Break With The Council of The Southern Mountains
As the AV students and staff became more deeply involved in poor rural communities, they began to see local politicians and school leaders as part of the problem rather than allies in uplift. The AV began to move from a consensus to a conflict understanding of how social change takes place. In 1966 tensions between the AV and the CSM came to a head when CSM executive director Perley Ayer, who was committed to a nonpolitical, consensus vision of community development, fired AV director Ogle and his assistant director. The remaining 13 AV staff resigned. They quickly moved to incorporate as a separate organization, and OEO promptly transferred its grants to the newly independent AV. To emphasize its separation from the CSM, the AV moved its headquarters from Berea, Kentucky, to Bristol, Tennessee, a location more central to the southern Appalachians into which the AV hoped to expand.
With its new funding the AV greatly expanded its summer program in 1966, placing 500 students with eight-week projects in four states: eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. OEO was becoming unhappy with the failure of many community action agencies (CAAs) in central Appalachia to take seriously its mandate of “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in the administration of the CAAs. OEO encouraged the AV to rally the rural poor for a bigger role in the local CAAs. Conflict in Kentucky’s Cumberland Valley was acute, and led to a controversial defunding of its eight-county CAA, which was split into one- and two-county agencies.
Read more about this topic: Appalachian Volunteers
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