Maureen O’Connell worked at SOCM for 35 years, 16 as Executive Director. During her tenure, SOCM expanded from a five-county grassroots community organization focused on coal (Save Our Cumberland Mountains) to a statewide organization working on a host of local, statewide, regional, and national issues of environmental, social and economic justice (Statewide Organizing for Community...
Bill Kopsky became Executive Director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel in 1999. The Panel helps Arkansans improve their communities and develop policy solutions by taking collective action and building coalitions. In 1998, it organized the...
Sophia Bracy Harris is Executive Director of the Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama (FOCAL) and Alabama Director of the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice (SRBWI). Her lifelong dedication to improving educational opportunities for children and their families has been recognized with the...
The scene is an early October forum in suburban Atlanta. A gathering of conservative Georgia lawmakers who focus on education issues pose a challenge to the people at the meeting – help us make the case it is time to raise state taxes for the sake of our schoolchildren.
Whoa. What did they just say?
Not many of Georgia’s elected officials publicly broach the...
The last couple of years have brought substantial new economic challenges to Appalachian Kentucky. Already saddled with being one of the poorest regions in the country, mountain communities are being hit hard by steep layoffs in the coal industry. Since 2011, eastern Kentucky has lost more than 5,700 good-paying coal mining jobs. That’s a loss of 42% of the area’s coal workforce.
This...
