Bonner Foundation  •  10 Mercer Street, Princeton, NJ 08540  •  609-924-6663 office  •  609-683-4626 fax  • info@bonner.org

In the third decade of the Bonner Program, we must understand that it takes many generations of learning, acting and connecting to concretize an idea into a movement and then into a legitimate position within the institutions that stabilize society.

I was born in Brooklyn but forty years ago moved to the Clearfork Valley on the KY, TN boarder of Appalachia’s coal mining country. The Clearfork Valley had 3000 people when I arrived in 1967. A few years previous they had 30,000.  It is one of those distant learning communities.  Twenty years ago the Bonner Foundation began to systematize ways for colleges and communities to move into a new arena for learning, acting and connecting.

We entered the Bonner system through their Crisis Ministries Program. I was doing a lot to help people in this unincorporated area, like other coal mining communities dominated by absentee land owners for purposes of various extractive industries like coal, gas, oil and timber. This was the challenge for me as I began to learn, act and connect to the people of this place where I would enter into a union, a communion, a community.  The people were cash poor but not without assets.  The land was being spoiled, but not without hope of redemption.   We would be a tiny band of people in a vast Appalachia, that would carry on with a vision for their community, specific processes, and concrete, visible reflections of a transformed community.

Given the community development self-help/mutual help philosophy we quickly tweaked the food pantry concept to a gardening agenda.  It worked - with no food pantry to maintain we could get people out tending their land or the land secured for them through their Community Land Trust.  Then there was the surplus. Then the marketing, then the Clearfork Seasonal Market organization.  It was this stimulus of an economy that also strengthened community through meaningful conversation and a stimulation of a community imagination.

It was this and many similar self help activities that made this place attractive to college professors, staff and students. We were discovered first by Appalachian Colleges. We quickly organized Just Connections - a partnership between college and community leaders who wanted to make the volunteer component of college students meaningful to both college and community.  Just Connections got a running start with a Bonner Grant.  That consistent collective work to deliver a product established an identity that has kept us going all these years.  

I found my voice when I was able to understand what I was missing in the partnership.  Colleges wanted to insure a new generation of leaders from within the college arena.  I wanted to insure that our young adults would become leaders in their community by using the community arena.  It was the young adults that should be forming partnerships.  At our Institute we began creating the opportunities for this to happen.  Our local volunteers show up and are expected to participate in the service of visiting college students.

My ministry of Community Development is  enhanced by Bonner. Together we have moved the college-community partnership forward in Eagan, Tennessee.  It is clear to me that a curriculum for community development emerging in this community must be a stimulus for developing curriculum and perhaps a degree in Community Development within colleges and universities.  It is essential for communities like ours to have an economy and legitimacy to employ a community development practitioner. Central Appalachia needs this for its small town and hinterland communities. This has to happen if the young adult Volunteers in Partnership can gain passage into the future they envision together. In serving together today, they will learn from one another, bond with one another and hopefully grow into the Very Important People in the next twenty years.

The legacy of these first twenty years of the Bonner Foundation will always be a part of our story. Everything Bonner, I love you, I thank you, STAY WITH US.  May God’s Spirit dwell in us and fill the spaces within the spaces within the web that holds all life together.