About
LiKEN incorporated as a non-profit in the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 1990 (under the name Kentucky Environmental Foundation). We are partners and members of various networks for collaborative, multistakeholder, policy-relevant, knowledge exchange and translation: Kentucky Nonprofit Network, National Rural Assembly, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Association, Rising Voices: Collaborative Science with Indigenous Knowledge for Climate Solutions, National Climate Assessment, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
[tmm name=”research-assistants”]
Shaunna Scott, Professor, Sociology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky
Dr. Shaunna Scott is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. She is the Past President of the Appalachian Studies Association. Her interests center upon social inequality, gender, the politics of identity and commemoration, theory, qualitative methods, participatory action research and social movements in Appalachia and Northern Ireland. Dr. Scott’s work appears in Rural Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, Journal of Appalachian Studies, Appalachian Journal, and Action Research. Dr. Scott is an affiliate of the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center, Center for Poverty Research, Social Theory Committee, and Gender Women Studies. Dr. Scott’s ethnographic and interview research takes a feminist critical theoretical approach to understanding politics, commemoration, community and economic development and planning, identity construction and community dynamics. She is particularly interested in understanding and promoting democratic practices and social justice projects in conflictual, stratified, rural contexts. Her work focuses primarily upon Central Appalachia, although she has done research in Northern Ireland and New Zealand.
Linda Kaboolian, Lecturer, School of Public Health, Harvard University
Dr. Kaboolian’s professional experience, research and teaching focus on multi-stakeholder problem solving processes around workplace and public policy issues. She works with labor, management and community groups around improved organizational performance and service to diverse communities. Labor Management Relations and Win-Win Labor-Management Collaboration are topics on which she has published books, chapters and articles. She has conducted years of fieldwork on organizations that bridge racial, ethnic, and class divides. She co-authoredWorking Better Together: A Practical Guide for Union Leaders, Elected Officials and Managers and The Concord Handbook. These works distill several years of fieldwork about organizations that bridge racial, ethnic, and class divides. While she now serves as a neutral mediator, she was an elected officer and chief bargainer of a union, and a senior manager in the federal government. She has also served in the state and local and non-profit sectors. Kaboolian received her PhD from the University of Michigan.
Danielle Brian, Executive Director, Project on Government Oversight
Since 1993, Danielle Brian has been the Executive Director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). She frequently testifies before Congress and regularly meets with Members of Congress and officials at the White House and federal agencies to discuss how to achieve a more effective, accountable, open, and ethical federal government. Ms. Brian was appointed by the Secretary of the Interior to serve on the U.S. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Federal Advisory Committee in 2012. In 2013, she was elected chair of the civil society organizations on the Federal Advisory Committee. In 2015, Ms. Brian was elected to the Board of the D.C. Open Government Coalition. Ms. Brian serves on the board of Taxpayers for Common Sense, and is the chair of the Steering Committee for OpenTheGovernment.org. Ms. Brian was inducted into the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame, was ranked by Ethisphere magazine as one of the top 100 most influential people in business ethics, and received the Smith College Medal.
Betsy Taylor
Executive Director
Betsy Taylor is LiKEN founding director and a cultural anthropologist. Over the past 25 years, she has worked for community-driven development in Appalachia and South Asia to integrate issues of health, agriculture, forestry, culture and environmental stewardship. In popular and scholarly venues, she writes about environmental and social justice movements, democratic planning and participatory research, women’s issues, the commons, democratic reclamation of academe / professions. She co-authored, with Herbert Reid, the book, Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2010). At the University of Kentucky, she served as Co‐Director of Environmental Studies, Research Director for the Appalachian Center and on the faculty of the Social Theory program, and during her years at Virginia Tech, she was a research faculty member in the Appalachian Studies program. She served on the steering committee of the U.S. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative from 2013-2017. She served as chair of the Human Rights / Social Justice Committee of the Society for Applied Anthropology from 2015-2017. Many of her writings can be found on her website.
Deborah Thompson
Impact Director
Deborah Thompson is a creative researcher, educator, networker, musician, and dancer promoting participatory arts and sustainable development, particularly focused on the Appalachian region and its people. Finding a home and passion in Appalachia both for personal and scholarly pursuits has meant that all of her university degrees were based in Appalachian Studies, including her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Kentucky. While working on her dissertation from 2006-2009, she served as programming director of the UK Appalachian Center, where one of her special projects was coordinating the Celebration of Traditional Music. She has coordinated the Country Dance Programs at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, where she also taught Appalachian Studies and General Studies. As director of the Appalachian Semester and assistant professor of Appalachian Studies at Union College in Barbourville, KY, from 1991-2001, Deborah loved bringing Appalachia alive for undergraduate students, especially bringing them together with community folks through travel and internships. At that time, she also was a founding member of Just Connections, a community-faculty partnership whose ultimate goal is to help achieve social justice in the Appalachian Region through service-learning projects and community-based research. Deborah currently serves on the boards of several non-profits, including the Pine Mountain Settlement School, Berea Christmas Country Dance School, and Folk Circle Association of Berea. Deborah collaborated and published in two cooperative projects, A Handbook to Appalachia and the Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Other writing relates to her dissertation, Performing Communities: The Place of Music, Race and Gender in Producing Appalachian Space and is documented on her curriculum vitae. She has taught classes and workshops in Appalachian music and dance for all ages since 1984. Other meaningful work Deborah has enjoyed includes editorial assistant for the Civil War Governors of Kentucky digital documentary edition, executive director of a local arts council, principal investigator for historic architecture surveys, and resident director for the National Collegiate Honors Council’s cultural study programs in Appalachia, Mexico, and the Texas-Mexico border. She and her husband have spent two decades together living on 85 wooded acres in eastern Kentucky, raising animals and a garden and pursuing a more sustainable living.
Simona Perry
Senior Communications Advisor
Simona Perry is an applied scientist with a passion for community dialogues, appreciative inquiry, local foods and life-ways, wild places and creatures, writing and teaching, and working alongside others to imagine and create beloved community. Trained as an ecologist and ethnographer, Dr. Perry has worked in rural and urban places across the US to document and raise awareness of the interconnections between ecology, psychology, politics, and culture. Her diverse professional expertise includes interpretive policy analysis, human-ecological risk assessment, marine conservation biology, river restoration ecology, participatory ethnographic methods, GIS, real estate law and transactional practices, endangered species policy, alternative conflict resolution, investigative journalism, and dialogic practice. She has published articles, book chapters, and blogs on a wide range of topics related to ocean and endangered species conservation and policy, the psychological and socio-cultural consequences of extractive industries in rural communities, the human rights aspects of fossil fuel developments and climate change, transforming safety culture in the oil and gas industry, and actions for racial equity, justice, and reparations in the southeast U.S. In 2012 she founded c.a.s.e. Consulting Services, a roots-based consultancy with a mission to provide asset-based services to individuals and communities directly impacted by rapid social and environmental change or conflict, and in 2013 she began working with the national safety advocacy organization, Pipeline Safety Coalition. Dr. Perry received her PhD from UMASS-Amherst in the human dimensions of natural resources, was awarded a Mellon Foundation GIS Post-Doctoral Scholar appointment with Dickinson College in Pennsylvania in 2009, and became an NSF Research Scientist with RPI’s Science and Technology Studies Program in 2011. Prior to obtaining her doctorate, Dr. Perry worked as a Senior Editor at Truthout, directed a non-profit international education organization in Washington, DC, and worked as a field biologist, environmental regulator, and policy analyst with NOAA Fisheries in Massachusetts, Seattle, California, and Maryland from 1994 through 2005. In 2015, she returned to her childhood home in southeast Georgia where she lives with her husband and two dogs.
Julie Maldonado
Associate Director
Julie Maldonado is a cultural anthropologist and serves as LiKEN’s Associate Director. As part of this role, she is Co-Director of the Rising Voices: Climate Resilience through Indigenous and Earth Sciences program, in joint partnership with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research/National Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR/NCAR), and is the lead for the LiKEN-produced PROTECT film, in partnership with Paper Rocket Productions. She also works with the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals to facilitate and support the development of tribes’ climate change adaptation planning and vulnerability assessments. Julie is a lecturer in the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Environmental Studies Program and for Future Generations University. She is also a founding member of the Culture and Disaster Action Network (CADAN).
As a public anthropologist, Dr. Maldonado has consulted for the UN Development Programme and World Bank on resettlement, post-disaster needs assessments, and climate change. She worked for the US Global Change Research Program and is an author on the 3rd and 4th US National Climate Assessments. Her doctorate in anthropology focused on the social and cultural impacts of environmental change and habitual disasters in coastal Louisiana, and she has served as an expert presenter to Congressional committees and staff . She was the lead editor for a special issue for the journal Climatic Change entitled, Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in the United States: Impacts, Experiences and Actions, which was published in 2013. Her book, Seeking Justice in an Energy Sacrifice Zone: Standing on Vanishing Land in Coastal Louisiana, and co-edited volume, Challenging the Prevailing Paradigm of Displacement and Resettlement: Risks, Impoverishment, Legacies, Solutions, were both released in 2018. As part of LiKEN, she organized and is executive producer of the Paper Rocket Productions film, PROTECT, to be released.
Mary Hufford
Associate Director
Folklorist Mary Hufford who grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Allegheny foothills, has worked over the past three decades in government, academic, and local community settings. As folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (1982‐2002) she led regional team fieldwork projects in the New Jersey Pine Barrens and the southern West Virginia coalfields. From 2002‐2012, she served on the graduate faculty of folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, directing the Center for Folklore and Ethnography from 2002 to 2008. As adjunct faculty with the Master’s Programs in Cultural Sustainability and Environmental Studies, she offers a summer seminar in Environmental Justice. Her seminars and field practica engage students in exploring how folk arts and humanities, grounded in ordinary settings and daily lives of Central Appalachian communities, and neighborhoods of Philadelphia and East Baltimore, are crucial to the work of environmental justice. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has published dozens of articles and reviews in both public and academic venues, including Orion Magazine, Gastronomica, the Journal of American Folklore, Southern Quarterly, Cahiers de Litterature Orale, Cornbread Nation, Social Identities, Western Folklore, the Journal of Appalachian Studies, and the Proceedings of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration. For a more complete list of her downloadable publications go to her website.
Mary Hufford’s CV is available here.
Lauren Hunter-Smith
Administrative Coordinator
Lauren Hunter-Smith is an artist, gardener, amateur mycologist, Mama, and the owner of Bluegrass Death Doula. Lauren is a Lexington native and graduate of the University of Kentucky where she studied Painting and Biology. Following college, Lauren served in the Peace Corps as a Women’s Health Volunteer in Benin, West Africa. Upon her return to the Bluegrass, Lauren worked with several local nonprofit arts organizations including the Headley-Whitney Museum and Kentucky Theater. Lauren made the leap to death care professional after completing her death doula certification in 2021. In addition to being a death educator and companion, Lauren is a home funeral guide, natural burial advocate, and non-denominational celebrant. In her role as LiKEN’s Administrative Coordinator, she plays a vital and central role in the co-design and creativity of the mycelial web of connections among our LiKENeers and our collaborators and constituencies. She ensures the smooth running of the office and helps to improve company procedures and day-to-day operation. She manages office systems and accounts, and serves on our Communication Committee.
Ruby Daniels
Community Engagement Coordinator
Ruby Daniels is an herbalist, farmer, herbal product manufacturer, and partner in the West Virginia Forest Farming Initiative. Ruby was born in Maryland and spent her formative years growing up in Columbia, MD. Ruby’s families have been residents in Virginia which is currently West Virginia since the 1700s. Her summers were spent in Southern West Virginia, and played a big part in the development of her career. Ruby Daniels also teaches workshops that focus on her Afrolachian heritage and educates the community of her African American heritage that has influenced her about the work she does with field grown herbs and forest botanicals. Ruby Daniels received her Bachelors of Science in Theater Design at Towson University, and later received her Masters of Science in Therapeutic Herbalism at the Maryland University of Integrative Health. Ruby spent fifteen years working as a Massage Therapist, during which time she increased the healing and assessment skills which she applies to her herbal business. Currently, Ruby travels around West Virginia completing site visits and reports to help current and future forest farmers make the most of the woodland resources, and building a network for herbalist and forest farmers to help develop an herbal industry in the state of West Virginia.
Madison Mooney
Community Engagement Coordinator
Madison grew up in a small coal town helping her family with their local businesses and staying active in her community by being involved with community services and sports. Madison is from Martin County, Kentucky. Madison received her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology in 2018 from Alice Lloyd College in Knott County, KY and a Masters degree in Social Work in 2020 from the University of Kentucky. With these two degrees, her main focus is helping people whether it is in a community, family, or individual setting. Madison has been involved with multiple organizations that work with people on social justice in order to create social change within the community, home, or within themselves. During her Masters program, Madison got involved with the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky and was able to be a part of the pilot Water Project in Martin County, Kentucky in 2019-2020 which tested household water and reported findings back to the community. At LiKEN, Madison brings her skills as a social worker to collaborative projects of personal and community development. Madison provides diverse conversation techniques to be able to engage with other LiKENeers, residents in Martin County, and leaders across eastern Kentucky. In close collaboration with Martin County Concerned Citizens and Headwaters (in Letcher County), Madison will lead LiKEN’s community engagement work in the Water Collaboratory, Stories of Place, Land Study, and other projects.
Patrick Freeland
Project Director
Knowledge Sharing Network: Climate Education Centering Indigenous Knowledge Systems
Honor, Pride, and Respect. These values serve as the foundation to a worldview of knowledge in plural – transdisciplinary understanding and holistic experience – in order to promote proactive change through community-based collaboration. Patrick Austin Freeland, Hvtvltvlke Mvskoke (Wind Clan, Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma) is a graduate of Haskell Indian Nations University and Purdue University, learning of the interrelations of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Indigenous Peoples’ adaptation to climate change and preservation of tribal and cultural sovereignty. Through commitment-to-action, Patrick centers his work ethic and civic engagement through intergenerational knowledge-sharing and through the utilization of interdisciplinary sciences, arts, and engineering, as a means to improve human and environmental health, social advancement, and intercultural understanding through reconciliation. Patrick’s research and professional development have centered on climate change adaptation and mitigation, noncognitive development in education, and advancement of plural knowledge and conscientiousness. Patrick, a lifelong learner, continues to develop skills in organizational development, program management, social knowledge systems, and intergovernmental policy, as well as strategic planning, assessment, and evaluation. Ultimately in practice, Patrick incorporates an adaptive management style supported by collaboration with an interpersonal focus on healing and peace-making.
William Major
Community Engagement Coordinator
William Major is a visual artist and activist living in Harlan, Kentucky. Major attended the small liberal arts school, Milligan College, and graduated in 2015 with a bachelor of arts in photography and humanities. He also received his master of fine arts degree from the University of Georgia in 2019. Major has shown his work across the southeastern United States as well as exhibiting in New York City, London, and Amsterdam. William has worked within communities across Appalachia and the southeast utilizing education, creativity, and local involvement to meet specific needs of that community. He has worked with the community arts initiative, Higher Ground, for the last two years as well as teaching classes at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. Major is passionate about social and environmental justice. He has taught art classes in jail and helped inmates get community college credit in Harlan county, has made multiple series of photographs documenting an array of social topics around the region, and actively fights against inequality. Major is hoping to bring a creative mind set to tackle the many projects that arise and are important to people in Harlan county.
Craig Williams
Kentucky Environmental Foundation
Program Director
Craig is a founding member of the grassroots community group Common Ground and of KEF, and served as Director of KEF until January 2008.
He is a charter member of the Kentucky Governor’s Chemical Material Demilitarization Citizen’s Advisory Commission, and currently serves as co-chair of the Kentucky Chemical Destruction Advisory Board.
Craig also has extensive community organizing experience related to veterans’ programs. He is the co-founder and secretary of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize). He has received several tributes in the U.S. Congress and was presented the John O‘Connor Citizens Achievement Award in 2003.
In addition, Craig is a board member of Blue Grass Tomorrow, a consultant for the Blue Grass Area Development District, a member of the PRISM Editorial Board for Eastern Kentucky University, and recently retired from coaching soccer in several schools and county leagues for over 25 years.
In April 2006 Craig was North American recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. Craig received a BA in Philosophy from Eastern Kentucky University, and in May 2008 was also awarded an honorary doctorate degree in Humanities from the University. Craig lives in Berea, Kentucky with his wife and near his two children and two grandchildren.
Daisy Ahlstone
Visual Storytelling Editor
Daisy Ahlstone studies environmental storytelling through the lens of folklore, eco-criticism, posthumanism, and science & technology studies. They explore legend, thylacines, extinction, material culture, metaphor, discourse analysis, digital communication, and more! In addition to working with LiKEN, Daisy also collaborates on folklore and community-centered projects with the Western States Folklore Society (http://www.westernfolklore.org/), and a Youtube and Twitch streaming channel called Folkwise, which brings the discipline of folklore to the next gen through digital platforms (https://www.twitch.tv/folkwise). They have a B.A. in Folklore from the University of Oregon and an M.A. in English / Folklore from Utah State University, and brings expertise in the anthropocene, new materialism, civic professionalism, public work and collaboration, and videography. Daisy is a current PhD student of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University, pursuing dissertation research on the impact of extinction in local communities. At LiKEN, they work with our programs, constituents, and collaborators to develop our capacity to tell our stories visually–weaving film, photos, and images together with the spoken and written word.
Sarah Chayes
Senior Fellow
Sarah Chayes is the first recipient of LiKEN’s Appalachian Mother Forest Fellowship, a new program to fund writing about the waters and forests of Appalachia. Sarah joins LiKEN as Senior Fellow in order to work on a book with the working title, The Potomac: An Invitation to Change Course, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf. Sarah Chayes’s remarkable trajectory has led her from reporting from Paris for National Public Radio and covering the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan to running a soap factory in downtown Kandahar in the midst of a reigniting insurgency. She went on to advise the topmost levels of the U.S. military, serving as special adviser to two commanders of the international forces in Kabul and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen. She left the Pentagon for a five-year stint at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she extracted the broadly relevant core from those experiences. Internationally recognized for her innovative thinking on corruption and its implications, she has uncovered the unrecognized reality that severe and structured corruption can prompt international crises, such as revolutions and other uprisings, violent insurgency, and environmental devastation. Corruption of this sort is the operating system of sophisticated networks, which weave together government officials, business magnates and private charities, and out and out criminals, and represents, in Sarah’s view, the primary threat to democracy in our lifetimes. Author of the prize-winning Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, she has just finished On Corruption In America — And What Is at Stake. For more, see https://www.sarahchayes.org.
Bethani Turley
Social Science Researcher
Bethani Turley (she/her) is from West Virginia and her research is shaped by an interest in the ecologies and politics of chemical and fossil fuel industries in Appalachia. Prior to graduate school, Bethani spent nearly a decade working in urban farming and local foods distribution in Ohio, where she cultivated a market garden and raised dairy goats. She completed a masters of geography at West Virginia University and a bachelor of arts in folklore studies, anthropology and environmental science at Ohio State University. She is currently working on her doctorate in geography at Portland State University, studying the politics of energy development, land use, and water resources in the rural US. Within LiKEN, Bethani is focusing on projects related to public drinking water in Appalachia.
Aaron Guest
Research Director
M. Aaron Guest plays a key role in designing and developing LiKEN’s data and analytic infrastructures. He listens to LiKEN’s project teams to develop good research systems to serve diverse needs. He handles project management software, and supports project directors as they design and implement work plans (digital tools for timelines, monitoring benchmarks, forms and platforms for reporting and data management). He in our in-house specialist in statistical and social network methods. Aaron is Assistant Professor of aging with the Center for Innovation in Healthy and Resilient Aging at Arizona State University. He received his PhD Candidate in Gerontology from the University of Kentucky in August 2019. He obtained a Master of Public Health and a Master of Social Work from the University of South Carolina. The emphasis throughout his career been on translational community-engaged participatory health equity research. His research specializes in aging among rural marginalized populations, health equity, environmental gerontology, and social network/placed based community-engaged mixed method research. Specifically, his research centers on how marginalized older adults’ social networks affect their health and quality of life. He focuses on the interrelationship between identity, place, networks, and health. He applies his interdisciplinary background as a community-based scholar to address health inequities, improve health equity, and improve health outcomes through decreasing disparities. Aaron lives in Phoenix AZ with his three cats: Miss Kitty, Pemberton, and Momo.
Wayne Coombs
Community Development Coordinator
Wayne Coombs is a native of West Virginia and was trained as a psychologist at West Virginia University. He has been in the mental health field for over 35 years. He has worked as an individual and group therapist in addictions and developed an addiction specialty for the Master’s Counseling Program at West Virginia Graduate College (later merged with Marshall University.) He founded and built the West Virginia Prevention Resource Center which contractually ran the substance abuse prevention system for the State of West Virginia. Wayne established and secured funding for the Applied Community Evaluation Program as well as the Prevention As Community Development Masters’ Degree Program through Marshall University Graduate College. He was a Founding Board Member of the Coalition on Appalachian Substance Abuse Policy and the principal author of “The Governor’s Comprehensive Strategic Plan to Address Substance Abuse in West Virginia” – (November, 2009.) He is the author of “The Pharmaceutical Colonization of Appalachia“, published in February 2018, in the Daily Yonder and Why We Can’t Solve the Opioid Problemin the Journal of Appalachian Health. He currently lives in Johnson City, Tennessee and has an Adjunct Faculty appointment at East Tennessee State University’s College of Public Health.
