Posts tagged Resilience
LIFE OR DEATH IN APPALACHIA: SOAR’s Urgency of Connecting Rural Kentucky to the World Wide Web

Centrally, SOAR aims to promote entrepreneurs, small businesses, educators, and, above all, residents of Eastern Kentucky as the region recovers from the decline of the coal industry. Their primary goal is to introduce a new high-speed internet infrastructure across the region, one that will provide substantial economic, educational, and health benefits.

Read More
Michael PhillipsResilience
Bit Source Rewrites the Code in Coal Country

As our culture and economy continue to become more connected digitally, thought leaders in Appalachia have identified an opportunity to help an economy reliant on coal transition into a more technologically resilient future. From this model, Rusty Justice and Lynn Parish started Bit Source in 2014, an organization responsible for upskilling and reskilling former coal miners to make custom software and applications for clients across the globe.

Read More
Michael PhillipsResilience
From Immigration to Innovation: Vijay Kamineni Manufactures a More Resilient Economy for Kentucky

Originally contracted by Logan Aluminum to work in their IT department temporarily, Vijay Kamineni has steadily advanced the ranks, earning titles like Development Team Leader and Business Transformation Leader. He now heads the company as a Chief Innovation and Technology Leader. And as he’s ascended to lead the company forward in its digital future, his focus has remained the same: to seek out and identify ways that new technologies can improve processes for both the worker and the work.

Read More
Michael PhillipsResilience
OUR STORIES ABOUT THE HISTORY AND THE FUTURE OF WORK IN KENTUCKY

Truly collaborative efforts must be forward-looking, cross-region, and cross-sector. They must foster, facilitate, and act as a catalyst for developing a culture and capacity for resilient, deliberate innovation. And they must be about designing futures in which all of us can see ourselves. (It’s understandably hard to be excited about a future you don’t see as available to you.) These futures should not merely be open to--rather, I’d argue we’d all benefit when they are significantly driven by--initiatives from voices and communities too often left out of that discussion--innovative efforts/voices from rural communities, communities of color, refugee populations, LGBTQ perspectives, and other groups who have too often not been given equal opportunity to dream what the future might be.

Read More
Sam FordResilience