Job-spurring grants in Appalachia are targeted in Trump's budget. Here's whats on the line

In 2015, Cassidy Wright-Hubbard was a seventeen-year-old sophomore at Southeast Community and Technical College in Cumberland, Kentucky. Raised in Harlan, she was dually-enrolled in high school and college studying for her art degree. But she needed an income and jobs in the area are few and far between. Most people in her shoes would get out of dodge. The brain drain from southeast Kentucky for motivated young people had been well documented, but Wright-Hubbard didn’t want to go. She’d been forced to relocate away from the mountains once before due to family changes.

“I could just feel my mountain roots being ripped away from me,” she said, on a recent panel at the 2017 Appalachian Studies Conference at Virginia Tech. The panel focused on how difficult it is for Appalachian young people to find the resources they need to stay in the communities where they were raised.

Then she heard about Higher Ground, a program made possible by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), a federal-state partnership established by Congress in 1965 to to promote the economic growth of 420 Appalachian counties and more than 25 million people. Technically, her job would be as an AmeriCorps VISTA, a program funded through the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), which is the umbrella organization of all our national service programs. Wright-Hubbard was overjoyed. Because of the position, which provides a monthly stipend, health insurance and a lump sum to be used towards higher education, she would be able to stay after all.

Appalachia-focused grants in the crosshairs of Trump’s budget cuts

In the sprawling list of proposed budget cuts released Thursday, President Donald Trump proposed eliminating funding for 19 independent agencies — both the ARC and the CNCS are on that list. Wright-Hubbard and her community in southeast Kentucky, which has a high concentration of AmeriCorps members and benefits substantially from ARC funding is dismayed.

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