Reimagining Appalachia: Ryan Eller on Hazard, Kentucky’s renewal, rural narratives, and the future beyond coal

TP: What’s your personal history as it relates to Appalachia?

RE: I’m based in Kentucky, but I was born in Western North Carolina and have family all across the Central Appalachian Mountains. I go back more than 10 generations in Central Appalachia. My white ancestors were actually the first settlers of Western North Carolina, and my indigenous ancestors go back in East Kentucky and Tennessee, and what’s now the Qualla Boundary with the Eastern Band of Cherokee. In many ways, my ancestors have been in this region for about 1500 years.

My father wrote one of the first histories of Appalachia, “Miners, Mill Hands, and Mountaineers.” We’ve been thinking and caring for this place and these people for quite some time.

TP: What kinds of perceptions and even stereotypes do you encounter about Appalachia, and how do they affect both how a community is viewed and how it views itself?

RE: The thing to understand about Appalachia that’s hard for people to wrap their minds around when they haven’t lived there is that, for over a century and a half, there have been very intentional narrative efforts to typecast the region.

The purpose was really because certain speculators wanted access to the land so that they could extract the resources. So, a narrative began that only outsiders can come and save this region from the heathens.

You saw [this] at the turn of the last century with narratives like the Hatfields and McCoys put into cartoons that ran regularly in places like Cincinnati, Seattle, New York, and Chicago. Journalists would come maybe one time and meet the Hatfields and McCoys and then just run with it, because those that were financing those narratives wanted access to the land and gained a lot through broad deeds.

In recent generations, we saw narratives developed through films like “Deliverance” that certainly played upon stereotypes of people being backwoods and inbred. Sort of this hyper-white, cautionary tale of America.

In our generation we see the same narratives play out in books like “Hillbilly Elegy,” which reckon that the salvation for people in these hills and hollers is to get out and look elsewhere. It’s not just external speculators who perpetuate that narrative.

Over time, that has a conditioning effect. This is why AFN has to exist. These narratives prevent people from viewing Appalachia as investible. When you are trying to decide where to put a business, who to support with entrepreneurship, and who your emerging leaders are, you often won’t go to a place where you inherently view that population as of a certain ilk.

That is not unique to Appalachians, but there’s been a unique manifestation of the way that the narratives have impacted Appalachia. I remember growing up getting in the mail these flyers with black and white photos, asking for money for these poor mountain folk, to build them houses. The irony was my grandfather was a home builder. My uncle was a woodworker. And I said, “Well, gosh, they are who I ask how to build anything that I need.”

I think it impacts almost every aspect of life and sadly has impacted how Appalachian folk have viewed the prospects of our own future.

TP: What do those narratives mean for people growing up there now?

RE: The fear among my family growing up, for me and all my cousins, was that they knew we might go off to college. My father became the first in our family to go to college. So that became an expectation for me. But you better not get above your raisin’. My great-grandfather used to say, “Go, you go to school and you read through them books, but don’t forget where you came from. Don’t forget who you are.”

I think there’s an experience, some people have called it the “brain drain,” of Appalachian folks going elsewhere for school, to go find work. In previous generations, folks tended to come back home. That’s now actually what’s happening in Hazard. A lot of folks are starting to come back, which is a wonderful, beautiful, intergenerational change.

I think that’s what makes Hazard so special because you’ve got a place that, for all intents and purposes, in the late ’90s, early 2000s was in the headlines. I remember watching a Dr. Oz show, now a senior official in Washington, calling Hazard “the unhappiest place in America.”

And while those narratives were happening, you had local leaders like Mayor Happy (Mobelini), who were saying, “You know what? I don’t think this is our future. I’m going to hand the keys over to a generation of people. We’re going to create internship programs and entrepreneurship incubators. We’re going to ask this next generation what they would like to see our community be, because they are our assets. We have lost our physical assets, but people are our assets.”

I’ve talked to folks from Hazard in midtown Manhattan that were working on Broadway, working as attorneys, working in the United Nations, all of whom want to or have already come back to Hazard because Hazard invested in them.

I think we’ve got those pockets all over the mountains. It just takes a generation of leaders deciding that instead of being gatekeepers of our physical assets, we are going to be folk who embrace and inspire the next generation to envision what Appalachia will become.

TP: How would you describe the narrative that Appalachians create about themselves now compared to previous generations?

RE: There’s a contrast between some communities. Take Roanoke for example. When the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) was being formed, the Johnson administration wanted economic parity in central Appalachia with the rest of the country because of the horrific scenes of poverty that folks saw when he was touring the region. Communities got to vote on whether they wanted to be included in the ARC territory. Roanoke said, “No, we don’t want to be associated with the word ‘Appalachian.’ We don’t want to be associated with the rest of those people.”

Today, Hazard has gone all in on embracing “Appalachian.” Not only have they embraced “Appalachian,” they’ve embraced the name Hazard with great pride. That, I think, has contributed a lot to the entrepreneurial spirit that they’re trying to be known for. Perry County, Kentucky, was this area where the overwhelming majority of the economy was coal. King Coal was king in every cultural aspect. It wasn’t just an economy. In those communities, like with my great-grandfather, there was a whole generation where you didn’t even get paid money. You got paid scrip that you could use at the company store. So even the things you owned, your wealth, were really the company’s.

So to turn from that to a place where now there are over 70 new small businesses opened up in the past several years in downtown—that may not sound like a lot to some of the listeners, but 70 businesses in a town that is just several thousand is significant. We’ve started counting storefronts that have reopened instead of jobs created because of how inspiring that has been to folks and how shocked they are when they fall in love with Hazard, because it’s not what they expected. It’s not what they read about in the New York Times.

TP: One of the reasons the New York Times ran those headlines was because of the opioid crisis. Hazard has been deeply affected by substance use disorder, and now people in recovery have played a significant role in its revitalization. How has this transformation taken place?

RE: There’s something to the familial Appalachian spirit that I hope we can recapture as a country. I was always taught growing up that you cared for your neighbors. And when you go to community events, you are eating with and communing with your neighbors because they’re like family.

Maybe some of that is born out of the grit and resilience that you have to have when you live in a place that is kind of tough to live in. It’s not easy. A lot of the land is not easy to farm. The winters can be tough. And you get all of these narratives that we’ve talked about from the outside. It can make things tough in what I would argue is the most beautiful place in the world. But when all of the odds are against you, when you’ve lost your entire economy, when you have a lack of intergenerational wealth, it makes you look at your neighbor and have a better understanding of why they might be in the condition that they are in, and you can see the possibilities in that person rather than just their challenges.

Most people in the mountains understood well that the pharmaceutical companies were preying upon Appalachia in particular because they knew that most of the jobs required physical labor. There was going to be a high level of pain. They assumed a particular education level and that they could prey on this community. A lot of folks were lied to. So I think there’s a different understanding around addiction and around second chances.

I will also say that’s true for the spirit of collaboration generally across Central Appalachia. I had the privilege of being a community organizer in the foothills of Appalachia in some communities here and then doing national and international work and now coming back and spending all of my time focused on Central Appalachia.

The cross-ideological, cross-racial, cross-class collaboration in Central Appalachia is unique. It’s fragile because of the national forces that are polarizing our communities and pulling people apart. You’ll see folks who probably scream at each other during election time, but then the very next day sit at a table, have a meal, and try to figure out what we’re going to do with that space that’s abandoned down on Main Street. I think that’s a part of what makes small towns beautiful.

In Hazard, in Perry County, there’s a three-county project on an active surface mine that will become the largest solar farm on the East Coast. You’ve got two county judges, one Republican, one Democrat, all involved in this project, all supportive. You’ve got coal companies working with progressive renewable companies.

All of these things are happening in a place like Hazard—because they have to in order to get things done. It’s just part of the way that Appalachians have survived.

TP: Small communities often face limits on the capacity needed to drive revitalization. How has Hazard addressed these challenges, and how might its approach be applied more broadly across Appalachia?

RE: There are several things happening in Hazard and other communities in Eastern Kentucky. One is not taking “no” as an answer.

We oftentimes will write a grant and not get it, or a project will get cancelled, and then we just kind of give up. But there really is a can-do attitude in Hazard that allows for entrepreneurship. If you see something that you want to change in the community, you don’t really have to go through a lot of layers for permission. You just go, and you improve it, and you remove a lot of red tape. That’s one of the secret ingredients to what the leaders in Hazard have done.

Creating capacity in Appalachia means giving small places the people, skills, and systems they need to compete. Within the last 15 years, you had the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky get started. The leaders knew that they needed place-based philanthropic capital, and they were willing to invest money in sending folks across the country to go tell the story and to say, we are investible. Little by little that has grown into one of the most thriving and impactful community foundations that we have in Central Appalachia.

The challenge of absorbing capital in places that have lost half their population in a couple of generations is real. However, if given the tools and resources, Hazard is an example of how quickly a community can get ready to absorb that capital, can upskill their workforce.

And it may not happen in the way that it does in most major metropolitan areas. In many of our small towns, you don’t have the staff capacity to hire a grant writer to even write a federal grant, let alone all of the reporting. So Hazard would take fellows and recent college graduates and train them. Eventually, that turned into advocacy efforts with brilliant organizations that we now have, like Grant Ready Kentucky, the AFN, and the Just Transition Fund, to equip our communities with that capacity to access the matching funds necessary to get that federal capital. We’re seeing those flows now because of all of that effort.

That’s the type of grit and resilience and innovation that shows what’s possible when a community can grow that capacity when it needs it.

TP: What are some federal agencies, programs, and policies you’ve seen that are particularly important in places throughout Appalachia?

RE: Certainly the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) is foremost. Although I disagreed with some of their strategies early on, we are seeing a lot of our communities move into economic parity with the rest of the country because of ARC’s efforts.

The ARC oversees programs like the Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) Initiative and the Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE) Program, which promotes interstate collaboration by recognizing that our outdoor and tourism economies are connected to each other. ARC has certainly been a major force.

The USDA has absolutely had a positive influence because of the work that the Rural Development agency has done over the years, helping some of our small towns build and rebuild infrastructure.

The Appalachian Arts Alliance in Hazard has gotten support from arts and culture organizations who partner with the National Endowment for the Arts.

We had over $500 million from the EPA that was allocated in the last couple years to help organizations like the Green Bank for Rural America transition our energy economy from coal into renewables. That would be a boon for our communities and provide thousands of jobs, and potentially lower energy bills in Central Appalachia.

It is also true throughout Appalachian history that we’ve had a bit of a precarious relationship with the federal government. Union busting in previous generations created skepticism. So many politicians have come through and made big promises about what was possible in the region and tended to bring outside ideas for what the community could become, as opposed to allowing our communities to define themselves.

Over time that diminished trust in the federal government. It’s efforts like Rural Partners Network and Just Transition Fund that are slowly changing that relationship with the government.

TP: What suggestions do you have for improving federal policy, and are there any changes that concern you?

RE: I’m incredibly concerned about the capital that is being frozen, held up, and not delivered to communities. I’m anxious when there’s talk of not renewing things like the New Market Tax Credit Program and the CDFI Fund.

The president’s proposal to cut the ARC by 93% would be the lowest level it has ever been. I think members of Congress, on both sides of the house, will decide that it’s well worth it to fully fund the ARC. The return on that investment is incredibly rare when it comes to federal programs.

It’s also unique because of the manner in which ARC was set up. It is inherently public, private, and both state and federal. Some of the dollars come from state, some from the federal government. All of it has to be matched.

Several of our members were in despair when the most recent USDA farm partnership was upended. We’ve got farms throughout Appalachia that make the majority of their revenue through those programs and deliver their crops to local schools so that kids can be fed with healthy local food.

That’s gone, so it just leaves our farmers with a lot of headwinds.

It’s not in my view always a good thing to rely on federal resources, but when those resources are then cut off, we don’t have the philanthropic infrastructure to fill that gap. So what keeps me up at night is how do we take one of the nation’s most under-resourced regions and dramatically shift to more regenerative, locally focused development. I think there’s going to be some pain in the immediate as we go through that transition.

TP: Do you think people in places like Hazard feel their interests and ideas are considered in national policy decisions? How do they perceive the impact of those decisions on their ability to sustain and grow their communities?

RE: Most people in Appalachia feel like Washington, D.C. is a foreign land. I have also seen politicians, even from Appalachia, lament about how horrible things are in Washington, D.C., and then go to D.C. and do the very thing that they were lamenting.

I think that is unfortunate because it perpetuates hopelessness. I don’t think most people in Appalachia think that Washington, D.C. thinks of them very often, and when they do, they probably have these images that were drawn up by popular narratives. I think there’s a spirit in Appalachia that is demanding for voices to be heard. I remember going to a SOAR (Shaping Our Appalachian Region) Summit where the speaker gets up and says, “This is Johnny, and he created a miracle. He got the New York Times to write a positive story about Appalachia,” and everybody laughed and jeered. Now I see those positive stories, like your podcast, focusing on our places.

Appalachia used to have the grittiest, fiercest multiracial labor organizing in the whole country. We were a home for the civil rights movement leaders. They conceived the bus boycott at the Highlander Center in Tennessee, where Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. would go on retreat.

We had mine wars and fierce labor organizing that demanded pride and demanded that people get heard. And in a generation we lost that, but a lot of it is being reborn. And it’s being reborn because you can only not be heard for so long before you start crying out from the wilderness. That spirit is being reborn and, I don’t know what will happen, but I think that eventually the leaders in D.C. will take note.