Liz is WVPB's Webmaster/Digital Coordinator and Eastern Panhandle Bureau Chief, based in Shepherdstown, WV on Shepherd University's campus. Liz is a native of Charleston, West Virginia. She received a M.A. in Strategic Communication from American University in 2022 and a B.A. in Communication and New Media from Shepherd in 2014. Prior to her role as webmaster, Liz was WVPB's Eastern Panhandle reporter from 2014-2022, the House of Delegates reporter on "The Legislature Today" from 2015-2017, and she covered K-12/higher education from 2020-2022. Liz has also worked as a technical assistant and associate producer on "The Legislature Today."
During the fall and spring school sessions, thousands of West Virginia schoolchildren are fed both breakfast and lunch as part of the School Breakfast and National School Lunch Programs. But when school is out for the summer, these meals end. This is why the West Virginia Department of Education’s Office of Child Nutrition started their Summer Food Service Program.
At the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Charleston, twenty-five children attended the first day of this year’s Summer Food Service Program, a program that, according to summer food coordinator, Amy Burner, ensures children eighteen years and under in lower-income areas continue to receive free, nutritious meals during the summer months.
“The program is designed to help families be able to find a summer feeding site,” said Burner, “where a child can receive a breakfast and a lunch, or a lunch and a snack, so that the parents don’t have to worry about where that meal is going to be coming from.”
Credit Liz McCormick
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Four of the twenty-five children who attended the celebration, proudly show their participation on the Summer Food Service Program promotional brochures.
Feeding sites can include schools, churches, pools, parks, housing complexes, and summer camps, but Burner says that just about anywhere could be a summer feeding site, and she hopes the program keeps expanding.
The kick-off celebration featured three guest speakers, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, Reverend James Patterson, and Diana Limbacher, a representative from the United States Department of Agriculture.
Having more women as leaders in our community is what Girls Scouts of the USA strive for, and yesterday afternoon, the Black Diamond Council, who serves nearly 15,000 girls in a 61-county jurisdiction including most of West Virginia, gathered together female leaders from the community to discuss the future of our young girls.
The Girl Scouts of Black Diamond Council kicked-off their “ToGetHerThere” campaign, which the organization calls their most aggressive campaign for girls to date, aiming to provide every opportunity to empower girls to reach their fullest potential and build a better world.
The event included a panel discussion centered on the current state of girls in our own state, how to build courage, how to build confidence, and how to build character. However, the topic that pushed heaviest as a means to progress change and promote leadership among girls was building confidence. Confidence seemed to be the key, and First Lady Joanne Tomblin, a member of the panel, says she thinks its organizations like Girl Scouts who will help build young girls confidence.
“A lot of young women come from dysfunctional families,” said Tomblin, “they don’t have people at home to support them, so it’s going to be those organizations that are at least going to start helping them build that confidence, and also, we need more women, more professional women, more parents to volunteer to mentor young women and then give them experiences. The more experiences that you have, the more confidence you’re going to gain.”
Another member of the panel, WVU Law School Dean, Joyce McConnell says she thinks it’s very important for women around the state to reach out to girls who may not have the best family life to help build their confidence with support they may not be receiving at home.
“Support for other women to reach out to girls, help girls understand their own talents and their own strength,” said McConnell, “and so I would say that if a girl has enough confidence to ask for a mentor, that’s a wonderful thing, but so many girls won’t even have that baseline, confidence, that we really have to reach out to them. We have to be much more proactive, and it can happen in the churches, it can happen in our schools, it can happen in community centers, but I think we have to take more responsibility.”
Princess Young, the Chief Development Officer for the Girl Scouts in Charleston said she was very happy with the turnout at the event, and she hopes all the people who were in attendance will be proactive and be interested in being a part of the bigger picture.
“A lot of folks just don’t know,” said Young, “they think of girl scouts, they think cookies, camping, and crafts. And for me, today was about everybody learning about the three C’s that are in our mission, which is building girls of courage, confidence and character who make the world a better place. And I think folks got that picture today, and they realize a little bit more about what we’re about and hope they want to get more involved and helping us develop and open those doors for girls in our region.”
Theater has often been a means to convey a particular message. Since ancient times, it has been used to teach lessons, understand important events, tell…
Theater has often been a means to convey a particular message. Since ancient times, it has been used to teach lessons, understand important events, tell stories, and provide entertainment for its audience, and one company comes to Charleston this summer to start a dialogue with West Virginia…about water.
On January 9, 2014, an estimated 10,000 gallons of MCHM, a chemical used to clean coal, spilled into West Virginia’s Elk River. The result was catastrophic, leaving 300,000 West Virginian’s in the Kanawha Valley with unusable tap water. Coincidentally, that same day in Brooklyn, New York, the New Brooklyn Theater, a company whose mission is to perform theater wherever theater is uniquely needed to move forward public conversations, opened a production of Edward Albee’s, The Death of Bessie Smith inside the Interfaith Medical Center in Bed-Stuy when it was threatened with closure. The company was founded three years ago by artistic director, Jonathan Solari, and he was already thinking about what the company might perform next, as news of West Virginia’s water crisis reached him.
Credit Jonathan Solari (@jssolari) / Twitter
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Twitter
“Immediately I was bombarded with emails from activists in New York who were from West Virginia,” Solari said, “tweets and all sorts of things, photos of the brown water in the bathtubs. And I was just thinking, what is going on? So we did a little bit more research as information became available or information did not become available, and started speaking with people who were either from Charleston, from West Virginia, and started getting a sense of it.”
Credit Liz McCormick
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Public Access Dock in Porters Hollow
Solari and the rest of the New Brooklyn Theater chose Henrik Ibsen’s, An Enemy of the People hoping it would address the water crisis and act as a platform for the citizens of Charleston to speak out about what’s been happening. As part of their motto, the New Brooklyn Theater likes to perform in unusual spaces, and for this piece, they will be building a site-specific stage on the Kanawha River at the Public Access Dock in Porters Hollow in Charleston.
“We’re doing a new adaptation that we’re creating ourselves with our playwright, Jeff Strabone, who’s also on the board of directors of our theater company,” Solari said, “so now we’re trying to ground this great story in West Virginia in a way that speaks directly to our audience and to this situation. We’re performing on an extension that we’re building up to the public access dock next to the Frontier building, so boats are gonna be going by and we’re not going to be able to stop that and that’s just going to be part of our storytelling. You have to embrace all that.”
An Enemy of the People deals with a man named Dr. Stockmann, who’s been seeing symptoms in the town that have caused him concern. Thinking it could be the water at the local baths that is the basis of the local economy, he runs a test, finding out that the water is being polluted and has been for the last ten years.
“So the play is about his fight to try to bring that truth to the forefront. The way into the story is through a similar situation that we’ve been experiencing here since January. At the heart of it, it’s a play about a man who has to discover and come to terms with how difficult it is to do the right thing, but we do that through the lens of polluted water,” Solari said.
To help make their performances come to life, the New Brooklyn Theater casts local actors of the area in which they perform to give the story a more genuine feeling by having actors who have witnessed the issues first-hand.
Credit Liz McCormick
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Public Access Dock in Porters Hollow
“It’s been eye-opening,” Solari said, “you know, there’s only so much that we could do in terms of pre-production when we’re reading newspaper articles and listening to the radio. But to be on the ground first hand, to be able to collaborate with people that lived through it and continue to live through it and have those voices in the room as part of the collaborative process; that’s priceless to us.”
The key to the New Brooklyn Theater’s mission is creating a dialogue about current issues, and Solari says if they’re not trying to actually engage with their audience and directly addressing their concerns, then their not doing their job.
“When the play’s over, it’s not just where are we gonna eat right now, but actually something that you can carry with you and will hopefully empower our audience to take ownership for the decisions that are made that affect them. And to facilitate that conversation.”
The Trust for America’s Health, a non-profit, non-partisan organization in Washington D.C. working to make disease prevention a national priority, likes the EPA’s new carbon emissions rules.
The Executive Director of the Trust for American’s Health, Dr. Jeffrey Levi, says he’s pleased that the EPA is moving forward with plans to issue carbon pollution standards for existing power plants. He says, the nation is already experiencing longer allergy seasons and record temperatures due to climate change and pollution, and without urgent action to control carbon pollution, communities across the country are at-risk for further negative health effects.
Levi says the proposal also marks another critical step in President Obama’s Climate Action Plan because it comes on the heels of the recently released National Climate Assessment, which was the latest in a string of actions to address the serious effects climate change is having on the nation’s health.
Levi notes that the Trust for America’s Health is seeing more illnesses, injuries, and health problems related to extreme weather events, rising temperatures and worsening air quality all stemming from natural disasters, reduced water resources, and new insect-based infectious diseases that, previously, were only affiliated with regions with very high temperatures.
Alzheimer’s disease takes its toll on thousands of American families every year. It is something that many of us face and one particular person was honored today for their work on the issue.
The West Virginia Alzheimer’s Association held their annual luncheon titled, “Thanks for the Memories” where they recognized those who fight to find a cure for the disease. In attendance was Senator Jay Rockefeller, co-founder of the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute.
When the luncheon entered its first year, Rockefeller received the inaugural award named in his honor for his commitment to advancing research into Alzheimer’s and other diseases of the brain. Along with his family, Senator Rockefeller founded the BRNI in Morgantown in 1999, to honor his late mother, who passed away after a 10-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
You can find out more information about the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute at their website, www.brni.org.
The Vandalia Award, West Virginia’s highest folklife honor, was presented to singer, songwriter and performer Roger Bryant last week at the 38th Annual Vandalia Gathering.
A native of Logan, Bryant is a musician whose roots are in the old-time and folk music traditions. He is the grandson of local folk legend Aunt Jennie Wilson and spent several years traveling with her, and accompanying her on his guitar.
By the early 1970s, Bryant began writing songs and performing on his own, achieving national attention in the late 1970s with his song “Stop the Flow of Coal.” He’s recorded four albums, the most recent of which is “On the Banks of the Old Guyan.”
According to a news release from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, Bryant serves as executive director of the Logan Emergency Ambulance Service Authority and is the director of the Logan County Office of Emergency Management.
Bryant plays music when he can and is a yearly performer at the state Division of Culture and History’s Vandalia Gathering. The individuals who receive the Vandalia Award embody the spirit of the state’s folk heritage and are recognized for their lifetime contributions to West Virginia and its traditional culture.
