news
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McDowell County Creates Opportunities with Micro-Loan Program
Few regions of the country have experienced as much economic pounding as McDowell County, WV. Once a booming coal county with close to 100,000 people in the mid-20th century, it has been pummeled by coal industry job losses and flooding through the years. The latest 2007 census estimate was 22,000. Can you imagine a 78%…
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The Block: An Urban to Rural Youth Connection
Create West Virginia diversity team member, Crystal Good, recently traveled to NYC to develop a relationship between Create West Virginia and The Arts Horizons LeRoy Neiman Art Center (The Center).Good along with The Center director, Clayton Evans, are seeking a partnership that will bridge the space and perceived differences of youth in Rand, WV and…
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TippEd(ucation)
Public K-12 education “tipped” this legislative session, an “idea has crossed a threshold, started to tip and begun to spread.” Many of you recognize this reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and how it applies to what we have been discussing. The idea that reached a boiling point this spring was that for all of…
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Help Select WV’s Top 101 Places to Dine (McDonald’s Doesn’t Count)
A lot of people don’t realize how important local cuisine is to a cultureand sense of place. Our country has been so oversaturated with national chains and franchises that much of the local “flavor” has been lost. That’s why we’re excited to see the WV Division of Tourism and the Collaborative for the 21st Century Appalachia…
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Barbie Responds: Exclusive Interview with Create West Virginia
We here in West Virginia have a unique knack for generating, um, interesting media coverage for our fine state. The latest was spawned by Delegate Jeff Eldridge of the West Virginia Legislature who submitted a well-intentioned, but perhaps misguided, bill to ban Barbie because of the doll’s tendency to place too much importance on physical…
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The Importance of Education in a Down Economy
We are certainly hearing a lot about the bad economy. While West Virginia is said to have it better then most, there has been more then enough outlets sharing the news of layoffs in our home state. One large indicator for the economy is the “unemployment rate.” It is a percentage of those in the…
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Social Media and Mountaintop Removal
You may not have been able to attend the recent hearing held by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) regarding mining on Gauley Mountain, but you could almost be there thanks to social media technologies such as Twitter. With coverage from the likes of the Smithsonian Magazine, interest is certainly sky high on…
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Join the Southern WV Create WV Summit and Enjoy an Off-Broadway Play
What’s better than talking about stimulating creativity in West Virginia and then seeing it in action? On Friday, April 10, join host group “Create Mercer” and the statewide Create WV team at the RiffRaff Arts Collective in downtown Princeton, WV, for an afternoon and evening of innovative culture and economic/community growth discussion. The Southern WV Create…
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West Virginia Seen Through a New Friend’s Set of Eyes – Mayra Ruiz
A guest post by Mayra Ruiz-McPherson The other day, I read with much interest Justin Siebert’s June 28, 2008 blog post entitled “Marketing a State – Online Reputation Management for West Virginia.” Unlike Create West Virginia’s own Jeff James and Wheeling’s own Justin – both West Virginians who returned to the state after years of…
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Disrupt ED
I have been listening, talking, reading and writing…with the State Dept. of Education about the Innovation Zone legislation we anticipate being introduced during the 2009 legislativev session. I thought that you might be interested in the lastest draft of the legislation and some comments from Dr. Johnson regarding the draft. Download Innovationzonedraft2 Download Draft2Comments Recently,…