Last week, groups from all across eastern Kentucky convened in Corbin for the 2026 Saw summit.

The three day conference centered on building eastern Kentucky together and brought together people in health care, addiction recovery, economic development, tourism and more to talk about strengthening the region.

Here's more from Kentucky editions.

Clayton Dalton.

At the Corbin Arena.

Eastern Kentuckians came together to discuss how they can strengthen their communities, whether it be better jobs, more accessible health care or new tourism attractions.

Reed Adkins is the executive director of Shaping Our Appalachian Region or Saw, and he said the organization was created at a difficult time.

After the downturn of coal.

Several of our communities were devastated.

Coal was the driving force for economic development in our area.

Congressman Hal Rogers and then Governor Steve Beshear came together in a nonpartisan effort to try to help the counties that were affected.

The topics of discussion were tailored specifically to the needs of the region.

The summit hosted topical breakout sessions ranging from addiction recovery to child care.

One of the sessions centered on broadband internet expansion.

One of saw's longstanding initiatives.

Broadband used to be a luxury.

You know, whether you had internet at home or if you didn't have internet at home.

You know, it's nice to have it.

If you could have it now becomes almost like a utility.

You know, it's it's important as water and electricity.

We're getting to a point now where broadband is becoming more and more common.

We still have outliers.

We still have those hard to reach places.

But now this this breakout session today really focused on what comes next.

How do we take an existing broadband infrastructure and what we build around that?

How do we build our communities?

How do we build population growth to come back instead of outmigration?

How do we attract talent?

How do we attract new businesses?

How do we attract people to our downtowns?

And what role does broadband really play in that?

Saws central focus is to transform lives through meaningful employment.

Senate President Robert Stivers said the recent announcement of a new UTV manufacturing facility in Owsley County does just that.

It is 60 jobs, and they're going to be good paying jobs that $20 an hour range.

And so that's very good.

And we've already had a lot of people say, hey, you know, if I can come back to County live and work for that type of a wage, we call them the boomerangs, they'll come back.

So for being one of the poorest counties in the nation, to have this type of event and establish that in Booneville, it just makes all the difference in the world.

And it plays right in with probably one of our strongest assets.

And that's the adventure tourism.

And they're going to build vehicles that fit right in with the adventure tourism.

We're seeing opportunities created here and a lot of people staying here that we want to stay here and people returning.

So there's a lot of excitement, more than I've seen in quite a while, that that over the last 6 or 8 years we have created some real progress.

For Kentucky.

Edition I'm Clayton Dalton.

Nearly 1200 people attended this year saw summit.