Name: How a conservative coal county built the biggest community solar energy project in East Kentucky
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How a conservative coal county built the biggest community solar energy project in East Kentucky

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Editor's Note:Placemaking Postcards is a blog series from the Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings where policymakers and practitioners guest-author promising placemaking efforts from across the U.S. and abroad that foster . In line with the , the goal of the series is to recognize the community as the expert, highlight voices from the field, and to create a community of learning and practice around transformative placemaking.&nbsp;In Letcher County, Ky., where coal mines once boomed and talk about the “” is commonplace, environmentalism isn’t particularly popular. During my four years , I have heard plenty of skepticism about climate science.But last year, our county’s grassroots groups (organized into a collective network known as the ) completed the biggest in the history of the east Kentucky coalfields. After three years of organizing, the network successfully secured an of half a million dollars in .In a place “Trump country,” this might seem surprising. But with an understanding of our local commitment to grassroots-led, culture-driven development work, you can see why it makes sense.Letcher County is located in Kentucky’s fifth Congressional district, which has long lingered near the bottom of national rankings for and resulting from of the region’s land and laborers. This private extraction by national and multinational businesses has been accompanied by a casting Appalachian residents as ignorant, backward, and hateful, or as .—the worker-run nonprofit that initiated the Letcher County Culture Hub—produces home-grown , , , , and other art that tells a different story. In sharp contrast to the that have long defined Appalachia, Appalshop tells stories of resourceful communities working through hardship to build a “” where residents work together to fulfill their needs and wants, where everyone’s worth is affirmed, and where—as an inclusive community—.Our work goes beyond making media. We work alongside partners from the to the to turn our approach to storytelling into a new method of —what we call . Unlike standard approaches to development, CCED starts not with a community’s problems, but with its .The solar energy project was born from this approach, demonstrating how CCED can leverage communities’ cultural strengths to address common challenges and seize new opportunities.The and its solar project were an early test of the CCED methodology. The Culture Hub has two connected aims: First, we that forges between our county’s “,” a term derived from civil rights leader Bayard Rustin referring to spaces where a community can gather in its full diversity and make things together. Second, we work through that art and those partnerships to create the conditions for communities to and turn them into community wealth.Results of this community wealth-building work have included expanding an award-winning farmers’ market into a , reviving Kentucky’s , and starting a where neighbors recovering from addiction and incarceration could find work.In a place long divided along political, religious, and cultural lines, these projects have brought residents together. As one community leader , “We had always fought our own battles, and none of us got together and tried to fight the whole war.”During the course of these ongoing collaborations, Culture Hub partners identified a common threat: rising utility costs. Kentucky’s regional energy monopoly was rapidly raising its rates, and many of the county’s cash-strapped community centers of power were on the brink of closing their doors.Previously, we had felt powerless to take any proactive action. But now, united through the Culture Hub, we did some research and discovered : solar energy. After several months of research and deliberation, four Culture Hub partners stepped up to convert their buildings to solar power: , , Housing Oriented Ministries Established for Service (HOMES, Inc), and .Bringing solar to coal country was risky. Coal had been king for generations, and there was plenty of propaganda accusing solar supporters of siding with “.” It would have been easy to assume “the community” would oppose the project—except for the fact that the community was the one running it. One Culture Hub leader surveyed the coal miners in her neighborhood and , “Every one of them said something like—‘Honey, the train’s pulled out and it looks like this solar thing could benefit all of us.’”Another barrier was money. Our regional community development financial institution (CDFI), the , supported the project, but hesitated to make a half-million-dollar investment in small, community-led organizations. Undeterred, the Culture Hub kept showing up, calling meetings and participating in other CDFI-sponsored programs and events. After more than a year of sustained engagement, they agreed to that made the project possible.Even with the financial support, not everything worked out as planned. The firehouse backed out of the project at the last minute, when the gas companies offered them free heating in perpetuity. But the relationships built through the CCED process remained strong; the fire chief, a former strip mine boss and lifelong right-winger, .This work is not about changing residents’ political views. It’s about neighbors coming together across differences to about the place we all live in and love. To some, it’s a story about saving the planet. To others, it’s about saving money or . But to everyone, it’s about supporting our communities and the centers that keep them strong.Our country’s ongoing divisions thrive on fears of losing one’s place: if they get jobs, ; if their lives matter more, ; if we embrace solar, . But after years of making things together and affirming the dignity and worth of everyone in the community, Culture Hub partners have come to see new ideas and new people not as threats but as opportunities. Instead of the old zero-sum game, Letcher County’s community centers of power are building a cooperative commonwealth.This article is part of the&nbsp; blog series, which invites practitioners and placemakers to highlight promising placemaking practices across the U.S. and abroad, with a particular focus on practices that foster inclusive economic growth and development.Get daily updates from Brookings

Editor's Note:Placemaking Postcards is a blog series from the Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings where policymakers and practitioners guest-author promising placemaking efforts from across the U.S. and abroad that foster . In line with the , the goal of the series is to recognize the community as the expert, highlight voices from the field, and to create a community of learning and practice around transformative placemaking.&nbsp;In Letcher County, Ky., where coal mines once boomed and talk about the “” is commonplace, environmentalism isn’t particularly popular. During...

How a conservative coal county built the biggest community solar energy project in East Kentucky

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