Thinking Outside the Girl Box: Teaming Up with Resilient Youth in Appalachia

1. Ric: Context Matters. Or, Lincoln County, West Virginia: “I Love It. I’ll Leave Someday.”

 1 Context Matters. Or, Lincoln County,WestVirginia: “I Love It. I’ll Leave Someday.” for THe LonG HAUL2 “so, where are we now?” i squinted out the window of ric Macdowell ’s prius and tried to find anything recognizable in the endless progression of trees, hills, and intermittently placed homes of Lincoln county, West virginia. ric was giving me a driving tour of the area, and i was starting to understand why the field notes of every member of my research team included long narratives about getting lost on curvy country roads. You may find it odd that a book about adolescent girls opens with a chapter about a middle-aged man. Bear with me. ric is a key player, especially in the beginning of the story, and a vocal, caring ally. After this chapter, the focus will shift to the women and girls central to the project. 12 ric: context Matters “oh, this is route 10, Mud river road,” ric said, with the casual confidence of a native.“one of the main roads.” Right, main road. I know exactly where we are. Before there was a Girls’ resiliency program, there was a community in which ric was an important player. A slim,gentle,soft-spoken man rarely seen without a baseball hat, ric was—in his own quiet way—a rock in the community.Though born in pennsylvania, ric may as well be considered aWestvirginia native at this point. in 1968, he graduated from Grinnell college and came to the state as avisTA volunteer (volunteers in service to America) and never really left.An english major at Grinnell, ric recalls he “didn’t have a clue about what i was going to do when i graduated. [But] my senior year, there was a headline in the Des Moines Register with something like VISTA volunteer needed for ...WestVirginia. And i thought,‘that’s what i’m going to do!’” one moment’s inspiration—glancing at a newspaper headline as a twenty-one-year-old—unfolded,ultimately,into forty years and counting of youth advocacy in rural Westvirginia. ric, who writes and speaks frequently about the importance of being committed to youth “for the long haul,” has certainly lived by that belief himself. He tells me that he has lived in a house “up a rural holler” since 1972, working first as a schoolteacher and, later, as a professor and extension agent (a university employee focused on off-campus community development) forWestvirginia University. Unquestionably a major voice in youth advocacy in Lincoln county, ric has been involved in the Girls’ resiliency program from the outset.And in his involvement, he has always been a nurturer. i have vivid memories of ric calmly attending to noisy children at community meetings , distributing pears he had picked from the tree in his yard, sharing suggestions in a deep but quiet voice. ric was not the typical visTA volunteer,at least not as many West virginians perceived them.ThevisTA program had been created by the economic opportunity Act of 1964, just a few years before ric joined. The national attention president Kennedy had directed to Appalachian poverty, coupled with the “War on poverty” subsequently launched by president Johnson, brought young activists into the region.visTA volunteers , many of whom “displayed the long hair and . . . mannerisms of the suburban youth culture that evolved during the sixties” were seen Lincoln County,West Virginia 13 by locals as “newcomers whose idea of community was different from their own” (Williams 2002, 349).Westvirginia author John o’Brien vividly remembers his grandfather tossing sticks into their campfire and talking with irritation about “these daggone visTA people. Who is it sends them?Where is this Appalachia place and why do they think i live there?” (2002, 115) According to Thomas Kiffmeyer’s (1998) study of the Appalachian volunteers (Av), a regional service group that worked with the visTA program and was committed to the idea of meaningful local involvement in social reform, the “infusion of non-native aid” was one cause of the organization’s demise. Kiffmeyer writes that the Av “abandoned early on the tenet upon which the organization was founded—local people helping their neighbors—and thereby left itself vulnerable to charges that the group was controlled by outsiders” (1998, 91). Kiffmeyer goes on to argue, however, that ultimately the Av was defeated more by political actions taken by local community power brokers who were trying to...