Describe your organization in three words.

Intermediary, Collaborative, Dynamic

Tell us about your org or team.

MACED is a 43-year-old community economic development organization working to help transition Eastern Kentucky's economy to one that is more just, sustainable and equitable. We do this work through demonstration programs to show what is possible, policy work to educate the public and develop a more informed electorate, coalition, and network building with new and existing local, regional and national partners, and through communications work to capture and tell the stories of our work and of just transition in the region as a way to shift the narrative of Appalachia and the new economy we’re helping to facilitate here. We have about 40 people on staff, including the staff of our two affiliates, Kentucky Center for Economic Policy (becoming an affiliate in May 2020) and Kentucky Natural Lands Trust. Most of the staff is located in Berea, but we also have two field offices deeper in Eastern Kentucky in Hazard and Paintsville. And our service region is all 54 counties of Appalachian Kentucky as designated by the Appalachian Regional Commission. MACED believes the solutions to the challenges Eastern Kentucky faces are complex, and cannot be solved with an “any jobs will do” strategy of industrial recruitment that aims simply to “replace lost coal jobs.” We believe in community economic development that focuses on rebuilding or growing the entire community to meet the needs, wants, and desires of the community members as designed and implemented by those community members.

Tell us about the work that you are doing with CSS.

Improving food access is one component of Appalachia’s New Day.

We worked with CSS to design a storytelling campaign for Eastern Kentucky called, Appalachia’s New Day (AND). We launched AND in June 2019. We used CSS tools - particularly Cornerstones, Battle of the Story and Points of Intervention to design it. The CSS tools helped us put a frame around and a foundation under this work. Through the campaign, we capture and tell the stories of new economy and just transition work happening in communities across Eastern Kentucky. We work with community leaders and members to identify their stories of new economy work and community economic development. We write those stories out, capture pictures, and then post them on our blog and share them out on our social media platforms to extend their reach. We also help the groups with whom we’ve worked to capture the stories to promote them on their social media if they want us to. We’ve worked with key partners, too, to get them to help amplify the stories on their channels. We also worked with specific media outlets to keep them informed about the stories in the hopes they will want to cover them more deeply.

“The idea behind the flag is that once someone becomes a part of Appalachia’s New Day, they can stake their flag in their place to show they are a part of the new day we’re all working toward. ”

And, in fact, one story has already been picked up by a regional public radio station, and they published longer form of it. In 2020, we’ll launch the second phase of AND. In this phase, we’ll begin to offer communications training workshops to community groups in the region. We’ll also start asking individuals and others to tell their own stories using the AND branding and hashtags. We’ll have a pledge for them to sign onto, which will state their dedication to changing the narrative of Appalachia in some way. AND has its own branding and website. There are materials we’re sharing with the communities and people with whom we’re working to collect stories. Those materials include stickers, buttons, posters and a flag. The idea behind the flag is that once someone becomes a part of Appalachia’s New Day, they can stake their flag in their place to show they are a part of the new day we’re all working toward. We imagine these flags flying high in communities across the region in a growing movement of realization that we’re all working toward a brighter future.

“ They have obscured the true stories of the region in favor of stereotypes so they could support resource extraction and make it seem like the only viable economic option for the region. ”

Explain to us why you are doing this work.

We must develop buy in to new economy work through the stories we tell.

There is a long history of story extraction in Appalachia. Those in power took stories they largely created about this place and have used them to paint this region and the people who live here as needing their help to survive. They have obscured the true stories of the region in favor of stereotypes so they could support resource extraction and make it seem like the only viable economic option for the region. The ultimate goal of this campaign is to shift that narrative, and tell a more diverse and a more accurate story of the place and its people. We believe that in order for new economy and just transition work to fully take hold in this place, we must be honest about our stories because they will help people see that another way is not only possible, but that it is already happening. We must develop buy in to new economy work through the stories we tell, and we hope this campaign will help with that. We also know that small, local organizations don’t often have communications capacity of their own, so we are providing that with this campaign. We are capturing and writing stories for them, so they don’t have to take time away from the work they’re doing to write the stories. This is part of the reason why we want to offer communications training workshops in 2020, during the second phase of this campaign. We want to help build and grow their capacity so they can continue telling their stories long after the AND campaign.

Share how folks can get involved with your work or see your work’s final product.

People can follow along with AND’s progress on our website, and sign up for email updates to keep up-to-date about what we’re doing.

How would you describe Story-based Strategy (SBS) to someone who has never heard about it?

People do not respond and are not moved to action by facts and figures alone. This is almost always true. The way we get people to shift their thinking, move to action, or respond to the work we’re doing is by telling them stories. People are natural-born storytellers. We don’t tell someone what we bought at the grocery store; we tell them the story of our experience at the grocery store. We tell them what it was like to be on the beach for vacation, not just that we went there. We tell stories to understand the world around us and to establish our place within it. Stories are crucial to constructing our world. Therefore, we must figure out how to use stories to shift dominant narratives about the world that tell us no other way is possible, or that a place and its people are not good enough for anything except being taken from, or that we can’t do any better. We have to establish a new way of understanding our world and our place in it - a truer, more accurate understanding - and we do that through the stories we tell.

“People are natural-born storytellers. We don’t tell someone what we bought at the grocery store; we tell them the story of our experience at the grocery store. ”

How did SBS affect your work on the project?

SBS influenced every phase of Appalachia’s New Day, from the design of it, to the implementation, down to the colors we used in our branding. We used Cornerstones, Battle of the Story and Points of Intervention to design AND, and throughout the planning process, we were referencing back to those Cornerstones to help us stay grounded in our goals. We were constantly thinking about the story we wanted to tell and present to the public, and we were careful in our phrasing and graphic design to make sure we were still telling that specific story. We were able to filter everything through SBS along the way, and AND is much better for it now, and will continue to be as it grows and evolves.

How was working on this project, using SBS, different from your work without SBS?

Using SBS helped us focus in a way we just weren’t able to do before. MACED has never really designed and implemented a true communications campaign before, so this was all new territory for us. We had always relied on being more reactive in our communications work rather than proactive, and as a result, had no real plan of action for communicating with anyone, and we weren’t really able to get our story, or the story of the region, out to the public or media in a controlled way. But SBS really helped us grab ahold of communications in a way that made sense for what we wanted to accomplish. It’s helped give definition to the work and helped us see that using these tools really can work for us, and it provides much-needed structure to the work we’re doing.

If you could have another iteration of your work, how would it have changed?

We’ve actually already had several iterations of Appalachia’s New Day, ha! We started the design process thinking the campaign would be an update on the New Deal, then shifted when we felt like that might be more politically charged than we wanted it to be. We also started out with the idea of flipping the common practice of ribbon cuttings for new businesses, and hosting ribbon cuttings for the new economy across the region. But when we thought about the very limited capacity of local groups to pull something like this off, we switched our focus to planting flags. We also started out trying to cram everything we possibly could into this campaign, and quickly realized that wasn’t going to work. So, we returned to our Cornerstones, and saw that we were getting way off track, and we used our Cornerstones to get us back on track, and landed with our final and current iteration of AND, which really is right where we should be with it right now.

Do you think SBS will change how your team relates to future collaborative work? How? And why?

SBS has already changed the way we work together and future work. We’re already in the process of designing another campaign about MACED’s energy work that we hope will ultimately help move people to action in the policy world. And we’re thinking about how we can bring it into future policy-related work. It’s also shifted the way we think about communications. Whereas before, MACED focused a lot of attention on marketing our programs and services, we’re now shifting to a more SBS approach of telling stories and running campaigns that will help shift public opinion. I believe that SBS will definitely shape MACED’s future communications work well into the future.

Appalachia's New Day: Interrupting Extraction with Story-based Strategy and Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED)