Volunteers drop off cleaning supplies and masks at the Rea of Hope in Charleston.
Human beings are social creatures and the pandemic is taking a toll on all of us in one way or another. It’s also bringing to light just how important human connection is in our lives.
This week on
Inside Appalachia, we’ll hear from folks who are overcoming these challenges on top of maintaining sobriety and staying on the path to recovery.
As we grapple with the immediate health emergency of the coronavirus pandemic and celebrate the hope found in vaccines and infections going down here in Appalachia we’re also struggling with two other public health crises: the opioid epidemic, and a large uptick in HIV cases. Researchers believe the crises are linked.
Colt Brogan and his co-worker Crystal Snyder.
Communities throughout Appalachia struggle with shrinking populations. As a region, Appalachia is losing people in the prime working years (ages 25 to 64) even as the rest of the country is seeing growth in that demographic, according to a 2018 report from the Appalachian Regional Commission. The latest census figures indicate West Virginia alone lost approximately 10,000 people in the last year and has lost nearly 65,000 people in the last seven.
Each year, thousands of Appalachians move away from their hometowns to find opportunities elsewhere. Local leaders often talk about a “brain drain” referring to young people who get their college degrees and move out of the region to a city with more job opportunities.
BIG | BRAVE prep collab album with The Body; guitarist Mathieu Ball lists his top 10 LPs of 2020
BIG | BRAVE recently revealed that they finished up work on a collaborative album with
The Body. Had been talking about making a record with these lads for a while, BIG | BRAVE wrote when they posted the above picture. With the indispensable coconspirator [Seth Manchester, co-operator of Rhode Island s Machines With Magnets studio], we finally did! Can’t wait to share what we’ve done.
While you wait for more on that, we asked BIG | BRAVE guitarist
Mathieu Ball what his favorite albums of 2020 were, and he responded with a list that includes
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
More than 30 members of the combined American-Austrian family gathered for a reunion in Pickens, W.Va., in August 2019.
If you live in Appalachia, or for that matter, if you’ve ever lived in Appalachia, you are a part of our family. It defines us. This week on
Inside Appalachia we’ll hear about family found in unexpected places like a West Virginia family who got a letter from a sister in Austria they didn’t even know they had.
And a young man in North Carolina was inspired to learn old-time music when he saw a jaw-dropping performance by a fiddle player named Fred McBride. Turns out they’re related.