Other Projects
Over the years, the Center for Rural Strategies has taken on a wide variety of projects. We’ve produced documentary films, conducted polling and focus groups of rural people, provided consulting to nonprofits and community groups, convened policy working groups, launched collaborative media platforms, and led local and nationwide advocacy campaigns.
Our current major projects are highlighted below. You can explore previous activities in our project archive.
Rural faith initiative
The Center for Rural Strategies is currently engaged in a multi-year project to document the novel and long-established ways rural congregations serve their communities.
Through audio storytelling, documentary work, and written stories, Rural Strategies aims to show how rural faith communities can bring people together, serve as anchors in small towns and the countryside, and help drive solutions for rural America’s biggest challenges. The project also aims to convene faith leaders and their congregations — to listen, to learn, and to support relationships within and across communities.
Leveraging its core programs, the Daily Yonder and Rural Assembly, Rural Strategies seeks not just to document how faith congregations can help rural communities but also serve as a connection point for people across the country.
This project is supported by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, made through its Ministry in Rural Areas and Small Towns Initiative, a national effort to help churches in rural areas and small towns enhance the vitality of their ministries and strengthen the leadership of the pastors and lay leaders who guide them. The Center for Rural Strategies is one of 20 organizations from across the United States receiving grants through the initiative, including colleges and universities, denominational agencies, church networks, and parachurch organizations, among others.
You can read the full announcement for more details.
Living Traditions - appalachian folks arts and culture
At the Center for Rural Strategies, we’ve long believed that presenting accurate and compelling stories of rural lives and cultures is a pathway toward positive change for rural communities. Throughout our history of telling stories about the everyday lives of everyday people, we’ve regularly highlighted the expressive cultural traditions that make our countrysides vibrant places to live. We know that people engage in traditional cultural practices not just as a way to connect to the past, but also as a means of adapting to the present and of visioning the future. As part of a multi-year project, Rural Strategies is continuing to showcase the skills and knowledge inherent to rural communities’ folkways, and how these traditions intersect with the political, economic, and environmental questions of the day.
For the Living Traditions project, Rural Strategies will tell stories about folk traditions and the arts, and how these practices bring communities together, solve problems, and maintain the unique culture of Appalachia. Stories will be produced by Rural Strategies staff working within the Daily Yonder and Rural Assembly, but also by partners who live and work in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
The project’s audio, print, and video stories about living traditions within Appalachia will seek to help audiences learn about the expressive cultural practices important to Appalachian communities and celebrate the local practitioners who sustain them. Through these stories and related community-engagement work, we hope to support intergenerational transmission of artistic skill and cultural knowledge about Appalachian folk arts and cultures.
The Living Traditions project is made possible with funding support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.
The Center for Rural Strategies was founded by veterans of the Appalachian cultural center Appalshop and is headquartered in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Our work documenting and disseminating stories about folklife in Appalachia carries on, hoping to lift up lessons learned and paths forward for the next generation.