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

Introduction: When I Fell in Love with Shelley Gaines

 introduction When I Fell in Love with Shelley Gaines every good love story has to start with a time and place—you know, to set the scene—and this one is no different. it’s the spring of 1999.i am sitting in my university office,surrounded by menacingly tall stacks of student papers and scribbled field notes from ongoing research projects. A large wooden sculpture sits perched on my desk, spelling out a message that my husband and daughters think i desperately need to be reminded of each day: “relax.” As one of the few qualitative research experts in the area and a lifelong “yes” addict, i am severely overcommitted. My next meeting is with a shelley Gaines, and my plan is to have a brief chat and then regretfully decline to work with her—“Your project sounds fascinating. If only I had the time!” enter shelley: baby on one hip, bright smile on her face. radiating enormous energy and optimism,she tells me about the Girls’resiliency program (Grp), in Lincoln county, West virginia, a community nonprofit aimed at helping girls identify strengths, become active decision makers, and advocate for social change. shelley describes how it began with fewer than ten girls in one school and quickly grew to include almost one hundred girls in three schools. Being in the program, she explains, means monthly after-school discussions about everything from day-today happenings with friends to the roles and rights of girls and women. it means regular out-of-school activities, such as volunteer projects, art workshops, and social outings. she talks about the poor, rural county with 2 introduction little in the way of facilities or programs for youth and about the hard lives of the girls served.As she speaks passionately about this grassroots,“girldriven ” program focused on developing leadership in Appalachian youth, i feel my own enthusiasm growing. Oh boy, I’m in trouble. But this was an unfair battle to begin with; given my personal and professional interest in gender equity,Appalachia, and community development , i never had a fighting chance. shelley’s intense commitment to the girls in Lincoln county was palpable. By the time she left my office that day, i had agreed to conduct evaluation research for the program. What i didn’t realize then was how long the research would go on and how much it—and i—would change along the way. Although the research questions multiplied over the course of the project, at the outset they were fairly broad and simple. i wanted to understand what the program meant to the girls, how it played out in their lives, what aspects of it they valued and why, and what they were concerned about. i think about long-term ethnography as a long-term relationship. i have a commitment to stick with it, to represent people fairly, to seek and present accurate information, and to learn lessons that can be used in other relationships. in the case of this study, i committed myself not only to my research students and to the teen girls in the program but also to the staff and board members, whose fierce devotion to rural youth is extraordinary. And to the woman whose passion i fell in love with that first afternoon, shelley Gaines—the woman with the vision. every good love story also needs strong characters. in fact, it may need those above all else.Hence,the telling of this story is people-centered. each chapter uses an individual and her or his experiences as a springboard for telling a piece of the organization’s history, as well as for discussing key issues that arose in our research.Although my research teams did not collect the life histories of individual girls, the book in its entirety might be understood as a life history of an organization. You’ll notice the first-person singular writing. My daughter, Layne Amerikaner, who joined the project in 2010, cowrote the book. she and i had to decide what voice to use,what our presence should be in the writing. We agree with corinne Glesne that first person singular is fitting for qualitative work, especially given that i was the lead researcher for the project. “The presence of ‘i,’ ” writes Glesne,“says that yours is not a disembodied When I Fell in Love with Shelley Gaines 3 account that presumes to be objective” (2011, 236...