This month's guest is Executive Director Roger Schmidt of The Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska (pop. 8,500). The Sitka Fine Arts Camp was founded in 1973 to provide isolated Alaskan communities with little or no youth arts programs exposure and training in the arts. Because of remoteness and low population density, Alaskan youth are at a severe disadvantage in access to high quality arts. They serve approximately 1,000 students annually from Alaska and throughout the world. SFAC has received state and national recognition for its importance in providing access to high quality arts education to Alaskan youth including receiving the 2008 presidential Coming Up Taller Award and the 2015 Alaska Governor’s Award for Arts Organization of the Year. In 2011, SFAC was gifted the historic Sheldon Jackson College Campus. This college campus had been closed for four years and was in a state of complete disrepair. SFAC oversaw one of the most extraordinary grassroots volunteer stories in our country: the revitalization of this National Historic Landmark. Between 2011 and 2015 one thousand volunteers (one ninth of Sitka’s population) logged over 45,000 volunteer hours rebuilding the campus, demonstrating unprecedented community support and giving the Sitka Fine Arts Camp a permanent home. Visit https://www.fineartscamp.org to learn more about this incredible organization.

This episode we speak with Wormfarm Institute founder and Executive Director Donna Neuwirth. Wormfarm Institute is in Sauk (Sock) County, Wisconsin. The county has a population of just over 65,000 people according to the 2020 census.  Wormfarm has become a national leader in rural creative placemaking. They describe themselves as an evolving laboratory of the arts and ecology and fertile ground for creative work. Wormfarm explores the links between urban and rural communities within and beyond the food chain, creating opportunities for cross-sector collaboration by bringing together farming, conservation, and the arts. They aim to rekindle the cultural and enhance the economic possibilities of their region while celebrating its unique natural and human history. Visit their website at https://www.wormfarminstitute.org

As a preface to our first podcast, I have somber news but it is also a lesson in how strong small town organizations relate to their community. A day after this interview with Alex Gibson of Appalshop, their community of Letcher County, KY was struck by the severe floods of July 28th, 2022. The Appalshop facilities and archives were severely damaged. Their response was to not just look to their own strife (which was great) but to the strife of their wider community. To learn more, the NY Times just wrote an article about their situation: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/us/kentucky-flood-appalshop-archives.html Please consider supporting them and their community by visiting: https://appalshop.org/ We hope to follow up with Alex in the future to report on their progress. This episode (recorded prior to July 28th): We speak with Alex Gibson, the CEO of the inspiring and impactful Appalshop in Letcher County, KY. They are a model institution for delivering sustained arts and culture programs to a smaller community.

Hosted by Geoffrey Kershner, the CEO at the Academy Center of the Arts in Lynchburg, Virginia.