Kentucky Communities Unlock their Cultural Wealth to Lead the Way Forward

By Abbie Langston and Lorrie Chang


Photo Credit: Malcolm Wilson, Humans of Central Appalachia

Letcher County, Kentucky is at the very heart of Appalachia, a region as rich in history and culture as in natural resources. Over the last 10 years, the county has lost more than 90 percent of coal jobs that had sustained its economy. About 98 percent of residents are White and 80 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

At first glance, this rural area might seem to have little in common with diverse urban centers like Detroit and Pittsburgh. But the challenge of advancing a just economic transition in coal country is not dissimilar  with the challenge of building an equitable economy in metropolitan regions once dominated by steel, automotive, or other manufacturing sectors.

Like these cities and other “company towns,” Eastern Kentucky citizens once drew their lifeblood from a single industry, and now face the challenge of charting a new economy. One resident likened coal’s hold to addiction. The coal companies proclaimed, “you mine the coal and we’ll take care of you,” she explained. When coal collapsed, this dependency left communities in fear and desperation. So it’s no surprise that many residents have welcomed the prospect of a proposed federal prison as another economic anchor to fill the void.

But across the political spectrum, a consensus is building that Letcher County’s future cannot depend solely on one company or industry. A group of community-led organizations have formed the Letcher County Culture Hub, a network designed to foster and develop residents’s agency and assets, and build on the strength of its own rich cultural wealth. Today the growing list of partners include volunteer fire departments, businesses, community centers, and artist and cultural organizations collaborating with elected officials and other local, regional, and national organizations. Partners bring together resources and work in consensus to pursue common goals including reviving cultural events like the region’s bluegrass festival, founding new social enterprises including one that employs formerly incarcerated people, and expanding opportunity such as broadband Internet.

The Letcher County Culture Hub is also a part of the Arts, Culture, Equitable Development Initiative, generously supported by The Kresge Foundation, for PolicyLink to expand the impact of six community based organizations across the US in equitable development and policy change through arts and culture.

Centering Grassroots Power: Self-Determination through Arts and Culture

The Letcher County Culture Hub was born out of Appalshop, a 50-year-old multimedia arts, culture, and workforce development center that supports residents to tell their own stories, strengthen Appalachian culture, and work for more just communities.

With its arts-and-culture focused mission and deep roots in Letcher County, Appalshop took a unique approach to economic development: unlike traditional development that begin with a plan for a community to develop assets, they began with the community and the assets within it. Ben Fink, an Appalshop organizer who collaborated with community leaders to start the Culture Hub, explained, “This isn’t a project about saving Appalachia. This is a project about Appalachians saving ourselves.” From this perspective, culture isn’t just a way to add local flavor to economic development or market products; it is the very context and medium that make economic and social relationships possible. As Fink put it, “culture means more than music, dance, or art. It means paying attention to the language, interactions, and how meaning gets made.”

For the Culture Hub, starting with culture means starting with the methodology of story circles utilized by Appalshop’s longtime collaborator Junebug Productions, an African-American arts organization rooted in the civil rights movement. Story circles create a space where all voices are equal, identify and build on common bonds, and generate ideas from the intersections and contradictions between stories.

This has been a crucial process for the Culture Hub whose constituents span a wide spectrum of philosophical beliefs and political leanings. Fire chief, former mine owner, and conservative political activist Bill Meade reflected, “If you told me I would be here at Appalshop three years ago, I would have never believed you.” Appalshop has long been viewed by some with skepticism for its progressive political orientation in a place steeped in conservative traditions. But by building from the common ground of culture, the Culture Hub has bridged long-standing divides and forged new bonds of collaboration. Story circles, community plays, and other cultural-based approaches have allowed participants to not ignore their differences, but to work across them through shared values and aspirations. Meade, a founding member, is now one of the network’s central leaders. He has played an integral role in economic development, helping launch the county’s first large-scale solar project with partners; and the arts, playing a lead role in Appalshop’s recent play The Future of Letcher County.

Playing the Long Game: Rooting Culture in an Economic Model

For over a hundred years, Appalachia has been dominated by an economic model that suffocates rather than encourages creativity, new ideas, and self-determination. The Culture Hub’s vision for the next hundred years is very different: build a culture of entrepreneurial spirit, interdependence, and unbounded imagination among residents who believe the future is theirs to create. This is why their mission is not just job creation or economic development. Instead, it is guided by the broader principle, “We own what me make.” The goal isn’t to employ everyone; but to create the conditions for everyone to enact their cultural, civic, and economic agency; identify and build on their assets; and find self-directed ways to turn them into community wealth.

The Culture Hub is playing the long game to redefine who owns and designs the narratives, strategies, and policies that will define Appalachia’s economic transition. Policies or programs alone cannot achieve true equity a society in which all can reach their full potential without shifting the culture of how people relate and make meaning and value together.

By building trust and a common voice through the intentional, collective production of culture, participants recognize and act on opportunities and needs in ways that might not be possible in traditional planning processes. As Fink explained, “honestly I think there was some shame about, you know, feeling helpless…[These deeper opportunities and needs weren’t] going to come up but for the kind of really intentional work around relationship building and strengthening that we did.” Because the Culture Hub roots development in people and their stories, participants are able to “not only to tell a different story about themselves, but also to act on that story”. Residents can rewrite their story from helpless to empowered and shape the solutions that turn this story into reality.

The Culture Hub is expanding. What began in 2015 with four partners is now nearly 20. Furthermore, the Culture Hub joined community cultural organizations in the Black Belt of Alabama, Mississippi Delta, West Baltimore, and rural and urban Wisconsin to found an emerging coalition. This project, called Performing Our Future, brings grassroots partners alongside economists, researchers, and technology developers together to advance community-led, culture-driven development on a national and international scale. The Culture Hub and the coalition continue to look for collaborators and funding to support work in which all people, voices, and perspectives make their own future and own what they make.

Support the Green New Deal

This is how "Winning on Equity" happens!

Last Thursday, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey demonstrated the meaning of radical imagination by putting forward a legislative framework to confront climate change and uplift the lives and well-being of Indigenous communities and communities on the front lines of climate threats across the nation. Their proposed Green New Deal (GND) builds on work many of you have led over the last decade: it confronts the threats of climate change by proposing a transition from fossil fuels while investing in the communities and the 100 million economically insecure people in America that have borne the worst of our carbon-based economy.

Let's show Congress that the Green New Deal has our support. Transformative solidarity is the prerequisite to realizing the promise of the Green New Deal vision.

Contact your congressional leaders and tell them to cosponsor the Green New Deal framework and move it forward into bold legislation.

Highlights of the Green New Deal include:

  • Universal Access to Clean Water and Transportation: The GND prioritizes investment in green infrastructure including drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure that can ensure universal access to clean water for the 77 million people across the U.S. who lack access to safe and affordable drinking water. It would dismantle fossil fuel infrastructure to protect our natural water systems, while developing renewable energy sources. It would eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, and would repair and improve our transportation, energy, housing, and other infrastructure.
  • A Federal Job Guarantee in the Green Economy: Amid growing economic insecurity and persistent racial economic inequity, a federal job guarantee can be a cornerstone for an inclusive, thriving, and sustainable 21st century American economy. By ensuring that every person who wants to work has access to a quality job, a job guarantee would eliminate involuntary unemployment, decrease poverty, and raise the floor on low-wage work while building stronger, more climate-friendly communities. The GND explicitly addresses historic, social, economic, racial, and gender-based injustices and includes a federal job guarantee as well as additional policies that ensure economic security and build wealth and ownership at the community level.

Climate change and growing inequality are among the greatest threats to our nation. As the nation's population becomes majority people of color, the Green New Deal can enable us to become a just, fair, and sustainable society where all — including working-class communities and communities of color long locked out of opportunity — can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential.

Tell your congressional representatives to support the Green New Deal by cosponsoring the bill, moving forward committee hearings, and shaping bold legislation.

In solidarity,

Michael McAfee, PolicyLink

Good Food Here Store Owner Guide

Overview

An initiative of the Ohio Department of Health, Creating Healthy Communities (CHC) is committed to preventing and reducing chronic disease statewide. Through cross-sector collaboration, CHC activates communities to improve access to and affordability of healthy food, increase opportunities for physical activity, and assure tobacco-free living where Ohioans live, work and play. By implementing sustainable evidence-based strategies, CHC is creating a culture of health. Learn more about their work here.

This guide offers tools for healthy food retail store owners sell healthy foods at their store.

Check out these other resources produced by the Creating Healthy Communities Program:

Good Food Here Coordinator Guide

Overview

An initiative of the Ohio Department of Health, Creating Healthy Communities (CHC) is committed to preventing and reducing chronic disease statewide. Through cross-sector collaboration, CHC activates communities to improve access to and affordability of healthy food, increase opportunities for physical activity, and assure tobacco-free living where Ohioans live, work and play. By implementing sustainable evidence-based strategies, CHC is creating a culture of health. Learn more about their work here.

This guide helps healthy food retail project coordinators with tools to provide technical assistance and resources to help store owners sell healthy foods.

Check out these other resources produced by the Creating Healthy Communities Program:

VIDEO: Creating Healthy Communities Program's Good Food Here Initiative

Overview

An initiative of the Ohio Department of Health, Creating Healthy Communities (CHC) is committed to preventing and reducing chronic disease statewide. Through cross-sector collaboration, CHC activates communities to improve access to and affordability of healthy food, increase opportunities for physical activity, and assure tobacco-free living where Ohioans live, work and play. By implementing sustainable evidence-based strategies, CHC is creating a culture of health. Learn more about their work here and through this video.

Check out these other resources produced by the Creating Healthy Communities Program:

Innovations among Food Banks in the United States

Overview

This new report by Reinvestment Fund and Bank of America looks at how food banks are adopting a variety of approaches within each of these categories to feed the hungry and permanently end food insecurity.

Video: Winfield Save-A-Lot

Overview

Check out this video about Reinvestment Fund's work to finance the fit out and equipping of a new 15,000 square foot Save-A-Lot grocery store in Winfield, KS. A veteran-owned and operated business, the store is located in a USDA food desert where the previous grocery store closed in 2013. The store will create 30 jobs and serve residents of a low-income community (23% poverty rate).

Honor Capital, a veteran-owned business with a dual mission to employ returning veterans and to alleviate food desert communities, will operate the Save-A-Lot. The store will be managed by Matt Eisenbach, a Naval Academy graduate who served 6 years of active duty. The store will seek to hire local veterans to fill the new jobs it is creating.

The Save-A-Lot will offer a full array of fresh produce and fresh cut meat in addition to typical grocery departments (dry goods, dairy and frozen). Located in a USDA food desert, the store is on the northeast side of Winfield, more than two miles from the only other food retailers in the city, a Super Walmart and a Dillions located adjacent to each other. No other stores are located within 10 miles.

Honor Capital Save-A-Lot (full profile: reinvestment.com/success-story/honor-capital-save-a-lot/)

Eight Black Women Mayors Join First-of-Its-Kind Network from PolicyLink and ESSENCE

Featured at the ESSENCE-PolicyLink Women Mayors Roundtable on January 29 are Mayors: LaToya Cantrell, New Orleans, LA; Sharon Weston Broome, Baton Rouge, LA; Catherine Pugh, Baltimore, MD; London Breed, San Francisco, CA; and Karen Weaver, Flint, MI (Photo Credit: Arthur Walton)

 

The political power of Black women has been on full display, particularly in America’s cities where a growing number of Black women have taken over as chief policymaker.

PolicyLink and ESSENCE recentley announced the ESSENCE-PolicyLink Mayors Roundtable -- a network for Black women mayors to exchange ideas, share best practices, develop strategies to create equitable cities, and shine a spotlight on their work and communities. Participating mayors include: Catherine Pugh, Baltimore, MD; Sharon Weston Broome, Baton Rouge,LA; Vi Lyles, Charlotte, NC; Karen Weaver, Flint, MI; LaToya Cantrell, New Orleans, LA; London Breed, San Francisco, CA; Muriel Bowser, Washington, DC; and Lovely Warren, Rochester, NY.

The network kicked off last Friday in Washington D.C., following the U.S. Conference of Mayors Winter Meeting, and will close July 4-7, 2019 during the ESSENCE Fest in New Orleans. In the interim, the mayors will participate in monthly virtual roundtables on topics related to policy and leadership hosted by the PolicyLink All-In Cities Initiative. ESSENCE will also be publishing a series of articles and videos profiling the mayors and highlighting the work that they are championing.

Read more about the event and watch the short video clip on Essense to learn more.

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