Rural Youth Speak Back

Reaching for Higher Ground, produced by youth, tells the story of a group of young people who are fighting to save their communities water.

Background:
Appalshop's Appalachian Media Institute had been training young people from Lotts Creek in video production for several years. The goals of these trainings was to have the video makers create works which would serve their community. At the same time a citizens' group named Kentuckians for the Commonwealth had been working on an organizing project against mine blasting and a deep-mine permit which would destroy the community's watershed. Through communication and working together the two groups, young and old, were able to come together and begin sharing ideas and resources.

In October of 1999, working with media artist Nick Szuberla, a new group of students participated in a series of AMI workshops designed to teach them basic camera skills, team work, image framing and in-camera editing. The students spent time outside hunting for images and running relay-races with cameras around their school grounds.

During the months of November and December, the participants began to form their topics and do community interviews.The young video makers picked two topics. One group began to document the history and founder of their community school--Alice Slone. The other group began to record local residents' struggle with the effects that blasting from coal mining is having on water quality and community health. They called people to be interviewed, set a time to stop by, and prepared questions on the topic.

Between January and April the students shot interviews, created selects tapes and began to rough cut their tapes together. During one interview with a community member who was having problems with blasting, the students came across inspectors for the State Department of Surface mining who told the young video makers that they need to turn their camera off. The students later wrote the State Office of Surface Mining and requested an interview with the inspectors. The interview took place after a series of letters and communications from the state's lawyers...

During February the students produced a community showing of their work and had many of the people they interviewed come for the screening. The showing turned into a community meeting on the history of the school and issues faced by people in regards to coal mining. Both young and old people agreed that it was important for the community to fight against the permit which would threaten their watershed. Later in the month the students produced a one hour radio call in show on WMMT, where they played segments of their interviews over the air.

In June the young people, working with KFTC, organized a surprise trip to the Frankfort, KY Office of Surface Mining to confront officials about the permit that would destroy the Kelly Fork watershed.

In all, over thirty students, community members and ten community-based artists boarded a bus and traveled to Frankfort. Armed with creative tactics and video cameras the young people held a two hour meeting/protest with government officials where they demanded the pulling of the proposed permit. The young people left the building chanting "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, you sink us, and we will sink you." A student later reflected that she felt this was one moment where "we were all together as one...just for one day."

In the following months youth participants in Appalshop's AMI project produced a documentary on youth activism. Building upon the work that came before them, they interviewed the participants in the organizing project and used their peers' video footage to create a piece which spoke to the power of youth organizing.

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