Rooted in Place, Rising Together
- Phill Barnett
- May 21
- 17 min read
LiKEN Program Updates, Spring 2025
At LiKEN, our work is rooted in relationships to place, to people, and to the knowledge that connects them. This spring, we’ve been honored to walk alongside communities across Central Appalachia and beyond, listening, learning, and growing together. From creative youth storytelling to deepened disaster resilience, from forest livelihoods to land justice and water equity, each of our program areas has continued to nurture new partnerships and possibilities. Here’s a glimpse into what we’ve been up to.
Stories of Place
Honoring Roots and Growing Branches in Martin County
Last year's Martin County Stories of Place residency program in 2024 took place in an English 10 classroom at Martin County High School focused on “Where I’m From” poems (inspired by the poem of the same name by George Ella Lyon) that represent their story and upbringing. LiKEN recently brought together all their drawings and poetry into a hardcover book and eBook presented to the students and the school as a keepsake.
Martin County Stories of Place Residency is on the rise for 2025, including connecting with different organizations, camps, and even pop up story circles throughout the summer to help kids stay active, creative, and connected to their community, their stories, and nature.
Forest Livelihoods
Spring is in full swing in the forests of Central Appalachia. Syrup and fire season draw to a close as trees leaf out and the forest floor erupts with spring ephemerals. This annual renewal is especially significant for LiKEN in 2025 as we welcome back several furloughed employees to the Community Wealth program, and as the communities we serve continue to recover from significant flood events. Our CECs and river partners on the “Community Wealth from Healthy Rivers and Forests” project have been working directly in their communities helping residents muck out their homes, get supplies, and navigate resources. We are documenting the response and recovery to the flood and the dramatic impact to the Tug Fork and Kentucky Rivers.
We hosted our second FSA workshop, this time in Lee County. At these events, forest landowners can access the documents they need to get a number from the Farm Services Agency, opening the door to cost-share and technical support for conservation, management, and production on their land. We also had representatives from Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Cooperative Extension, and the Community Farm Alliance (CFA) on hand to advise attendees about their services. Look for more FSA workshops in the coming months. We will be co-hosting a workshop on making value-added products in Leslie County with representatives from Kentucky Proud and Appalachia Proud. There are more trainings coming soon to a forest near you! Topics include site assessment for forest farming, managing forests for wildlife, and riparian buffers that can help mitigate flood damage and provide food and income.
Our Community Engagement Coordinators (CECs) continue to document the values of Central Appalachian forests: how they provide wood and non-timber forest products, support tourism, conserve soil, provide habitat for wildlife, and protect our watersheds. LiKEN staff are currently seeking workers from forest-related businesses, technical service providers, and passionate and engaged anglers, root-diggers, hunters, naturalists, and river rats about the threats and opportunities they see to the rivers and forests they love.
We are also looking for landowners and property heirs who have at least 10 acres of forest and are interested in growing or managing edible, medicinal, or decorative forest plants and fungi, actively managing forests for wildlife or recreation, or who may be interested in selling credits for the carbon their forests are storing. We will be helping qualified landowners meet the goals for their forests. This includes help navigating technical assistance and cost-share programs, creating forest management plans, and helping assess the potential for forest farming on their properties.
Land & Revenues
Although winter came with many challenges, including a storm that ravaged Central Appalachia and a funding pause that withdrew federal investment from the region, the Land & Revenues team at LIKEN Knowledge made incredible strides during the chilly season. Back in October, we hired our first Family Assistance Coordinator, Sandra Hunt, to work directly with clients enrolled in our heirs’ property assistance program, the Appalachian Heirs’ Property Center (AHPC).
Appalachian Heirs’ Property Center
Sandra and Kevin Slovinsky, Director of Land & Revenues, worked hard to stand up protocols for intaking new clients and solidifying AHPC’s package of services. We are proud to announce that the general public can now easily schedule an intake appointment on the webpage for the Appalachian Heirs’ Property Center. If you have inherited an ownership interest for property in our service area (see map below), you can make an intake appointment here. We have really enjoyed working with those who we have had the opportunity to help and joyfully look forward to each new appointment.
Appalachian Travelling Will-Writing Clinic
We are also excited to share that LiKEN will re-launch the Appalachian Traveling Will-Writing Clinic for a second year. From spring to fall, the Land & Revenues team will be holding one Will Clinic a month in a different eastern Kentucky county each month. Preceding the Will Clinic, Kevin Slovinsky and attorney Joe Childers (Childers & Baxter PLLC) will offer a free community presentation on estate planning and heirs’ property. You can see the dates of upcoming Will Clinics and Heirs’ Property Info Sessions below. We look forward to soon presenting an extended set of tour dates, going up to November.
Knowledge Sharing
LiKENeers Kevin Slovinsky and Jacob Johnson, a University of Kentucky history graduate student who worked at LiKEN as part of the UK Appalachian Center’s AppalachiaCorps program, are co-authors in an academic article published in the March edition of Environmental Research: Energy. Titled “Afterlives of coal: land and transition dynamics in Central Appalachia,” the article looks at carbon forestry offsets, solar energy projects, and prisons located on reclaimed surface mines, drawing connections between these projects and the “legacy actors who have long dominated local and regional extraction regimes.” The authors argue that “the success or failure of broad-based transition policies depends largely on place-based dynamics rooted in land: who controls the land, who has access to land, who benefits from investments in land, and how public revenues flow from land.” LiKEN played a key role in compiling data on land ownership, which was utilized in the section on the solar energy projects. You can freely access the digital version of the article here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2753-3751/adb1ea.
While contributing to scholarly articles, the Land & Revenues team has also been participating in several wonderful in-person conferences. In late-February, Kevin Slovinsky and attorney Joe Childers gave a presentation at the Eastern Kentucky Farmers’ Conference on “Strategies for Preventing, Resolving, and Using Heirs’ Property.” This presentation, the PowerPoint slides for which can be found on our resource page here, challenged the notion that heirs’ property is unusable. Using clear examples, Slovinsky and Childers were able to delineate between what people can and cannot do with their heirs’ property without incurring legal liability. The two presenters were joined at the conference by LiKENeers Sandra Hunt (Family Assistance Coordinator), McKensi Gilliam (Harlan county Community Engagement Coordinator), and Matthew Sparks (Leslie county Community Engagement Coordinator). The wonderful event, which brought together farmers, non-profits, and government workers, was organized by our dear friends at the Community Farm Alliance, Kentucky Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, and many more.
In mid-March, LiKENeers travelled to the 2025 Appalachian Studies Association Conference and presented alongside an extraordinary set of scholars and activists. Kevin Slovinsky organized a panel titled “Land & Livelihoods: Mapping Dispossession and Resistance” that included presentations about four different projects. All of the presenters positioned land as a crucial puzzle piece to understanding the politics of our time, but they approached this issue—land—through an incredibly diverse set of lenses. LiKENeers Kevin Slovinsky and Jacob Johnson presented the findings of a draft land ownership report of Martin county, Kentucky. Embodying the ethos of “place matters,” the Martin County Land Report zooms into a single eastern Kentucky county and captures a moment in time with a mission to broadly support justice-oriented grassroots community organizing. Lindsay Shade and Sylvia Ryerson analyzed the siting of prisons in Appalachia, drawing relationships across time and space to inform activist movements in the region. Dylan Harris shared the findings of his research on the carbon credit market in Appalachia. His approach to land positions it within a complex market that commodifies the ecosystem benefits of forests, connecting Appalachian landowners (both commercial and private individuals) to massive corporations like Disney and Microsoft. Last but not least, Zane Hornbeck-Buseman and Savannah Reese of the public-interest land bank West Virginia Land Stewardship Corporation (WVLSC) demonstrated their Property Abandonment Reclamation Tool (PART). A property visualization/mapping software developed by and for West Virginian land banks, PART reveals how patterns of land ownership, acquisition, and dispossession impact people's ability to remain on and utilize the land… getting at the very relationship people have with the land.
Read what Kevin Slovinsky said when opening the session:
“About forty-five years ago, the Appalachian Land Ownership Taskforce achieved something incredible: they utilized participatory action research methods to conduct a colossal study of land ownership and taxation across 80 counties in Appalachia. We don’t have anything like that to reveal today. However, what we do have reflects the threads of an ongoing, decentralized land study that is made up of dozens of different projects. They each take unique approaches to land, capturing the complexity of the land matrix. I hope that, sometime in the future, we can look back on today as a major step towards weaving that vision into a broader tapestry, a vision which I am sure many of you share.”
In early April, Kevin represented LiKEN at a convening in Atlanta on heirs’ property research ethics, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Kevin joined Danyelle O’Hara, Chief Projects Officer at the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation (CHPP), on a final panel session. Danyelle and Kevin spoke on the partnership between LiKEN and CHPP and how research shapes their programming. Kevin explained how quantitative research on the geographic occurrence of heirs’ property has told us where to hold Will Clinics. Our qualitative research, which includes many short interviews conducted at Will Clinics, has given us incredible insight into how cultural, political, and historical factors shape the cause and effects of heirs’ property. Kevin encouraged researchers to engage impacted people not as subjects, but as expert participants in the research process.
In June, Kevin Slovinsky will speak at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Policy Summit alongside attorney Mavis Gragg, co-founder of HeirShares.
Overall, the spring 2025 is looking to be a good season for the Land & Revenues team at LiKEN Knowledge!
Water Collaboratory
Winter brought significant challenges, rendering LiKEN's water work timely like never before. Both Harlan county and Martin county experienced severe flooding not once, but twice, heightening the urgency for disaster response and coordination as well as resilience-building efforts and proactive water management strategies.
In the aftermath of February floods, LiKEENeers were out in the communities we serve helping residents, cleaning homes, and demonstrating in action the commitment that is needed for building resilient communities.
Winter has also been a time for sharing knowledge and facilitating dialogue on the knowledge products we have been creating, based on our ongoing work on Harlan county’s and Martin county’s water and wastewater systems.
The Harlan County Water Resilience Toolkit was shared within the community through spring. Harlan County’s CEC McKensi Johnson introduced the toolkit to different residents and was able to receive feedback. This feedback has also been helpful in finding what parts of the toolkit need improvement. Since sharing the toolkit LiKEN has already heard success stories that show how the toolkit has helped inform some residents.
On March 3, Madison and McKensi presented on the Water Climate and Equity Project to a Geography class on Water Management taught by LiKENeer Bethani Turley at Portland State University in Oregon. The students made many meaningful connections between their readings and the experiences and information shared by our two CECs.
Water Climate Equity
The LiKEN Knowledge Water Pressure Team attended this year's 2025 Appalachian Studies Association conference in Cookeville, TN, to share the hows and whats of our long-term water work. Our roundtable discussion, titled “Creating Change for Resilient Community Water Systems in Central Appalachia,” focused on our goals, objectives, and findings of the Water Climate Equity project. We shared our methods for creating spaces of mutual/social learning and action and presented our key takeaways on how water inequalities are related to extractive developmental pathways and how different developmental pathways can create different types of water systems. Drawing from our community-engaged research in Martin and Harlan Counties, we shared our learnings about the water infrastructure of these two counties, and the impacts of extreme weather events on community and infrastructure, as well as about the relationship of community members with their water and water systems.
We also shared our Toolkits for Community Engagement and Water Resilience in the Face of Climate Change. We identified information and knowledge sharing as important ways to keep communication open between residents and their water and wastewater systems, which led us to work with residents, technical assistance providers, and water system personnel. In our toolkits you will find information on water and wastewater on the community, state, and on the federal level for Harlan County residents. There is information on how you can get involved with stream sampling within your community, with sections that have information on drinking water systems, wastewater systems, household system maintenance, pollution, extreme weather, water system stressors, The Clean Water Act, and emergency contacts. There is also a glossary that defines any terms used in the toolkit that may not be a common term in every household. All of this information is tailored down to the local level for the communities in Harlan County.
During early stages of the WCE project, we found that residents needed information on their systems that were not easy to find and they sometimes didn’t know what questions to ask. The collaborative process of creating these toolkits, what information is in there, including the resources we have utilized (e.g. local knowledge, state and federal resources etc.), and the feedback mechanisms we created to ensure that each toolkits is constantly updated and aligned to local needs and assets.
Finally, we presented our insights on how change can occur, discussing potential leverage points that could disrupt the vicious cycles we are finding in our research on the water and wastewater systems of these two Central Appalachian counties.
Future plans from learnings at the ASA discussion and resident feedback:
There is an urgency in focusing on emergency preparedness and ensuring that information needed in emergencies is easily accessible in our Water Resilience Toolkits.
There is a strong interest in our Water Resilience Toolkits from people working in other Appalachian communities, which we plan to address in the future by creating a “how-to guide” for making a toolkit tailored to their own community needs and assets.
Kentucky Watershed Alliance Virtual Workshop Presentation
On March 25, Betsy and Madison presented “How to Create a Non-Profit for Watershed Management & Beyond: Reflections on LiKEN’s Path from 2015 to 2025” for a virtual workshop sponsored by the Kentucky Watershed Alliance (KWA). We have been solidifying partnerships with groups such as KWA and the Kentucky Watershed Watch that focus on source water. Creating a link between source water and drinking water is an important niche LiKEN can fill between the two normally siloed areas.
Mountain Drinking Water Project
Madison Mooney has been working on this project with the support of LiKEN Knowledge, University of Kentucky, and (list other partners if needed). This project is in its last year of community members out of Martin County and Letcher County testing their tap water for disinfection byproducts. We are currently working towards the planning phases of hosting community meetings to share the results. Stay tuned for future updates!
To learn more, visit LiKEN’s website or the University of Kentucky’s partner page.
Disaster Resilience
At LiKEN, disaster resilience means more than just bouncing back. It’s about building forward with care, community, and deep respect for the land and its people. From co-hosting powerful gatherings that honor Indigenous knowledge and place-based learning to co-convening national efforts on data governance and climate adaptation, our work in this area is grounded in relationships and guided by justice. Here are a few highlights from this season’s efforts to support communities as they respond to and prepare for the challenges of our changing world.
Celebrating Restorative Relations
We uplifted intersectionality across movements and honored relationships, people, places, and more during Celebrating Restorative Relations: Connections between climate resilience, Indigenous rights, and land and water rematriation, on March 6th in the traditional homelands of the Chumash people, known as UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Santa Barbara in California. The event, which included a morning workshop and evening community-building gathering, was co-hosted by LiKEN in collaboration with the CREW Center for Restorative Environmental Work, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Climate Justice Working Group, the UCSB American Indian & Indigenous Collective, and the SPACE Su’nan Protection, Art & Cultural Education. Conversations were centered in understanding and amplifying connections between Land Back movements and politics, processes of reciprocity, and resilient ecosystems—as well as the importance of decommissioning and dam removal within energy transitions, among other responses to global climate change.
Featured panelists included Indigenous and allied movement builders, practitioners, and organizers (see flyer to the left for more details on each of these amazing people) who highlighted the importance of collective actions of reviving relationships of care and connectedness between peoples, lands, waters, and multispecies kin. Honoring place-based learning and traditional ecological knowledges—especially noting how important it is to appreciate the unique experiences, traits, and knowledges that each person and place has to offer, and knowing and understanding their traditions, language, and more—were also uplifted as crucial to being able to build relationships with intentionality and care for how learnings are shared with one another to keep the work moving forward.
The morning workshop, held on the UCSB campus to connect with students and the broader campus community, ended with calls to action from the panelists which included:
Being a good guest on lands you are not from and making time to learn more about the communities you are a part of;
Uplifting youth voices and teaching them from early on about Indigenous history and histories of their communities;
Always centering the community and placing them first, asking what you can do for the community as opposed to proposing what you can do for them;
Understanding that relationships and trust take time to build, that patience and empathy for one another are key factors; and
To show up and continue showing up, especially as allies, because oftentimes this work takes years and continuous support is needed.
The evening gathering, held in the SPACE with a smaller group of guests in a more intimate setting, allowed the opportunity to take a deeper dive into some of the morning conversations which resulted in wonderful messages uplifting the crucial importance of peacekeeping work, treating everyone with respect, of knowing the why and how actions (such as cultural fires) are done, and the understanding that no one’s knowledge is above others. Above all, what was highly uplifted was the need to come together, invite everyone into these conversations, and create safe spaces where people can be vulnerable with each other and share and heal from hurt, trauma, and sadness in order to truly be able to recognize and support one another.
Overall, both events served as an opportunity to celebrate ongoing acts of resistance and restoration, with one of the other goals in holding both gatherings in communities close to one another (the UCSB campus located in what is known as Goleta, and in the SPACE located in downtown Santa Barbara) to be rooted in awareness of how place and community interact in different contexts. Special thank yous and gratitude to Tristan Partridge and Javiera Barandiaran for coordinating the morning workshop at UCSB, and MariaElena Lopez for opening up the SPACE to welcome us for the evening community gathering; to all the wonderful panelists Sarah Barger, Sybil Diver, MariaElena Lopez, and Margaret McMurtrey for your time and shared wisdom; and to all those who attended for making time to join us in these crucial moments. We cannot wait to continue building on these connections and relationships into the future!
Heather Lazrus Symposium
The 2025 Heather Lazrus Symposium at the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Annual Meeting: “Convergence Science: Indigenous Weather, Water and Climate Knowledge, Systems, Practices and Communities”
The following was adapted from a blog-post in the lead up to the Symposium, which can be read in full here: https://blog.ametsoc.org/2024/12/23/be-there-the-heather-lazrus-symposium/
Since 2010, Dr. Heather Lazrus, co-founder of the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences, was a key life-force behind initiatives at the AMS Annual Meeting working to bring to the forefront of the geoscience enterprise the importance of recognizing and respecting Indigenous science, knowledge systems, and ways of knowing and understanding. To honor Dr. Lazrus, who passed on from cancer in February 2023, the 105th Annual AMS Meeting, in collaboration with The Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences (which Heather co-founded), hosted the AMS 2025 Heather Lazrus Symposium, “Convergence Science: Indigenous Weather, Water and Climate Knowledge, Systems, Practices and Communities” on January 13, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. This named Symposium honored and continued the leadership of Dr. Heather Lazrus in moving AMS and the Nation towards advancing the weaving together of Indigenous knowledges and sciences and other atmospheric and earth sciences.
“The urgent threat posed by our climate crisis necessitates innovative actions. Innovation is an opportunity to look beyond Earth sciences to solutions in other knowledge systems and, in doing so, to support the rising voices of those who have been historically marginalized.”
The term “convergence science” is often used in the context of bringing together physical, biological, and social sciences; recognizing Indigenous perspectives further emphasizes the artificial nature of boundaries between sciences and ways of knowing. The Rising Voices, Changing Coasts (RVCC) Hub emphasizes that convergence science asserts the deep relationality of life, of the planet, of mother earth, of the affirmation that we are all related.
The Lazrus Symposium hosted a Presidential Session with the RVCC’s Louisiana Hub, during which local Tribal leaders, elders, and partnering scientists shared their stories of weaving together Indigenous and other science knowledge for place-based convergence science and community adaptation. The Symposium also included presentations from early career Indigenous scholars on emerging Indigenous innovations related to weather, water, and climate. A luncheon was held in honor of Lazrus, featuring a special screening of “Everything Has a Spirit” and a conversation with filmmaker Ava Hamilton (Arapaho). The Symposium also included discussions on how to improve scientific partnerships among federal agencies and Tribal governments and communities, and presentations by Indigenous scientists on fostering intercultural dialogue and respectful engagement.
The space was held for those who have long been engaged in convergence science and/or intercultural collaborations and for those learning about these ideas for the first time. The Symposium welcomed the AMS community into this ongoing conversation to co-create culturally relevant and actionable scientific knowledge and actions that increase climate resilience and support healthy, thriving communities today and for future generations.
Special thanks to the Symposium organizers (Julie Maldonado, Stephanie Herring, Eileen Shea, Diamond Tachera, Katie Jones, Robbie Hood, Tim Schneider, Jen Henderson, and Carlos Martinez) and all of the speakers, including Noelani Villa, Kristina Leilani Black, D. Nākoa Farrant, Elder Rosina Philippe, Elder Theresa Dardar, Elder Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar, Chief Deme Naquin, Jr., Alessandra Jerolleman, Melissa Moulton, R. Eugene Turner, Suzanne Van Cooten, Marie Schaefer, Amanda Roberts, Megan Taylor, Paulette Blanchard, Corinne Arrington Salter, Mike Durglo, Crystal Stiles, Katie Jones, Jeff Weber, Dan Wildcat, and Tim Schneider for their time, energy, dedication, and shared knowledge.
Rising Voices, Changing Coasts Louisiana Hub retreat
The Rising Voices, Changing Coasts (RVCC) Hub, led by Haskell Indian Nations University (PI Dr. Daniel Wildcat), is a coastal research project that weaves together Traditional wisdom and modern knowledge to understand the interactions between natural, human-built, and social systems in coastal populated environments. RVCC is working to improve our understanding of how climate impacts four diverse coastal regions—Alaska (Arctic), Louisiana (Gulf of Mexico), Hawai‘i (Pacific Islands), and Puerto Rico (Caribbean Islands)—and to provide local communities with the information they need to take action and protect their lifeways.
As part of RVCC, from January 9-12, the Louisiana Hub held an in-person retreat in Grand Bayou, Pointe-au-Chien, Grand Caillou/Dulac, and Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana. Tribal leaders, elders, and organizers came together with partnering scientists to be in place together and share in conversations and meals, as a community, to deepen the learning and understanding around place-based lived experiences and the intersection of environmental, economic, political, social, and cultural dynamics in the region. Building relationships and sharing capacity was at the heart-center of the learning experience, holding space to further understanding of a diversity of knowledge systems and ways of knowing and practices. Doing so enables the team to work more intentionally together, with care, towards the First Peoples’ Vision for the Louisiana Coast.
Earth Data Relations Working Group: Governance of Indigenous Data in Open Earth Systems Science,
The Earth Data Relations Working Group (EDRWG), for which LiKEN was a co-convener, came together in 2023 and 2024 to address the following question: In the age of big data and open science, what processes are needed to follow open science protocols while upholding Indigenous Peoples’ rights?
In January 2025, the EDRWG’s published recommended actions in Nature Communications that recognize Indigenous Peoples’ sovereign rights, support more responsible and effective research across the Earth Sciences, and “envision a research landscape that acknowledges the legacy of extractive practices and embraces new norms across Earth science institutions and open science research” (Jennings et al., 2025). To read the full article, please visit: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53480-2.
Conclusion
As we move through 2025, we carry with us the lessons, partnerships, and momentum from this season. Each story shared here, from high school classrooms in Martin County to flood response efforts, forest stewardship, and national conversations on data and resilience reflects the heart of LiKEN’s mission: to honor place-based knowledge, strengthen community ties, and co-create pathways toward justice and sustainability. We’re deeply grateful to all our partners, collaborators, and community members who make this work possible. Thank you for walking with us whether you’re reading, organizing, planting, sharing, or showing up in your own way. We look forward to what’s ahead and to continuing this journey together.
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