Berea wins “Livable Community” award to support local food

Berea wins “Livab...

Berea, Kentucky is one of four winners of a competition held by the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Department of Agriculture. The “Livable Communities” award was granted to support Berea’s continued work on expanding the...
SOAR moves forward at East Kentucky Leadership Conference

SOAR moves forward at E...

The next step in the SOAR process happened last week at the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation annual conference when the SOAR working group committees met for the first time. The 10 working group committees are tasked with “leading large-scale discussions throughout eastern...
Kentucky General Assembly tinkers but doesn’t change way it spends severance funds

Kentucky General Assemb...

The Kentucky General Assembly came to a close last week, and its accomplishments (or lack thereof) leave much to be desired for eastern Kentucky. A bill to make permanent scholarships for coal county students attending coalfield schools passed, but beyond that, little was done to support...
State agency offers predictions for Kentucky’s energy future

State agency offers pre...

The Kentucky Department of Energy Development and Independence (DEDI) provided some eye-opening charts at a recent symposium on “The Future of Coal” at Northern Kentucky University. It’s no secret that coal in eastern Kentucky is in steep decline, but seeing where DEDI believes the...
Structure and process for SOAR initiative announced – it’s a good next step

Structure and process f...

Governor Steve Beshear and Representative Hal Rogers announced the structure and process for the Shaping Our Appalachian Region initiative yesterday in Hazard. We’ve been waiting for this announcement since Dec. 9, 2013, when an almost 2,000-person crowd showed up at the SOAR summit in...
Severance Tax Dollars Need Stronger Overall Strategy

Severance Tax Dollars N...

This blog is cross-posted at the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. The House version of the new state budget takes $20 million of coal severance money the governor’s budget had allocated to region-wide programs and local governments and shifts money to over 400 earmarked local...
Worker-Owned Cooperatives for Appalachia

Worker-Owned Cooperativ...

What if the people who are employed by a business are the same people who own it? How would that change the decisions that get made regarding wages, benefits, community participation and the workplace culture? Worker-owned cooperatives are an answer to corporate business models that...
Great crowd and lots to learn at KFTC’s fifth annual Growing Appalachia conference

Great crowd and lots to...

This post is cross-posted at the blog of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. About 190 people attended KFTC’s fifth annual Growing Appalachia conference in Prestonsburg, a record for the one-day event focused on ways people in eastern Kentucky can earn or save money or grow a business...