Change in the Coalfields: A Podcast by Coalfield Development

Anthony Flaccavento

January 26, 2023 Coalfield Development Season 3 Episode 3
Change in the Coalfields: A Podcast by Coalfield Development
Anthony Flaccavento
Show Notes Transcript

Original intro/outro music: 
"'Till I See Stars" by The Parachute Brigade

John F. Kennedy:

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 change makers right square in the middle of all this working to ensure the changes 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 a podcast by Coalfield Development. I'm your host, Brandon Dennison. And we have with us today, Anthony Flaccavento, who if you listen to Thomas Watson's podcast is sort of considered one of the - I think Thomas said one of the the forefathers of the CAN network, Central Appalachian Network, a leader in sustainable agriculture, and absolutely someone I look up to as a change agent in the Appalachian region. And so Anthony, thank you for your time today.

Anthony Flaccavento:

Thanks, Brandon. I'm not sure I'm thrilled to be a forefather. But they say...

Brandon Dennison:

his words not mine.

Anthony Flaccavento:

Glad to be on the show. Thanks.

Brandon Dennison:

So take us back to the beginning, if you don't mind. What got you involved in community development in Central Appalachia? How'd you get into this work?

Anthony Flaccavento:

Yeah, it's not too long and winding of a story. So it's a wee bit. I actually was born in New York City. My family moved to Baltimore when I was a baby, I really grew up in Baltimore. And I loved gardening and I wanted to go to school to study agriculture, my dad gave me a little space in our backyard. At the same time, when I was 14-15, 16-17 I had this kind of growing what at the time we call the social justice, desire, I just really, I was pained by all of the suffering and injustice in the world. And as a young kid, there not a whole lot you can do about it, but I wanted desperately to make a difference in the world. So I, my first experience in the Appalachian region was because I ended up going to school at the University of Kentucky back in the second half of the 70s. And while I was going to school at UK, I was studying agriculture and environmental science and I ended up getting my minor in economics. I started to do work in central and eastern Kentucky. First, first for the Soil Conservation Service now the NRCS. And then after I graduated, I worked for a couple years for an environmental engineering firm out of Lexington. But I was doing testing and other things related to strip mine reclamation - wasn't really, wasn't much of a job to be honest, it was kind of dull. But what was great about it was I was always traveling through Harlan, Bell, Letcher, Floyd, all those counties. And I was traveling with a fellow most of the time from Middlesboro, Kentucky who I adored. And he taught me a lot about the region. And so I just started to feel really a strong interest in the Appalachian region because Lexington even though it's Kentucky, it's really, really different from Eastern Kentucky. So our first kid was born Josh in the hospital in Versailles. I went off to grad school in 1983, and got a degree in basically rural development. It wasn't quite called that, but that's what it was. Came back to the region in 1985. But this time on the other side of the mountain in southwest Virginia, and set up shop in the little coal town of St. Paul. And for the next 10 years I ran the Richmond Catholic Diocese Appalachian Office of Justice and Peace, and it was a variant that no longer exists. But at that time, we're talking about 85 through the middle of 95. The bishop at that time was one of the last of the progressive Catholic bishops. There weren't and aren't a whole lot of Catholics in southwest Virginia. So while I did work with folks in the church and try to encourage, like stewardship and environmental ethic and a social justice ethic, and we did all that, but the main thing I did was community development work. And my boss, the Bishop, who was 300 miles away in Richmond, he basically said to me, do what you think needs to be done. And so that allowed me to get deeply involved in the Pittston coal strike spent the better part of a year on the front lines of the Pittston strike and 89 and 90, I got to start stuff. We started a Homeownership Program for low income and working families and concert with groups in Eastern Kentucky, and people, creative and others. And that was a big, big hit and worked well, then I started an environmental group called the Coalition for jobs in the environment. And then I started Appalachian sustainable development and did all that stuff, while I was being employed by the diocese, and at that point was just, you know, learning a lot, because I, to be perfectly honest, I knew nothing about Appalachia when I arrived, except I'd read Harry Caudill, and I'd read a couple of other formative books, but really, I was a total greenhorn. And fortunately, folks took me in, sometimes they educated me pretty bluntly and directly, which was good. I'm another times a little more gently. But I've been here ever since, raised my family here. And, of course, through ASD worked at that for about 15 years before moving on from that. So that's my story. Right? So I was actually the student president of the Catholic Newman center when I was at UK. And, and I was just deep into all this writing about labor and the environment and, and justice for workers and poor people. And it was as a person growing up in the Catholic church, I was shocked to discover that it existed, because we never talked about it.

Brandon Dennison:

Oh really? I did want to ask, I mean, when you said you're 15, 16, 17 had this burning desire for social justice. You know, I don't know that that's a common experience, generations change we have what what planted that seed that

Anthony Flaccavento:

You know, I honestly don't know, because my passion? folks and my siblings, I have three siblings, I'm the youngest, all wonderful human beings. But none of them had that need to change things. None of them had. They, they're all liberal leaning, and they all have a sense of the world isn't fair. And just but there, it wasn't kind of for me, it was just like a total driver. And honestly, I don't know where it came from. But I do know that when I started to get, when I started to get involved with the Catholic Church's social justice part, which really happened at UK when I was 18. It fed and nurtured that impulse and gave me a little, you know, a little more grounding.

Brandon Dennison:

Yeah. Could you say a little bit more about the Pittston coal strike? So just give a little background on how that came about? And tell us a little bit more detail about your your experience as a part of it.

Unknown:

Yeah, so I had been in St. Paul, southwest Virginia at that point, for...I arrived in 85. The strike started in 88. It ended in 89. So I've been around for about three years. The miners at that point, Pittston was a union mine went on strike

Anthony Flaccavento:

Why is it that I mean, that's so because - and Pittston was the biggest coal mine, coal company going at that point in in southwest Virginia. And they went on strike as the company revoked their health cards. They basically said we're canceling your health card, so we're not going to pay for your health insurance anymore. There was other issues around retirement and other things too. But that was the biggie. Because as everybody knows and knows anything about it, you know, health care is important for everybody, but unbelievably important for minors who are working such dangerous dirty jobs. So that sparked the strike. They went on on strike. I had been getting to know miners a little bit but didn't know too many of them. I just knew some from living in St. Paul. And I had met a couple of the folks with the you UMWA around labor issues. And so once the strike started, I checked with my bishop. I said, I think this is gonna be a big one. And he said - have at it. So I started meeting with the folks who were the kind of on-site leaders. It wasn't Rich Trumka, who was the head of the UMWA at that point. And Cecil was the Vice President, but I was meeting with the kind of the guys right below them. And they welcomed the help. And they said they were committed to nonviolent resistance. And, of course, you know, as somebody raised in the Catholic tradition, or not raised in it but steeped in it. That was great news. So I basically tried inspiring. Incredible, you got to be a part of that. And why to figure out what could I do as this one 1.4 person office in southwest Virginia. And what it ended up being was that the Appalachian Office of Justice and Peace it was called, became one of a few hubs in the region to mobilize people in support of the minors in two basic ways. For some, it was going to the picket lines and standing in support and sitting down and getting arrested, which I did and 1000s of other people did as part of the civil disobedience. For a lot of other folks who weren't ready to do that. It was letter writing, it was letters to the editor, it was marches of solidarity, both in the coal fields and in places like Abington and others a little bit removed from the coal fields. But over that next year, we mobilized thousands of people and also served as something of a hub for people from outside the region, who were writing or calling and saying, what can we do. And raising money too because the strike fund needed, needed a lot of money. And so I played a very small role, but I think, a helpful role in terms of really bringing the community out in support of the miners. And you know, the strike went on for it was either 11 or 13 months, but it was it was long. And it was primarily non violent. There were jack rocks, flattening tires, there were definitely some incidents of rocks through windows and threats, but it was overwhelmingly non violent in my assessment. But the miners were wearing down, and it looked like there would maybe never be a resolution. So the other role that we played was just kind of moral support just showing up. And I have friends to this day, and when I ran for Congress, you know, 20, some years later, the miners who are still alive, they remember that, and they, you know, it just it gave me an enduring credibility with them. And I'm not even sure that I deserved it, but it did. So anyway, that was it, and that ultimately, they won. That was probably the last major win prior to the legislative win that they got recently as part of one of Biden's major bills. But between those two, it was mostly a losing scorecard for the miners, and the Pittston strike was was a win for him. why do you, why is it that the unions power has waned so much in Appalachia? Well, I mean, it's a subset of union power waning in every economic sector in every part of the country. Of course, again, it's really encouraging now to see renewed interest.

Brandon Dennison:

Yeah, thanks for pointing that out, too.

Anthony Flaccavento:

Yeah, absolutely. But even with that, Yeah. it's hard not to say that mostly, we've lost ground. We're all hopeful now that this is the beginning of a new, a new phase. But I think there's a number of things. So, you know, for one, there was this general complacency that I think settled over unions themselves, in many cases, but also people who historically, were friends, family of union members. Because back in the day, when the mind workers and the auto workers and the Teamsters, and all those different folks were literally fighting for their lives. It just was, I think, a much more obvious thing to to people who are not themselves, waging those fights, how critical that was. But as labor conditions improved, as the unions won better wages and benefits and protections, people started to get complacent. And then the next thing was younger workers in particular, particularly in conservative circles, but not just started to speak this line that well, unions served their purpose. They were really important back in the day, but we don't need them anymore. We've entered this collaborative age where management and workers are all part of the team with the CEO, and you know, all of that stuff. And so I think all of that contributed to it. And then probably the single biggest thing is the laws changed. And with push from congressional leadership, and in some case, state leadership, the right to work laws, but particularly at the federal level, they just made subtle changes that made it harder to organize a union, easier for the companies to do things that at one point had been illegal to intimidate or deter people from unions, so that it would be perfectly legit, for the company to post anti union sort of signage around the shop floor or on the mine floor, to put things in the break room to require employees to go through talks, anti union talks, and yet the Union could not put its own literature and its own kind of advocacy at the same level. So there was a lot of legislative changes that made it harder to form a union, harder to keep the union, harder to fund a union and easier for companies to intimidate or prevent them. And so all of those things together, whittled away at unions over the, you know, basically the 35-40 years between the late 70s and now.

Brandon Dennison:

You know, it's interesting, that sort of reminds me of a question I had for you, because a lot of the organizations you started and the work you did, I think you're saying sort of the 80s is when you were getting up and going. And so a lot of the research I've done in Community Economic Development, in Appalachia, but also in other urban settings, you see a lot sort of 60s, 70s as this burst of organizing and activity, and then the 80s is sort of this decline, you know, and it seemed like a rough period, if you were trying to be the, in the community economic development space. So is that right? And how did you sort of bucked the trend?

Anthony Flaccavento:

Well, in in a way that relates closely to my, my first 10 years in southwest Virginia, when I was working with the diocese, and part of the the piece of the work I did, which was a much smaller piece, but not insignificant with the Catholics in the pews was really about, in part persuading people, that social justice was even an issue, because there was kind of, kind of like now on the right, they say, to talk about race is racist. Like we're a post racial society, well, in a way in a different sort of way. Back then, in the in the mid late 80s, among a lot of middle class, mostly middle class people in church pews, Catholic and others. The sense was, Oh, we've we've fought those fights, and we're past them now. The question of justice and fairness where that was, that's behind us. And so the work I was doing with the Catholics was often trying to educate and persuade that, you know, in fact, we still had plenty of those issues and challenges in front of us. So yeah, that that, again, that kind of malaise or complacency, plus it was the Reagan years, which were all about kind of two things, it's sort of a renewed celebration of being American, and, and being like, we want it to feel good about being American. And I agree with that. But part of feeling good about being an American meant don't criticize anything about being American. And so that was part of it. And then there was also the early days of the embrace of trickle down economics, which Reagan really brought to the fore, which meant essentially free up the small group of people at the top, to work their magic as investors and entrepreneurs and geniuses. And that'll take care of the rest of us, because their brilliance will trickle down wealth to the rest of us. And so those two things kind of a general sense that the fights for basic dignity and justice, whether in workplaces or the community, we're behind us. And the sense that actually, the rich people are the ones that make society run and bring wealth to the rest of us, those two things combined in a big way in the 80s. That the advantage we had in southwest Virginia and central Appalachia more broadly, was that that was way less true in our area than other parts of the country and plent of the parts of the country, you could kind of legitimately believe that because there was a kind of a pretty great, pretty widespread growth and relatively widespread prosperity in those days. Obviously, that's been shrinking and being concentrated ever since. But in Appalachia that never happened. And so making the case that we still had some fundamental issues and challenges was a little easier here than if I you know, been in whatever suburban Baltimore.

Brandon Dennison:

You and I probably have shared analysis on this. But why did all that growth bypass the Appalachian region?

Anthony Flaccavento:

Well, a lot of it was because so much of the ownership was outside the region. We you know, that's been thoroughly documented. But that's a really important thing is, is that when the ownership whether it's coal companies or timber companies or gas companies or agricultural entities, when the ownership is outside the region, you might have good wages and eventually, the UMWA won really good wages for the miners. But you have the vast majority of the total amount of wealth and money that's generated leaving the region that's one thing. Second thing is because of a historic dependence on a small number of industries, coal, timber, tobacco, a little bit further to the east, furniture and textiles because we don't have the economic diversity that also means that the money that the miners and a few other people doing okay, we're earning didn't have a whole lot of opportunities to circulate in the economy. So, so we had, you know, a lack of places to spend the money locally. And when you don't have that kind of economic diversity, you don't you don't absorb and recycle the funds, you send them out of the region. So I think those two things were were really, really big. Obviously, the last 25-30 years of community and development has been trying to create this new approach that does exactly the opposite, that situates much more ownership locally, and that diversifies the economy so that businesses buy from businesses and consumers buy from businesses and you know, all that stuff. You guys are in the thick of it. But, you know, until, you know, maybe late 90s, is when the ARC and the State Department's of Economic Development and other government entities and the experts so called, that's when they first started thinking about economic diversification and sort of plugging the leaks of an economy and all that. But up to that point, everybody who was in leadership was pretty content for the for a little bit to trickle down and a whole lot to get sucked up. That was the model.

Brandon Dennison:

So with that, with that sort of theory of there's a better way to do community economic development. Is this where Appalachian Sustainable Development enters the story?

Anthony Flaccavento:

Yeah, yeah. In two ways. One was when we started when I was still working for the diocese, and we started Coalition for Jobs in the Environment. I and the other small group of people that started it really had a vision that didn't materialize through CJE, we thought of this as being the group that would bridge the gap between ecological concerns and environmental stewardship on the one hand, and a healthier economy on the other. It ended up CJE was a wonderful group, but it ended up becoming a more traditional environmental group, fighting the fights that need to be fought - incinerators, all kinds of stuff. So we let that be we let that go on on its way. And so we tried a second time about five years later, and that created ASD. So there was really there was really two impulses at that point, when we started ASD, which was 1995. The first was still to overcome the jobs versus the environment conundrum, which had been used against workers, the environment, and in Appalachia and elsewhere for generations. The second was that by 1995, we had the United Nations Development Program, and we had the word sustainable development had entered the vocabulary. And people were beginning to talk about what it would mean, but most of the groups that took it on, were very intellectual and academic about it. They were they were developing complex matrices to see, you know, 43 parameters to evaluate.

Brandon Dennison:

Why do they always do that?

Anthony Flaccavento:

Partly, I think it's partly a nonprofit culture problem, personally, it's this academic impulse to move everything to the head. But whatever that was, those things were going on. And of course, some of them were unnecessary, but, but I was like, you know, I'm very much a doer. And and so anyway, I wanted to create a sustainable development group that was all about trying stuff. And and of course, we did, we did analysis, and we and we did research into what we were trying to do in the wider field, we did market analysis and all that stuff. But I said, you know, what, there's no way in Appalachia of all places that we're going to create a sustainable economy if we don't try things and see what works and sticks and what doesn't. And so that was really ASD's approach and took us a year or two to figure out which sectors but our two main ones, you know, were, were ag and wood products. And, you know, we went from there. And we still did lots of trial and error. We also sort of dipped our toes in a few other areas, but those ended up being the primary one.

Brandon Dennison:

And ASD was one of the founding members of the CAN network and you as the executive director of it, right?

Anthony Flaccavento:

Yeah, I think actually, I think we might have been the second layer but but just just about the founding, I think ACEnet in and rural action in Southeast Ohio and CEO (Center for Economic Options), they were definitely founding members of ASD might have been but if we weren't founding we were like, right in behind them. And yeah, and then so CAN you know CAN which is continued all these years. It's kind of extraordinary, but that was a that was the place the people, not all of them, but a lot of the people who are leading these experiments, because that's what ACEnet and CEO and rural action were also doing. And I believe Maced became part of that as well. Now Mountain Association. We were all in one way or another, trying stuff and trying to figure it out as we go. So CAN create a space for us to compare notes and learn from each other, and, you know, also commiserate when things weren't going well. And then as it matured, and as those individual organizations grew, and got some, some heft and some credibility, CAN also became a vehicle for like, more structured learning things as well as advocacy, with bigger foundations and that sort of stuff. So CAN became a really important augmentation for those groups.

Brandon Dennison:

Could you speak to the power of a network? And also how to make a network function in a rural setting?

Anthony Flaccavento:

Yeah, um, you know, I'm don't know nearly as much about networks as, as people like June Holly and some of the others who kind of made that almost their life's work. But my sense of networks, let me put it this way. Right. My my model for successful network, not the only one, but one of them was the Appalachian Harvest Growers Network. So when we started, when we started in ag work as ASD, we were trying different things we helped to get the Abington farmers market started, which grew into a big success. We did a variety of other things, trainings and demonstrations. But our first like, really big, big thing was starting a food hub, which was Appalachian Harvest was started over in Lee County originally and then moved to Scott County, and it was focused on tobacco farmers and creating alternatives for that. Anyway, all that background. Of course, Appalachian Harvest is still going on today. And it's got partners in Kentucky and West Virginia and elsewhere. The backbone of it, besides the little tobacco barn that we had converted into a packing shed was this network of growers. And this network of growers was mostly tobacco farmers, a few few sort of old hippie farmers, mostly tobacco farmers, who were interested in trying to raise produce organic produce, and, and not necessarily instead of like maybe in addition to tobacco, as tobacco was going out, but highly skeptical. And the reason they came together and really gelled as a network was because they needed each other. And, and I should put myself in that category because I was one of the growers as well, we needed each other, because none of us had the capacity either on farm or post farm to do the quantity and quality that was needed to satisfy the buyers. We had these buyers like Richmond and Food City and Abington and Ingles in North Carolina, they were big, and they had big, big demand and high standards. So meeting their demand and meeting their standards, or even even beginning to do so meant that you needed quite a few farmers to come together, figure out who's growing what do the planning, follow the plan as much as you can when you're farming, and, and all of that stuff and then teach each other. So they became it became the the way we figured out how to satisfy the market. But it also became a really vibrant peer learning network. So anyway, that said to me, that networks need to be based in concrete action. And I think in need, I think they're more cohesive and more effective, when it's not just not just a sort of voluntary group of people who want to come together as a network to discuss and learn, that's fine. But they're gonna they needed each other to stay in business to to satisfy these markets that became, in many cases, their main market. So I think that networks work well, when they really have a concrete need that they pursue together and, and in pursuing it together. They're more effective than alone. That's a little different from networks that are about an affinity of ideas, and they can certainly work. But in my limited experience, they tend to be more fleeting or less, you know, less compelling, because, again, it's mostly in the head, the association rather than sort of in the pocketbook.

Brandon Dennison:

That's a great point. That's a great point. Well, could you tell us a little bit more about the barn that caught my eye knew about the Farmers Market, which is a huge inspiration, but the packing barn? That's the first I'd heard about that.

Anthony Flaccavento:

Yeah. So so it burned down. In May of maybe it was 2005 or 2006 we were several years in I don't remember the year I probably got that wrong. But we were several years in, and at that point, we scrambled for that season and built the facility the next year that that ASD Appalachian harvest has been in ever since but but it was a tobacco barn in Stickleyville in Lake County. And it was the barn of one of our first growers, a man I hold in high esteem and love to this day, Martin Miles. Martin was one of those lifelong tobacco farmers. He'd done some sheep and some beef cattle, but mostly it was a tobacco grower. And Martin had seen his quotas shrinking dramatically, and his profitability per acre going down the toilet. And so he was one of the people that said, I'm gonna give this a try. So we didn't we didn't have any packing shed the first year, but we didn't have much product either. But that second year, which I think was 2000, we started poking around and Martin said, Well, I got an old barn, and I still I still hang tobacco in part of it but most of it's empty. And so we basically borrowed Martin's barn. We had a gentleman's understanding, and we got the job corps to pour concrete. And we found an old cooler at the Kroger in Abington that they were getting rid of to upgrade and we moved the panels and everything over had to buy a compressor but got all the panels, a few staff from ASD and a bunch of the farmers built the cooler on site. We purchased a couple of low tech grading lines and a bunch of boxes and we were underway. And that was the packing shed. And then within a couple of years, Martin was completely out of tobacco. So we now had the whole barn available we expanded, put in another grading line, another cooling room, we built a more appropriate loading dock added a section. So the barn became this kind of piecemealed facility, which which created problems and had like too many nooks and crannies. But but there was something absolutely beautiful about the first food hub in Appalachia and an organic one to boot being in a tobacco barn. It was wonderful. But partly because it was in an old tobacco barn and a lot of stuff had been rigged by the seat of our pants. We had an electrical fire, which took it down and the facility in Duffield is a whole lot better and more suitable. But that's the story of the tobacco barn. And eventually we bought it from Martin. We borrowed it for the first year or two. But once we started investing, we bought it from him.

Brandon Dennison:

Well, what have you been up to since the ASD days?

Anthony Flaccavento:

So in a nutshell, my last 12...left ASD in December of 2009 so actually, it's 13 years ago. And I should say it's, it went through a little bit of a leadership transition when I first left, but it has been in great hands with Catherine ever since and she's she's taken it to a level of size and complexity and impact that is way beyond what I was doing. So it's in great hands. Basically, I took what I learned at ASD and being around the country talking to other people and CAN and a few other experiences I had and started a consulting business Scale Incorporated. Scale is a simple name for a complex acronym, which is sequestering carbon accelerating local economies, the idea was spawning sustainable development really. So I've done that, and I continue to do it, Scale has been a great thing. With a consulting business, you never have a paycheck per se, it's always up and down. And when you get a good gig, you can you can pay yourself. And when you have dry times you have dried times, mostly Scale has been pretty successful. So I've enjoyed that the two times I ran for Congress, both times in 2012, I had to stop my consulting work for about five or six months. In 2018. I stopped for a whole year. So that that sets you back when you're a small firm. But we came through both of those and Scale has been doing great work. Scale basically takes the kind of work that you do and ASD does, mostly in food and agriculture, but also in economic development more broadly, and, and works with local communities when they ask, usually it's a mix of a nonprofit or two or three with entrepreneurs or farmers or business people. Sometimes some folks from the land grant or academics and sometimes like extension agents and others and that that group will ask us to come in and do things like do a business plan or write a feasibility study for a food hub or kitchen or just help them do what they're doing better. And projects that we do range from a long weekend to, I just finished earlier this summer an 18 month project with some colleagues in Western New York. So it's it's been good work you get to work with really, really committed folks who are trying to make their communities better their food systems, their economy, the last year, still doing scale, but I'm, I've eased into the rural urban divide, quagmire of full bore by starting the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative. And that's really kind of my passion. Now even I still have worked with Scale. But that's kind of, it's a logical outgrowth in a way of, of the committee development work. But it's also allows me to deal with my, my unsuccessful political aspirations by trying to figure out how it's gotten to the point that liberals, progressives and Democrats are, at least as a body, pretty unwelcome in most of rural America. Appalachia, for sure, but really no more so than rural Kansas and rural Nebraska and rural South Carolina, etc, even rural New York state. So, for a long time, I used to think that all the the Coalfield Developments in the ASDs and similar things in New Mexico and Arizona and Colorado that all of this bottom up development would not only make for stronger local economies and better communities, which it has, but we'd also transformed our politics and our public debate. And then a few years back, I figured out that as important as our collective work was, it wasn't having the impact, we hoped on the bigger debate and the policies and the elections. And so RUBI is trying to address that.

Brandon Dennison:

What was it like running for Congress?

Anthony Flaccavento:

You know, it's enormously stressful if you really throw yourself in. But I, I would say, aside from the fundraising, and we raised $1.2 million, as well, $1.1 and a half million dollars a second time with no corporate contributions, and only a few labor PAC contributions. I was really grassroots. But aside from that, I mostly loved it. Because, you know, a fair number of people knew me from ASD, but you knew I met way more people. And, and part of the essence of my campaign was talking about bottom up economics and talking about the work that people like you and I and others had been doing for so many years. And and lifting that up and basically saying, this economic paradigm of investor driven trade and trickle down economics that benefits the wealthy and sucks wealth out of communities, that's creating our political problems to that's the, that's the foundation of why we're unable to get along. And not only do we have to bust that down, and Stop that crap, but we need an alternative. And a lot of times when I was doing our town halls and other things, I'd say what a lot of folks don't realize is we have alternatives. A lot of people are out there figuring out the alternatives, which are a little bit different in every place, but they have some common characteristics, like invest in local communities, and diversify the economy and put local people in positions of leadership and stop, stop having the experts come in and tell us what to do, but make it a shared understanding of what needs to be done. And so the basis of all those years, like you in the trenches, gave me a very persuasive stump speech, at least not persuasive enough to win, that's for sure. You made new connections. Yeah, and even many of the people that that voted against me would say to me, sometimes during and sometimes after the election, I really liked your approach. I like what you're talking about. I agree with you. And then some of them would say that I can't vote for a Democrat. But you know, I think mostly I enjoyed it. I think it was valuable for the for certainly for me, and then for the community. I think it it, it frustrated a lot of people when when I lost and lost bad. We're just like ready to give up. But other people have been looking for ways to keep that kind of idea and energy going. So that's not a bad play.

Brandon Dennison:

Anthony, I mean, it's, I almost can't believe it, you know, how much good work you've done in Appalachia and so in first so long. And I guess the simple but also really complicated question on my mind is, you know, if you started in the 80s, a lot of history since then. A lot of good work, but a lot of challenges remain. Are you feeling more hopeful about Appalachia, less hopeful, or is that not even how you frame it?

Anthony Flaccavento:

Oh, I feel more hopeful than certainly 35 or 40 years ago. I mean, I didn't know enough back then to be hopeful or, or cynical, really. But but even compared to 15-20 years ago, and the main hope is that there's a whole bunch of Coalfield Development corporation type groups that are I'm not, I'm not saying you're like, just like everybody else. But I mean, that type of innovative group that really has It is that is that your biggest hope for what still needs to figured out how to build this new economy, there's, there's a lot more of them, us now, not only that, those groups have all gotten a whole lot better at what they're doing. So the sophistication and the depth of the work is much richer than what it was 15-20 years ago. And perhaps most importantly, that body of groups like the CAN groups have, maybe not the credit, you should, we should, but a whole lot more credit than we had back in the 80s and early 90s. So the policymakers and the agency folks, they've gone from just sort of tolerating us to highly respecting the work and they turn to people like you to be educated themselves and and to figure out strategies. And that doesn't mean that there isn't still top down silliness, there isn't still one place, one size fits all kinds of templates, bureaucrats that are completely removed. And it certainly doesn't mean that our elected officials are totally on board and driving the necessary level of investment. But the kinds of conversations that Heidi Minko has been convening as part of the just transition fund effort, they wouldn't have gone anywhere near as far as 10-15 years ago, because we hadn't built the creds to sort of force our way into the room to create our spaces around the table. So I think all of that really gives me hope, honestly, the only really major discouragement that I have now is just our political culture, and our politics has, at the same time degenerated so badly. And it still is, a lot of people don't want to say to me, especially young people, oh, just forget about it. It doesn't matter. But Justin Maxon, back in his MACED days, he said years ago, he said, you know, politics is just about making the rules of the game. And politics still makes most of the rules of the game. So we can't have, we've got to be able to have both this upwelling of innovation and honest to goodness, community based development that is happening. But with that has to be a politics that supports that and enables that, not one that either ignores it or or pulls the rug out from under it. change in Appalachia? Yes. You know, I'm a Democrat, I'm a progressive. And what RUBI, the position that RUBI has staked out the rural urban Bridge Initiative, is that you can think whatever you want about the other side, though, right, the conservatives, the Republicans, whatever. And I got planning a not so nice feel it's about some of those leaders. The fact of the matter is both parties and the political and economic process for two generations ignored, neglected, betrayed and really screwed most of Appalachia, I mean, way more than two generations. And, and so the anger and the outrage and all that it might be excessive, and it might be it might be, you know, parlayed and cultivated by the right wing media. But the reality is, folks have plenty of reasons to be pissed off. And so long as on our side, people just say kind of what's wrong with those people? Why don't why did they keep voting against their interests? That does nothing to solve the problem. In fact, that makes it worse. So what Ruby has said is we've got to take stock of where we've gone wrong, and contributed to this divide to this place of such deep mistrust. Because if we see ourselves as the people who are helping to give birth to an economy that works better for people, communities, and the environment, which is what we're all about, that builds local capacity and local wealth and prosperity, if we're the But if we're among the people trying to drive that, we've also got to recognize that if we're going to, if we're going to do it, we've got to rebuild trust in our communities. And that means taking folks where they're at, understanding that they have things to teach us listening more and talking less. And then we can maybe begin to make partners of people because you know, you and I both have plenty of partners in our community development work, that are, that are hardcore Republicans. But they love the work we're doing on the ground. They're doing the work themselves in many cases. And so we've joined forces. But somehow, you get a couple of steps removed from community. And that kind of sense of mutual need. And collaboration is so much more difficult to forge because that's where the the swords come out. And we we move into our teams, and we just hate on each other. So we've got to, we've got to fix the political side if we want the community and economic side to continue to grow and flourish.

Brandon Dennison:

So where can folks learn more? Rudy stands for rural urban divide. Initiative

Anthony Flaccavento:

is Ruby, Ruby, and Oh, Ruby. Towel? No, it's the rural urban Bridge Initiative.

Brandon Dennison:

Ruby's better.

Anthony Flaccavento:

And yeah, you can just Google that. It's, it's rural, urban bridge.org. Or you, if you Google Ruby, in my name, you get it too. It's a pretty good website, we've got some very specific things going on. We're not just like a general advocacy group, we just released a big report. But more so than the report. We're doing trainings. Every day, I just came from Montgomery County, Virginia doing one we do them all over the country to help people understand the causes of the divide and what we can do about it. And we're about to launch a big national initiative called community works, where we're going to enable empower and support local liberals, local Democrats, to begin to undertake not political work, but concrete, local community work, to get stuff done, to learn and to start rebuilding that trust.

Brandon Dennison:

Start with the good work first, right?

Anthony Flaccavento:

Start with the good work first, and, you know, dialogue, conversation, that's all important. But when you hate each other, it's hard to have a good conversation. When you start working side by side to fix problems in the community, it becomes harder to hate each other and then you can start talking. So that's our that's our thesis. We want to launch it as a national pilot this coming spring, and then hope that it in a few years will start transforming politics.

Brandon Dennison:

Tangibility, though throughout your whole life, doing tangible work, and like you said, actually trying stuff in community. I feel like that's just a key thread for you throughout.

Anthony Flaccavento:

Yeah, I mean, I don't you think so too. I'm don't want to put words in your mouth.

Brandon Dennison:

I do. Amen. A big Amen. Yeah.

Anthony Flaccavento:

When ASD was about four or five years old, a reporter did a first big story from the Bristol Herald Courier about about some of our projects we had going on. And it was a pretty good story overall, but he had a quote from me that wasn't quite right. But but it was about this issue of tangibility and doing stuff. The quote was Flaccavento says, At ASD, we don't think we act. It sounded like sort of like random thinking. What I actually said was, we don't just think, but I actually liked his quote, better.

Brandon Dennison:

Awesome. People feel the same way about me. You're a true inspiration. You reached out pretty early on in the Coalfield's story. We were doing deconstruction of abandoned buildings with local folks. And you reached out and just affirmed and encouraged said, you know, I want to help however I can and just keep it up was your general message and that meant more to me than maybe you probably realized at the time, Anthony said thank you for all you've done for Appalachia for our country. And just keep going man.

Anthony Flaccavento:

Thank you and right back at you Brandon, right back at you. I'm so proud to know you. So proud of of what Coalfield has done and continues to do and I know we'll do so. Thanks a lot.

Brandon Dennison:

Changing the Coalfield 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, you can email us anytime at info at Coalfield-Development.org and subscribe to our newsletter for more information on the podcast. test you can follow us on instagram twitter, facebook and linkedin by searching Coalfield Development check back soon for more episodes.