West Virginians are becoming increasingly confronted with the impacts of flooding and extreme rainfall events, and often lack the community-based resilience to adequately recover. The project team will use religious congregations across Tucker County, WV as hubs to facilitate community-building sessions to cultivate resilience to flood events. Grounding these sessions in a shared sense of place and faith, the team will focus on place-based storytelling to build community and discussions of faith to build intentional theologies that encourage resilience. Participating communities will leave with an enhanced sense of community cohesion and emotional and spiritual resilience achieved by cultivating their sense of place and intentionally wrestling with their faith traditions in the context of disasters.
Tucker County, West Virginia is located in the northeastern part of the state and is home to around 7,000 individuals. The City of Parsons sits at the confluence of the five tributaries that form the Cheat River. Parsons and many nearby communities have still not fully recovered from the devastating 1985 flood that inundated entire towns, roads, and homes across Tucker County. In addition to the physical impacts of this event, the flood has had a large impact on the community fabric and culture of Tucker County. Between 1980 – 1990 Parsons lost 25% of its residents, as countless jobs were lost and many low-lying areas were banned from rebuilding, leaving gaps where thriving communities once stood. These cultural impacts are exacerbated by regional cultures and worldviews surrounding place and faith. Many community members wrestle with both a sense of deep connection and generational ties to the landscape and a sense of betrayal towards the land due to the flooding that has occurred. Furthermore, cultures of theology are challenged as residents grapple with their faith in God alongside the reality of devastating and destructive flooding. Finally, these challenges are furthered by a divide within the area between “on the mountain” communities that have experienced a resurgence due to tourism and subsequent rising housing prices and “off the mountain” communities such as Parsons that are still grounded in traditional industries. These cultural realities have left Tucker County with reduced community cohesion and diminished resilience emotionally and spiritually to respond to past and future flood events. The project team has been involved in disaster resilience and response work in the region, and has witnessed the lack of attention given to the emotional and spiritual elements of resilience and post-disaster care.
Through this project, the community plans to convene members of religious congregations across denominations for community resilience building sessions grounded in a shared sense of place and faith. Religious congregations in Tucker County can serve as hubs to gather residents to collectively wrestle with cultures of place and theology in the context of disasters. The project team envisions these sessions consisting of two core components. First, participants will join facilitated conversations to share stories around their relationships to place and how their identities and attachments to place have been influenced by flood events. Second, the team will facilitate a conversation around how faith and local cultures of theology have influenced participants’ sense of place and attitudes towards disasters and flood events. These sessions will be grounded in an understanding of the deep generational ties many Tucker County residents feel towards their home, and the role that extractive industries have played in the region in creating cultures of place and theology. The project team believes that this work can build resilience by providing a safe and shared space for community members to tell their stories, intentionally deconstruct how disasters have influenced cultures of place and faith, and cultivate community cohesion. These sessions can highlight the importance of emotional and spiritual resilience – in addition to physical resilience – in responding to disasters, and can provide a framework for other communities to engage in similar community-building exercises.
The project team aims to implement the first community resilience building session in the Spring of 2025, holding subsequent sessions throughout the Summer and Fall.
I am Deacon Mary Sanders and I serve as a minister of word and service in West Virginia and western Maryland. Prior to seminary, I served as an environmental inspector for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. My sense of call is to serve the people and environment of Appalachia. I live on my great grandma’s farm with two dogs and two cats and am surreptitiously planting a food forest around my cabin.
Natalie Bennett is a PhD Candidate in the Environmental Studies Department at CU Boulder. Broadly, her work probes the social and behavioral dimensions of climate change risk management and adaptation. She is fascinated by the complex role of emotions, perceptions, values, worldviews, cultures, and social dynamics in influencing how people make decisions and adapt to risk. Before entering graduate school, Natalie worked in climate adaptation and vulnerability planning, science communication, and community science for the Federal government, the nonprofit sector, and an environmental consulting firm.
We’re looking for volunteer partners to help us do this work! Participating partners will engage in one-hour meetings every 2-3 weeks with Mary and Natalie to scope and develop the details of our community-building sessions in Tucker County. The team invites remote participants, and expects non-local volunteers to work alongside Natalie to remotely support Mary as she conducts these sessions. While personal familiarity with the cultures and faiths of Tucker County residents is not required, all partners must exhibit a willingness to listen, learn, and ground their participation in the community’s context.
The project team envisions a range of experiences and expertise as relevant for our work. Broadly, we invite partners with expertise in the following areas:
Thriving Earth Exchange asks all scientific partners to work with the community to help define a project with concrete local impact to which they can contribute as pro-bono volunteers and collaborators. This work can also position the partners and communities to seek additional funding, together, for the next stage.
Nurture Nature Center
The Nurture Nature Center is a non-profit located in Easton, PA, that supports building community resiliency to environmental risk by leveraging the power of informal science education, art-centered approaches to learning, and community dialogue and networking. Started in response to flooding in Easton, NNC has over a decade of work related to flood outreach, education, and social science research. NNC is currently an AGU TEX Community Science Hub.
