Rural Community Development Innovation

The West Virginia Community Development Hub in the U.S. will capture and share accounts of the hard-won achievements of rural community leaders to challenge cultural and economic stereotypes about Central Appalachia's diverse rural communities in the face of poverty. They will use their existing network within these communities to produce texts, photographs and videos that share the lives of leaders and innovators who have worked hard to improve the quality of life in their communities. The stories will be combined with information highlighting key strategies for building community to overcome systemic, intergenerational poverty and be distributed on existing communications platforms, pitched to regional and national news outlets, and disseminated to practitioners in the rural community development field.