Change in the Coalfields: A Podcast by Coalfield Development
Change in the Coalfields: A Podcast by Coalfield Development
Stephanie Randolph
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Original intro/outro music:
"'Till I See Stars" by The Parachute Brigade
The sun does not always shine in West Virginia but the people always do and I'm delighted to be here.
Brandon Dennison:These are historic times in Appalachia. A lot has changed. A lot is changing now and a lot still needs to change. In our podcasts we talk with changemakers right square in the middle of all of this working to ensure the change is for the good. You're listening to Change in the Coalfields podcast by Coalfield Development. I'm your host Brandon Dennison. This is Change in the Coalfields- my name is Brandon Dennison, the founder and CEO of Coalfield Development, which hosts this podcast. And we are joined today by the Deputy Director of the Cassiopeia Foundation and the Managing Director of its subsidiary, Purple Tiger, someone I've known for a lot of years, and I've always really admired what you do and how you do it - Stephanie Randolph.
Stephanie Randolph:Hey, Brandon, thanks for having me today. I've been listening to the podcast. And I'm honored to be included as one of your guests.
Brandon Dennison:Well honored to have you join and happy for our guests to hear your story and to hear your thoughts on change here in Appalachia and in the coal fields. So I'd love to just go back to the beginning, actually. So you're now a major leader in Appalachia, have been for a long time in impact investing, more generally. But how did it all start? Where did you grow up?
Stephanie Randolph:Outside of Appalachia. I was actually born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. So Appalachia, to me was that drive two hours away that I would go for a nice hike, or a weekend getaway. That was my early experience. But my husband and I moved to West Virginia, around 2001, looking for something different, wanting a different pace of life, and implanted ourselves on the border of Braxton/Webster County. And I learned that while I may have been college educated, there was a lot I did not know. And I may have grown up around Appalachia, but there were a lot of holes and in what I had come to believe.
Brandon Dennison:So literally, you you and your husband just wanted a change. And did you like spin a map around and put your finger (on it) or what?
Stephanie Randolph:He actually in college, he would always talk of talk about wanting to go kind of live off the land. I kind of back to the land, getting out of the suburban neighborhoods that we grew up in. And a friend of his finally said, you know, you think you want this? Why don't you go visit my uncle. And so he went off for a weekend to visit his uncle who lives in Braxton County, and had a fantastic time. And as he was getting ready to leave, the uncle said, Hey, you're welcome back anytime you want, with or without the nephew. And he kept going back without the nephew. And I would say it was probably four or five years before he took me with him. So that I could actually begin to see what he was loving about West Virginia. And coincidentally, a house across the ridge, but on the same road, as the friends that we had there became available on 152 acres for $200 a month. No guarantee - was on the top of like three quarters of a mile hill up the driveway. There was no guarantee of water access or road access as a part of that $200 a month. We're like well, we can make a switch on $200 a month, we can go figure this out. So in our late 20s, we packed up out of Cincinnati, we rented a Uhaul and move to the top of the mountain.
Brandon Dennison:Amazing. It's especially amazing. I mean, we're a state typically known for losing population. So you've contributed to an increase in the population.
Stephanie Randolph:We did for just over a decade. And I loved it but it's also a hard place to be a transplant. You stand out a
Brandon Dennison:Yeah. Yeah, there's pluses and minuses - say lot. a little bit more about that.
Stephanie Randolph:The Appalachian hospitality is the first thing everyone notices. Everyone will greet you with a with a hello. You can't drive down a dirt road without somebody and everybody waving to you and having the expectation to wave back. I once had a flat tire and you know, as I was fixing it three people stopped to try to help me. Those were all wonderful things but they're also a tad bit skeptical of outsiders. Um, a lot of times, you know, in particular college educated people will come in with these big ideas and don't take the time to root themselves in the community and that kind of doing something to us rather than for us approach or not taking the time to build the community will. And I mean, I think that's just a part of the history, the impact of the extracted history on the region that outsiders are, you know, welcomed and watched.
Brandon Dennison:Welcome and watched. That's that's a very, that sort of succinctly captures an irony of Appalachia, perhaps.
Stephanie Randolph:But again, I really do think it has to do with the history that so much of that has happened to the region has been done to it, not with it or for it, or that there were deceiving or only partial stories that were shared to enlist the support of those who were living there historically.
Brandon Dennison:Yeah, absolutely. Well, let me go, I want to hear more about your, your decade plus in West Virginia, but I also you know, I've worked with you, I've seen your work, you care about justice, you care about fairness, you care about opportunity, what was in the water there in Cincinnati that got you so committed to these types of causes.
Stephanie Randolph:And this will probably explain why I ended up in philanthropy. I mean, I was an upper middle class suburban kid, who, you know, never wanted anything that I didn't need, or didn't get. So I had a very privileged background, my parents were always supportive of whatever crazy idea I had. I've had the chance as a young kid to travel the world. But my mom was a working mom, who changed jobs from being a reading specialist at a Catholic school, to becoming a reading specialist in an inner city high school when I was in fifth grade, in Cincinnati. And that I have older brothers and sisters. And so as my older brothers and sisters were entering high school, and kind of beginning that college preparatory process, my mom was teaching high school students how to read and how to read books that I had already read, and I was in fifth grade. And I began to recognize the disparities that exists across race and across income. And then my mom, as my sister was moving through her college process began to realize that there's no one in that high school, that was helping students who had the ability to go to college to even think about it. There was no one in that high school making sure that they took four years of math or four years of English, they were more concerned about health and safety issues of the students. And they wrote a grant to the Carnegie Foundation to basically create a second program in the school that paralleled what the guidance counselors did to help identify students in their freshman year that had the potential to go to college, that helped them work on their scheduling to make sure that they were leading a college preparatory process. They augmented the English classes in 10th and 11th grade with the equivalent of the SAT/ACT preparation that my parents paid for, for me and my siblings, so that they had a more competitive opportunity to go to college. And when it came time for the application process, they were paired with somebody to help them with their essays, they brought in support to deal with FASFAs and help explain to families what the what the FASTFAs were, and how these loans, Pell Grants, how all of that would play out and affect them to create a pipeline of college students from this high school. And it was all done by a grant. And then volunteers.
Brandon Dennison:That was your first exposure to the power of what philanthropy can do?
Stephanie Randolph:Well, and also the power of philanthropy, but also the equity. My mom's work in that high school, the disparities that began to exist that had always existed, but to me as a fifth grader coming from suburban Cincinnati, walking into a high school that was 90% black was among the most startling experiences I've ever had. Because that was not what the community that I saw. And hearing stories of what students were going through was not the experience I was having. And I began to realize that that tale of two cities, you know, was really what was existing in Cincinnati. And was, you know, in all of what my mother was trying to do.
Brandon Dennison:So are you a Reds fan?
Stephanie Randolph:I am a reds fan and a Bengals fan which is a bit of a tough thing to hold. I'm thrilled the Bengals about last year...
Brandon Dennison:That was the first time in my life that the Bengals were like in the in the conversation.
Stephanie Randolph:Well, I've been around twice for both. I've been around for both Super Bowls. So I was very excited by that, but I'm a Reds fan. I'm a Bengals fan, I'm also an Ohio State Buckeyes fan and I'm a Bearcat as well. So I tried to keep up on what's going on in Ohio. But it's not often we have something to celebrate sports-wise.
Brandon Dennison:So, did you go to college yourself?
Stephanie Randolph:Yes, I went to the University of Cincinnati. And then I went off to graduate school in Los Angeles.
Brandon Dennison:Okay, what was Los Angeles like?
Stephanie Randolph:Los Angeles as a 20-something that had no concept of finances from the Midwest was a great experience. You know, I lived two blocks off of the Sunset Strip. And it was a hoot, to say the least. But every day, I realized this is fantastic. The weather's better than I can imagine. But I'm a Midwesterner. There was so much going on all the time, that I'd have to escape to some hiking trail just to like, kind of decompress and breathe. But it's a fun place to be in your 20-somethings, a lot of bars, a lot of great music. And if you're not really paying attention to the credit card debt... It can get out of him quickly? It was a lot of fun.
Brandon Dennison:I never knew that about you. What was your graduate degree in?
Stephanie Randolph:Ah, this is what you really don't know about me. This is why you like doing the show. Um, I went to graduate school to become a rabbi. I completed four years of a five-year program and walked away with a master's in arts and Hebrew letters, and a master's in communal service, which is nonprofit management, with a kind of focus on how Jewish institutions have been shaped and formed and evolved over time.
Brandon Dennison:That is utterly fascinating. Did not know and super cool.
Stephanie Randolph:I think the background, I clearly don't use the Hebrew skills. But the background shows up in how I hold mission and vision. Kind of what's the big picture? What are we working towards and how I work but also the mission of how, what's the nitty gritty what's, what's the nuts and bolts? What do we need to do to get there? I think that's the most important traits I took away from that time.
Brandon Dennison:Is, is the Jewish tradition, is that a inspirational - has that been significant in shaping who you are?
Stephanie Randolph:It, it was significant in shaping who I was as a younger person. It was my community, it was my grounding through high school and college. When I moved to graduate school, though, the academic nature of it overwhelmed the spiritual nature. And that's really when the out of the mountains started for me that, you know, where I may have found the routine of prayer helpful and grounding. I all of a sudden was analyzing what was going on? Why? What was the history? What are the alternative versions of this methodology to go through? And kind of rattled that for me, so I had to go and figure out new sources of balance.
Brandon Dennison:Reground. Yeah, what a fascinating background. And then you came back to Cincinnati, it sounds like and settled down?
Stephanie Randolph:Came back, went back to Cincinnati, kind of transitioning out of the Jewish community into what was next. Reconnected with my husband, who I dated in college. And after a couple of years, we decided to pack up and move to West Virginia.
Brandon Dennison:What do you do? How do you spend your time in West Virginia? Where to, where to begin? How do you get water?
Stephanie Randolph:How do we get water? Again, sometimes it works, sometimes you had to like go down the, all the way down to the bottom to the watershed and manually hold the pump button open so that it could fill up at the top and other times you just kind of lug water up. Now, West Virginia was a great experience. You know, I started off doing kind of independent contracting, I had experience doing grant writing, I understood organizational management. And you know, even today, anybody who can write a grant, anybody who can read directions and write a grant can find a job in West Virginia. And so I was doing some independent consulting, doing grant writing. I helped the Sutton library seek some grants. I helped with the Braxton county animal shelter at one point in time as they were getting started. I then did some work for Mountaineer Food Bank, as well as the Economic Development Authority of Webster. And that's when I'll All of a sudden, the head of Economic Development Authority in Webster's like, Mary Hunt of all people thinks we should start a Community Foundation. This was about 2002-2003. Like she does she know anything about foundations? Like as a matter of fact, I do. And that began my journey into philanthropy as a full-time career.
Brandon Dennison:Incredible. So you helped to establish a brand new foundation?
Stephanie Randolph:In Webster County, we created an area fund embedded in the Beckley Area Foundation. So it's called the Webster County Community Fund. That's within the Beckley Area Foundation. And then I moved over to Nicholas County, who was in the process of filling out the legal documentation become a freestanding Community Foundation, and became their first executive director.
Brandon Dennison:How did you...what do you have like 20, 30 staff underneath you?
Stephanie Randolph:No, it was me and my boards.
Brandon Dennison:Volunteer board, I'd presume.
Stephanie Randolph:They were fantastic. And you know, it was in in Webster, our first grant was actually we received a challenge grant, that was a result of a Ford Foundation investment into the broader regions, along with Mary Reynolds Babcock. And basically, they said, if we can raise$25,000, for our endowment, meaning our permanent dollars that we will keep, they would give us $25,000. It may have been 15 and 15. They would give us that same amount, so that we could immediately do grant making in the community and show people what this was like, and what this could do. So to be in Webster County and raise that 15, or $25,000 was a significant amount of money for a new idea that, you know, creating a savings account for the community, trying to teach people what that was about, and why we should do it. But then equally as interesting was, how do you distribute $15,000 in the community like that?
Brandon Dennison:So I was just gonna ask you like, how do you establish...where do you start?
Stephanie Randolph:From a grant making perspective? Well, yeah, You've got to give them the language they want sometimes, I think that's where the community comes into play. There were, say, 15 to 20 people in the community who were helping try to create this community fund. And we identified some specific areas of interest, health being one, children, arts and culture being another and then kind of recreation, and set up the categories and said, Let's see what comes in. We would sort the grant applications into categories, and then try to determine, you know, which ones stood out as the best. And so, some of the grants were supporting the back to school fairs, where we buy school supplies for kids before the first day of school, they did a grant for a walking track, and for a community that didn't have the safe roads for people to walk on. And it attempts to not just create a safer space for people, but to create a place where people could congregate and walk together to increase the health and fitness within the community. There were grants made to Holly River State Park, as well. So it was it was kind of like that first chance of when you see how deep the need is, how do you spread that wealth. But after a few cycles of that I began to really wrestle with, we're never going to have enough money to meet the need. And what do you do then? And working within the Economic Development Authority Office, you know, chasing down whatever grants were coming from the West Virginia and development office, whatever grants were coming down from aarC, this really started getting frustrated with there's never going to be enough grant dollars to make this happen. Or, you know, having to write the grants. I won't name the foundation. When I worked at Mountaineer Food Bank, they had a very large electric bill, because they have a large, a lot of freezers and refrigerators to help preserve the food. And a national foundation that's interested in food access would not do general operating grants. But what the food bank really needed was capital to pay this excessively large gas and electric bill. And so I'm having a conversation with the program officer who says no, no, no, we don't do it, we're not going to pay your electric. You know, or we're not going to we're not going to pay your electric bill. don't you? Oh and again, those, those moments as a grant writer have We're not going to pay general operating like, but would you support the storage and preservation of food? You know, could you look at it from a health and safety perspective? Oh, yes, we could do that. helped me kind of, as somebody who's now on the other side, begin to really wrestle with what's the real need? And are our requirements helping or hurting what's happening in communities? They're funny stories, but for sure, but it's an important question that I don't think we ask often enough. Because in, those under invested communities, community leaders are chasing grants, and they're setting their community priorities, often based on the funding streams, not the voices of the people. And, you know, I think philanthropy is starting to change. But it's as much a source of the divisiveness in competitiveness that rural communities face with one another, as anything.
Brandon Dennison:So that's a rich point. Two follow ups there. The first why, how did it and this might not even be a fair question, how did it get to be this way? How did philanthropy become so top down and unresponsive to what people in distressed communities are actually saying they needed want?
Stephanie Randolph:Oh, philanthropy is top heavy historic. And I'm going to separate philanthropy for a little while from the state and federal streams. But philanthropy was created as a tax shelter, first and foremost, that's the origin of those dollars. And as a wealthy person who has the opportunity to receive a tax deduction, but yet still maintain influence over the allocation of those dollars, that's a remarkable win. Not to mention that those dollars that you have the influence over, you can equate with power. And it grants you access. So I think that's how the model was set up. From the very start that the rich people have the money. And, you know, therefore, they're the ones that have the decision making power. It's starting to change. And it's changing in all different kinds of ways. But I think the origin was, somebody has the money, we'll give you a tax deduction. And this is a gross simplification of history. But yet, you still have
Brandon Dennison:And basically, within some very broad influence. parameters, you the rich person who's started this foundation can do whatever you want with it. You mentioned earlier just for listeners who maybe aren't as
Stephanie Randolph:Correct. And so that's the was the structure. And, you know, large foundations today, especially the...this is different from place based foundations...you know, they don't have the staff to get on the ground and understand what makes what's happening in rural West Virginia, different than what's happening in rural Iowa. You know, they're lucky, we're steeped in grants, could you say a little bit about the lucky when they get on the ground to come to West Virginia difference between a general operating grant and a project or Eastern Kentucky, to really try to understand what's going on. And, you know, the board similarly, are not engaged or in touch with what's happening on the ground. I mean, if you're grant? why that's so important? trying to deploy, you know, millions or billions of dollars, you have to do that at a scale. That intent unintentionally excludes so many people from it, because they can't do small grants, which is often what's needed in rural communities. They've got to deploy to the scale they have the staffing capacity to meet. Sure. A general operating grant is basically a grant to the organization. And it is allowing the organization to have free will over how they use their funds, so long as it is still being used to meet the charitable mission of that nonprofit organization who's receiving those dollars. A project grant is generally very clearly defined in a grant application to serve a particular purpose over a specific period of time. It often requires a budget to say and this is how I'm going to spend the money with somewhere between five and lucky 15% variance ability to change, and then a set timeline where you're supposed to do what you said you were going to do how you said you were going to do it with just a little bit of room for iteration and variation or learning and adaptation along the way.
Brandon Dennison:A normal business, you know, you got payroll, you got utility bills, you got insurance costs, you might have to pay rent, supplies and travel. And you know if it's a project grant, all that may or may not be allowable.
Stephanie Randolph:Correct and a project grant, oftentimes what you'll see is a line item at the bottom of it, and that'll allow for 10, maybe 15% overhead to pay maybe doing a project that's related to the delivery of fresh fruits and vegetables. And so it may be compensating for some transportation that may be the project grant may address some some transportation costs, it may address some of the purchase of food. And it may even pay for the person who's reaching out to figure out which communities need which pieces, what quantities of food. But is it paying for the accountant behind the scenes who's keeping track of things? Is it paying for the building? Is it paying for their offices? Is it paying for their computer? Is it paying for their benefits? Those are often the things that are hamstrung and a project grant which is general, but not consistently philanthropies most comfortable.
Brandon Dennison:And just as FYI, me most federal grants are a bit of a different animal and we won't go down that rabbit trail, but they tend to be much more like the program than the general writing. Two more questions on your time in West Virginia. And then we'll move to I want to move to the next chapter of your life. You mentioned the library in Sutton and something about that...I've got a lot of family roots on my dad's side in Braxton County. When I say Sutton library, I'm just curious what pops to mind?
Stephanie Randolph:Cafe Cimino?
Brandon Dennison:Yep, right down the way.
Unknown:I mean, it's either the Elk River, or Cafe Cimino. It's a beautiful building. You know, it's actually where I would have to go to get internet access. When we first moved in, there wasn't any internet access up on the mountain that I described. And so I would go into Sutton and I had like, I could sign up and have an hour of free computer usage. So that's where I went to check my email, order things off Amazon, and reconnect
Brandon Dennison:How about if I say Elk River, what pops to with the world. mind?
Stephanie Randolph:Where my daughter learned to swim. In Webster, that's what she learned to swim in the Elk. That's favorite thing to do when I go back to West Virginia, if it's warm enoug.
Brandon Dennison:To swim in the Elk?
Stephanie Randolph:Yeah, if it's warm.
Brandon Dennison:And I hate to break people's hearts, but the famous chemical spill in Charleston was straight into the Elk River, which is typically known as a very clean, one of the few very clean rivers in the state that we have left.
Stephanie Randolph:Yeah, and Webster, our house in Webster was a couple 100 feet above the Elk - is near the headwaters of the Elk. So we were very lucky to have fantastic water. It's awesome. And just beautiful swimming hole.
Brandon Dennison:So grew up in Cincinnati, spent a lot of time...you have lived in LA for a little bit, which I never knew about you. And then on a farm in rural, central West Virginia. There's such a deep urban/rural divide in our country right now. It's not new, it's been there, but it feels more...feels deeper. Any insights having lived in both, which is probably rare these days. Any insights on the urban rural divide?
Stephanie Randolph:It's always been there. Yeah. I think it's, uh, the culture is very different. But what we are seeing politically, I don't think it's a surprise to anybody who has ever had the opportunity to live in both an urban center and a rural center. It's just that it's been exacerbated because of how we intake media and how we now engage in social media. When I moved to West Virginia, I was, we'll talk politics here for a second since I kind of crack that door, I was raised in an Ohio democratic family. When I moved to West Virginia, it was clear I was still a Democrat, but the Democrats of West Virginia were not the same as the Democrats in Ohio. They were far more conservative. And so, you know, I could that was for me kind of an enlightenment. The first time I saw the differences between rural and urban using a definition that I thought had singular meaning. I thought a Democrat was one thing.
Brandon Dennison:Starting to see the graiation, the variation along the spectrum.
Stephanie Randolph:Correct. Which was interesting, and I think it's just expanded even more now. But I think The parallels between urban poor and rural poor are so similar and are underappreciated and under resourced in terms of a networking and power center.
Brandon Dennison:What if we can make that connection? I think that this is the journal, Martin Luther King's Junior's journals, show that was the next pivot. Right. It was to better connect rural, mostly white, not exclusively, but mostly white were with urban people of color experiencing poverty. Think how powerful that connection could be.
Stephanie Randolph:It's powerful, but I think it's also
Brandon Dennison:It's a start, right? humanizing. We see, if your rural poor you see the urban poor as the other. They're not like us. And I think that adds to the division. So there would be a power center. But I also just think that it would strengthen our center as human beings and increase compassion. Which is greatly needed. But I think that this kind of gets to what I've looking forward. You know, one of the reasons why that is so hard, is that the great leaders of rural efforts in underinvested communities and the great leaders of urban efforts and under, under invested communities are often working on equal. I mean, you're working multiple, you're wearing many hats, you're working well beyond your typical 40-hour workweek. You're in the grind, not just to serve your population and your clients, but to keep the lights on and be able to make that next payroll, that you don't have the time to think outside of the box. Or to begin to connect those deeper threads. Because it's at the costs of what you're doing on a daily basis. If you step away and begin to think at that bigger systems level, and I think that's where, you know, foundations should be stepping in and helping make that happen, not just in an urban and rural, poor conversation, like we're discussing now. But I think it's what's making what's happening in Appalachia successful now is
Stephanie Randolph:It's starting and starting, and I that there has been some investment in bridging sectors crossing geopolitical divides, rather than exacerbating them saying, I'm only going to do West Virginia, I'm only going to do Kentucky. think you know, you more than anybody sees the payoffs.
Brandon Dennison:So what was the next chapter after Braxton/Webster, Elk River days?
Stephanie Randolph:So yeah, I, you know, leaving a foundation in Webster and Braxton County, I was struggling with the flow of capital, and the size and scale of the challenge. I was also really wrestling with the financial model of foundations, which is 5% of our assets on an annual basis go towards grantmaking. To support our mission, and the other 95% are invested to support our perpetuity. Which to me really means your mission is perpetuity, not service of something. That's, it's a common thing to point out. But when I absorbed that, and said, Well, how are you investing your assets? Who are you investing in? And well, that's, you know, we're representing the Nicholas County Community Foundation, and we're investing in Wall Street, how does that help our community. I started getting really frustrated and then started exploring alternative models. And that's when I discovered impact investing, which can be defined in as many definitions as the investment in businesses, funds, projects or communities seeking not just financial returns, but also evaluating in that social or environmental returns as well. And some impact investors are even willing to reduce their financial returns for outsized social or environmental returns. Because they have equal value to somebody even though one is more easily monetized than the other. And as I was investigating it, I found a foundation that was based in Charlottesville, Virginia, so just outside Appalachia, that happened to still have an Appalachia program area that was already doing impact investing. And so my family nine plus years ago, packed up, left West Virginia and moved to Charlottesville so that I can really understand all of the ways a foundation can use its corpus. It's 100% of its dollars to achieve its impact.
Brandon Dennison:And you've been diligently chipping away. I was at a meeting you called in Charleston, maybe six or seven years ago now about impact investing in Appalachian learning in the effort and the patience you've put in to see more impact investing in Appalachia, I truly commended Stephanie, I really do.
Stephanie Randolph:Well, thank you for tolerating the thunder from outside the region's crazy idea. That first meeting took place. And I only know this because I recently looked at looked at it in September 2016. And we brought together community development practitioners like yourself, CDFIs, funders, who are interested in health funders who are interested in economic development, as well as some of these national impact investors. And for listeners, impact investing might sound like something new, and it still is new to a lot of people. But globally, there are more than $1 trillion dollars now allocated for impact investments, according to a group called the Global Impact Investing network,$1 trillion of people who are willing to consider environmental and social returns alongside financial rich. And not surprisingly, those dollars don't readily flow into Appalachia, they often end up on the coasts. And so that first conversation was, if we could attract these dollars, what would we do with it? You know, how, how would that money need to be structured to be most impactful? And it created a long learning journey, and a lot of really unique relationships and ultimately led to the formation of invest Appalachian.
Brandon Dennison:Well, congratulations. Incredible work. We're coming close to time. It sort of flew by this has been a great, just a great conversation.
Stephanie Randolph:I threw you off on the LA rabbinic school thing.
Brandon Dennison:And that's going to stay in, that's gonna stay and that's gonna be new info for people that don't know about you. Two more questions. One's my standard question that I usually close out with. But you mentioned Charlottesville. And so if I've got my timeline, right, you lived in Charlottesville for that horrific episode with the with the white nationalist rally. What was it like to be in that community when that happened?
Stephanie Randolph:That's a hard question to answer. It was among the most surreal experiences of my life. I live less than a mile from where all of that happened. We were going to, we would go to the farmers market every Saturday. And so we made an attempt to go to the farmers market very early that Saturday morning, the rally was supposed to start at noon, and
we went around 7:30. And at 7:30 in the morning, you saw armed militia lined up through the park, carrying heavy artillery. And you just could feel that something was gonna happen. My daughter is in 10th grade now. So she was in fifth, fourth, fifth, fifth grade. And she asked as we were walking, are these KKK? Are they white supremacist? Are the Neo Nazis? What are they? And I said, I don't think they're all any one thing. I think there's a lot of people from a lot of different groups, just like what what do I call them? But it was also what does a fifth grader understand about the difference between a KKK member or a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist? Better yet? What do I understand about the differences between those groups, and it's something that happened to Charlottesville. But it also kind of ripped the band aid off of a lot of what a very liberal city had been sweeping under the rug for a very long time. Specifically, it's just deep racial inequities, and the Jeffersonian history, as well as the influence of Jim Crow Laws. And the raising of you know, in the 1960s and 70s of high functioning black communities within Charlottesville. And that just kind of been swept under the rug and ignored. And I think it's something that the city is still struggling with.
Brandon Dennison:Well, thank you for sharing that. And it's an unfortunate but an appropriate segue. I mean, there's, there's so much that's so much good work happening in our region and our country and our world. And yet, there's so much more to do. What, as my final question, what are some changes in Appalachia that you've observed in your work and career here that you're really happy about? And what are some changes that wish you would have seen happen, but just haven't come to be?
Stephanie Randolph:I would say, I started to see things change during the Obama administration with power. Um, I referenced before kind of how grants can create competition and playing to the scarcity mentality, how it really began to challenge communities to think big, and look beyond their sector or their geography, geographical boundaries, to allow us to really teach and test collaboration. And I see see that continuing to grow, we can, you know, look at build back better now as another example of how that has grown. And I think the capacity of the partners that were assembled in the act now coalition to collaborate as efficiently and effectively as you all have done, was groomed and tested through some of the power relationships.
Brandon Dennison:We wrote in our application, that part of how we justified we had the capacity to handle this was improved it during power.
Stephanie Randolph:And I see it now with ARC's ARISE Program, which is very similar, I think, very, has a very similar feel to it. And so I think that ability to stop fighting to solve our problems project by project or community by community, and look at things on a systems level, or a markets level, is exciting, empowering, and the direction that we need to go. I think that we still need more people to learn how to talk about capital, and learn how to stack capital, we got to become more comfortable with those financial terms. Because it's going to let money flow more predictably. And faster, where it needs to go. If we can be clear, do you need a loan or a grant? Or what does equity look like? And how do we get that back. Until we become conversant in that, I think we're gonna continue to kind of trip over ourselves.
Brandon Dennison:On the coasts where people coffee, in the coastal cities, people get coffee and talk about equity...
Stephanie Randolph:Talking about money and sex just are not acceptable. And I think our world would be a lot better if we got better at talking about both...but in particular, in Appalachia. Because, you know, I don't know how many new markets tax credits those big $10 million projects that have passed by my desk that don't have that $1 million or $2 million gap.
Brandon Dennison:I've sent you one.
Unknown:You've sent me one, and it's pretty common. And how do we creatively solve that gap? And then how do we tell the story so that the dozens of other projects that are also looking for that mystery, $1 million or $2 million project can solve, solve that gap. So I think that's one of the things we need to do. The probably the most exciting thing to me, is the next generation leadership. There are some amazing 30-somethings, and just on the beginning of 40-something who are stepping into leadership or have been in leadership positions for a decade now. And that, to me is a ray of light. And a tremendous opportunity that I just want to keep feeding if I was in control of what I could do with grants, that leadership development, the cross collaboration, the cross pollination, even though they might not be doing housing, can they go and learn about a housing project so that they can understand how it may affect a health care delivery program, I think is that cross pollination of the next generation is important because you're all standing there, and dreaming big and just getting it done.
Brandon Dennison:Well, you've, you've been a leader who's been getting good work done, and I really appreciate appreciate all of it. And it's been so much fun to hear a little bit more of your story Stephanie and I look forward to continuing the conversation soon.
Stephanie Randolph:Brandon, thank you and keep up the amazing work. It's been a pleasure.
Brandon Dennison:Change in the Coalfields is a podcast created by Coalfield Development in the hills and hollers of West Virginia. This episode was hosted by Brandon Dennison, and produced and edited by JJN Multimedia. Become a part of our mission to rebuild the Appalachian economy by going to our website Coalfield-Development.org to make a donation. Youu can email us anytime at info@Coalfield-Development.org and subscribe to our newsletter for more information on the podcast. You can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn by searching Coalfield Development. Check back soon for more episodes.