Together, we are all ONE.

Experience our legacy of giving with care, sharing and cultivating the light in ourselves and others, and tending to struggling communities to yield an abundant future in Central Appalachia and beyond.

Enter this site with an open mind
and open heart.

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Together, we are all ONE.

We are not defined by what we have been given, but by our intentions and ability to direct or manage our attention.

We all share similar essential basic needs. We cannot find personal or communal peace without fair and just access for all to resources provided by abundant nature.

In order to give, to serve appropriately, we begin with attention to the ground, to understand the root causes of disharmony, hardship and realities facing our communities.

Partner Highlight
Food Justice Institute

To appreciate the fruits,
we must tend to the roots.

We work to nurture a grassroots transformation toward a more diverse, more sustainable, and more inclusive economy across the coalfields of Central Appalachia and beyond.

Our core strategy is to partner with individuals and organizations to build and lead initiatives that regenerate community, the planet, and self. This approach is much like that of a farmer, who cultivates the ground and tends to the roots so that there can be healthy growth. We foster a strong entrepreneurial environment to ensure change is both systemic and transformational.

Our supportive methods include collective voice and policy development, leadership development, building skills and offering technical assistance, increasing access for low-income community members, leveraging innovative capital, and engaging other funders. This means energizing communities to connect their priorities to local entrepreneurial solutions and accomplishing cumulative, long-term sustainable outcomes.

Our Partners

Founding Principle

The One Foundation was founded on the principle of Rahm, the experience that compells us to give.

The understanding that each human is endowed at birth with the potential of pure heart and clear mind in order to lift one another out of suffering.
Our Founder

Guiding Principles

The One Foundation seeks partners with a commitment to the values that we, too, hold - like sustainability, equity, inclusion and service to others. In partnership we seek first light and common understanding, before we engage in support.
Abundance of Mercy
Nature is mercifully responsive to all our needs with its abundance. We acknowledge the gifts we have received and give with caring intention and intelligent execution.
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Ground Up
We give attention to the causes and seek to serve the roots, tending the ground of suffering within each reality.
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Inside Out
Wholesome honest giving starts from within where the caring heart seeks the clear vision for appropriate response. To be able to truly give, we need to develop compassion and heartfelt caring within as individuals and entrepreneurs.
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Partnership
Witnessing the interconnected reciprocity within each ecosystem, we engage in partnerships  respect ing all contributors to  the  evolving vision. 
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Entrepreneurial spirit
Reimagining the entrepreneurial spirit to be compassionate and responsive, driven to meet the shared essential needs.
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Partner Highlight
Food Justice Institute

Working together toward food security

Food Justice Lab is advancing a new collaborative experiment to raise up human resources for food system change through the Appalachian Food Justice Institute and promote cooperative agricultural enterprise development through the Growing Food Equity initiative. The Food Justice Lab is an education, leadership and action research center at West Virginia University. The mission is to facilitate food system transitions that ensure improved access to food for low-income families, fair prices for farmers and dignified wages for workers, to conserve natural resources and promote healthy food for all.

The Appalachian Food Justice Institute intends to cultivate a youthful ecosystem of food system change-makers in Appalachia, based on the belief that Appalachian youth are leaders who can and are rebuilding the economy from the bottom up. They need encouragement that they can succeed. They need to navigate obstacles on their path. And most importantly, they need to know that they are not alone. Indeed, they need living proof that they have friends, mentors and partners to lean on. If we want to cultivate a new social enterprise ecosystem, particularly agricultural enterprises in Appalachia, we need to tend to the energetic seeds of youth and the transformative initiatives that they are germinating. Visit Food Justice Institute.

Partner Highlight
Food Justice Institute
Founder's Story

Marz Attar

From the early age, I was tempted to seek freedom and light while maneuvering through the demands of modern life.

Based on my entrepreneurial nature and good fortune, I am committed to One Foundation & The Attar Family DAF, in search of intelligent creative altruism.

Reflections
Marz Attar
Austria, 1959

Foundation Team

Marz Attar
Marz Attar has received many gifts in his life. A native of Iran, he completed an MBA at Harvard as a Ford Fellow in the late ‘60s. By the late 1980s, Attar founded Highland Cellular Inc. in West Virginia, a franchisee of Cellular One, and worked to build wireless cellular communication across southern West Virginia and northwestern Virginia. With the capital, the many gifts, he received from selling his company in 2007, which later merged with AT&T, Attar co-founded the One Foundation in 2010.

As a lifelong spiritual seeker, Attar is guided by the deepest teachings of mankind - love, brotherhood and caring for your neighbor. And throughout its existence the mission at the One Foundation has remained the same - To help create a world where compassion, altruism and love of one’s neighbor can flourish and thrive so that humanity’s paradigm can start to shift away from greed and conquest to peace and harmony. The One Foundation is both regionally and internationally minded, dedicating resources and mentorship to helping grassroots organizations working throughout central Appalachia and beyond to nurture transformation from the ground up by helping regenerate community, the planet and self.
Kent Spellman, Advisor
Kent Spellman joined the One Foundation team in 2018 after a diverse career as a private sector entrepreneur and as a social entrepreneur. He has been a building contractor, a designer, a newspaper publisher and editor, and an economic and community development professional. He also helped create the 72-mile North Bend Rail-Trail as a volunteer in the late 80s and early 90s.

In 2008, Kent became the founding executive director of the WV Community Development Hub, which he led until his retirement in 2016. When Kent applied for the position at the Hub at the age of 56, it was the first job application he had ever submitted.

Throughout his career, Kent has thought of himself as a builder, whether building rail-trails, designing and building homes and commercial spaces, or building communities and community-based economies. He is delighted to join the One Foundation team and to be working with the Foundation's remarkable partner organizations.

Kent lives with his wife, Betsy, in Clarksburg WV.