On our trip to Connellsville and Uniontown this semester as apart of the Appalachian Teaching Project, we got to do field research by interviewing local business owners and government officials. To start our research, we looked online at different Connellsville and Uniontown websites to identify local businesses and assets. Some of which included The State Theatre and Goodie Girls Bakery in Uniontown and the Greater Allegheny Passage Trail and Canteen in Connellsville. Getting to speak with the owners of businesses and other community members involved in maintaining these assets allowed us to gain a ton of information about all of the things these areas have to offer. Considering that our project is focusing on brain-drain and out migration of the population in Fayette County, one of the most surprising things people said over and over in interviews was how much they loved the area and how much pride the citizens have for their towns. Our interviews also allowed us to gain a lot of ideas for the future directions of this project since we were only year two out of ten cohorts working with the Appalachian Regional Commission. One of the initial ideas that came to my mind was creating a new space for people to just “hang out.” A recurring theme in some of the interviews I was apart of was the lack of things for people to do in the winter on account of so many of the tourism options in the area being outdoors and only open in the warmer months of the year. A communal space such as a cafe that is open a majority of the day would allow people to meet with others and connect year round. The idea the first year of the project came up with and created as their final deliverable was an asset map of Connellsville to highlight businesses and other categories of buildings in the area. This year, we updated the asset map to add new points and expand it into Uniontown, as well as converting it into a Storymap and Google Map that can be embedded into websites and easily updated in the future. This deliverable also ties into the other suggestions we have submitted with our Celebrate Uniontown Proposal. This proposal incorporates updating local government websites, getting involved in social media, and creating an internship program with the local high school to connect students with the local government. By creating and sharing our maps with the local governments of Connellsville and Uniontown, they can now easily embed them within their websites for people visiting the website to see who may be potentially looking for things to do or to find out about new things in the area. Other suggestions we have made as a part of updating their websites is including local news, upcoming events, and promoting local businesses. Similar to this was our idea to create and be active on different social media platforms to keep people informed about things going on in the community in a more accessible way. This could include some of the same things that would be updated on the websites, such as local news and upcoming events, but also things such as an “ask me anything” with a local government employee or a business of the week highlight. Finally, our Celebrate Uniontown Proposal recommends an internship program with local high school students so they can get involved in the local government and gain experience that could potentially interest them in a future career in small town government. Part of the responsibilities of this internship could be updating the websites and asset maps, running social media accounts, and applying for regional and federal grants that the area could benefit from. Since our project studies regional brain drain, I think this internship program could be extremely beneficial to the government and students alike, and I would love to see it come to life. Looking back on my time with this project, I am very proud of how much we accomplished in just year two out of ten. I really hope to be able to see the future progress of the project in the upcoming years and stay involved as much as I can. This course was so different compared to my other typical classes of lectures with two hundred students because of how hands on it was and how close the members of our team became with the project itself and each other. I feel like all of us really have grown to care about this project and want to continue to participate in any way we can, and I know we all look forward to seeing what the future students will accomplish.
Diving Deeper into Appalachia
