source, and difficult to tailor to a local context.
For students, the work is a real-world proving ground—what business education looks like when the stakes aren’t hypothetical, building skills hard to replicate in a classroom alone: scoping work, managing timelines, communicating with stakeholders, and turning analysis into recommendations a business owner can actually implement.
That mindset is intentional. As Anushka Jois 27BBA explains, she was drawn to this kind of work through prior consulting experience, developing “a strong interest in supporting organizations that operate with limited resources but have a meaningful impact within their communities.” At Appalachia Advisory, she says, that translates into approaching each project “with both structure and empathy.”
Appalachia Advisory also brings guest speakers from fields students are interested in, from organizations like UBS, Cognizant, McKinsey, and Bain—another way to gain mentors and expand their network.
“Whether that’s helping students land top internships and jobs or giving them a platform to explore consulting, growth strategy, or marketing,” says Adrian, “we’re building something that benefits both the region and our members.”
Other benefits are more personal than professional.
“Students can be fixated on what it looks like to be a ‘young professional,’ and it’s easy to underestimate how much you gain as a person by choosing to give,” says Todd. “Appalachia Advisory is a win on every side: students gain experience, young professionals channel their drive into something meaningful, and small businesses across Appalachia receive support they might otherwise be unable to access.”
For Amisha, the support she’s received from Goizueta students, faculty, and alumni exceeded her wildest expectations.
“At the start of the organization, I had a lot of hope for the idea but no strong expectation that it would truly work. I obviously have a strong personal connection to this cause, but I was less certain whether I would find others at Emory, or beyond, who would connect with this mission as deeply as I did. I remember when it was just me at the beginning, I was talking to everyone possible—Dean Hershatter, Professor Jake Jo, my close mentors Zaim Zibran and Akshat Toshniwal, my mentors from home Philip Cox and Sandeep Bangaru, and many others. Every single one of them encouraged me and shaped my approach in starting the organization and growing it. But, still, there was so much uncertainty.”
“But I’ve been blown away over the past year by the response,” she says. “Every single person who has joined this organization has brought incredible enthusiasm and perspective, and has pushed us forward in their own way. That has genuinely surprised and energized me.”
That energy is shared across the team. Co-President Iliyan Chatoor, who has been involved since the organization’s founding, points to the people as a defining factor.
“Everyone is supportive, collaborative, and genuinely motivated to do great work,” says Iliyan. “It’s inspiring to see how much we’ve been able to achieve together.”
Through the help of Iliyan and Adrian—as well as Todd, Anushka Jois 27BBA, and Jia Malhotra 25BBA, and Yusuf Sulaiman from East Tennessee State University— Appalachia Advisory is pursuing 501(c)(3) status and has raised nearly $11,670 in its first fundraising round—with members covering expenses out of pocket in the meantime. Future funding will support local community events, collaborative client sessions, and deeper university engagement as the organization looks to grow its footprint across the region.
“It’s remarkable to see something I originally cared about so personally become a shared passion,” says Amisha. “As I continue to serve on the board, I’m excited to see what legacy the team builds together.”
Appalachia Advisory is just getting started, with plans to expand its reach and impact across the region. Learn more at https://www.appalachiaadvisory.com/.
Goizueta’s Bachelor of Business Administration program is built for students who want to turn learning into impact—through rigorous academics, strong mentorship, and hands-on experiences that extend beyond the classroom. Learn more here.
