A Season of Growth: LiKEN’s Summer Highlights
- LiKEN Team
- Sep 11
- 10 min read
Summer is always a busy time for LiKEN, and this year has been no different. From creek clean ups and youth paddle camps to Tribal-led gatherings on the Louisiana coast and national conversations on land and water, our programs have been full of energy and purpose. Each effort, no matter how local or far-reaching, shares the same goal: to care for our communities and the places we call home.
In July, our team came together for our annual retreat at Spruce Knob in West Virginia. It gave us time to reconnect, share stories from the field, and think about where we are headed next. Below, you’ll find the full updates from each of our programs, capturing the work that has filled our summer and the seeds of hope we are carrying into the fall.
Disaster Resilience
What is the seed of hope from this moment that you would like to see grow for a more disaster resilient future?
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 Indigenous and modern knowledge systems and sciences to better understand 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.
From June 26-28, about 25 Louisiana Hub partners, including Tribal leaders, Elders, and organizers with The First People’s Conservation Council of Louisiana; facilitators and organizers from the Lowlander Center; LiKENeers Alessandra Jerolleman and Julie Maldonado; and partnering scientists, convened together on Shrimpers Row in Grand Caillou, Louisiana at the Community Outreach and Program Office (COPO). The COPO was created and organized by the tribal leadership of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. The gathering focused on weather and environmental observations, continuing to develop and share agreements on the vision, values, goals, and strategies for the First Peoples' Vision for the Louisiana Coast.
Community-Led Solutions for Compounding, Complex, and Cascading Disasters: Networking Roundtable at The Natural Hazards Workshop
With partners from the Disaster Justice Network, Lowlander Center, Bill Anderson Fund, and the Rising Voices, Changing Coasts Hub, LiKENeers Julie Maldonado and Alessandra Jerolleman facilitated a networking roundtable at The Natural Hazards Workshop, hosted by The Natural Hazards Center, in Broomfield, CO on July 13.
To spark conversations about and strategies toward building a disaster resilient future and to grow a connected network of hazard and disaster professionals, community members, and students, the networking event focused on each participant sharing who their professional and theoretical ancestors and mentors are in the hazards and disasters field and what values they have passed on. Over 50 participants gathered in groups and shared from their knowledge and experiences for three focused questions: (1) What does “community” mean to you? (2) What have you learned from place-based community work in disasters that can inform practice and/or policy? (3) What does a justice-forward, community-centered approach to disaster preparedness and recovery look like?
LiKEN and Lowlander Center partners also shared at The Natural Hazards Workshop about the Restoring Louisiana Marshes: Protecting Land, Increasing Resilience, and Reducing Flood Risk project. To hear directly from the Tribal leaders and organizers in Louisiana guiding this work to fill in the canals dredged in Louisiana’s wetlands to restore marsh ecosystems, reduce land loss and flood risk, and protect land, go to this short video.
Disaster Justice Network
The Disaster Justice Network (DJN) is a volunteer network organized by the Lowlander Center and LiKEN, and includes disaster recovery specialists, community and non-profit organizers, faith leaders, university students, educators, and more, to lend support and share critical information for disaster recovery processes in coastal Louisiana. DJN continues to hold twice-monthly virtual knowledge exchanges and sharing this summer, focusing on preparations for hurricane season, information-sharing on disaster preparedness and communications, building disaster mutual aid connections, and emerging LNG (liquified natural gas) impacts on the coast.
Convergence Science: Indigenous Weather, Water and Climate Knowledge Systems, Practices and Communities
Rising Voices, which LiKEN was a co-organizer of, organized the Convergence Science: Indigenous Weather, Water and Climate Knowledge Systems, Practices and Communities symposium at the 2023 and 2024 American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meetings in Denver, CO (2023) and Baltimore, MD (2024), which continued at the Lazrus Symposium in New Orleans, LA in 2025 (see LiKEN Spring newsletter).
In August 2025, a summary of these convenings, including the emerging recommendations and guidance on implementing convergence science in practice was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society; to read the full open-access article, please visit: Tapestries of Knowledge: Using Convergence Science to Weave Indigenous Science and Wisdom with Other Scientific Approaches to Climate Challenges.
Land to Sea Network
The Land to Sea (L2S) Network is a coalition of practitioners convened together through LiKEN and working to rematriate and protect Indigenous lands and waters. L2S partners published an article in the Journal of Geography to share lessons from the network and “place-based examples of Indigenous reclamation through rematriation, or restoration of sacred relationships between Indigenous peoples, lands, and waters – ranging from the resurgence of Indigenous caretaking to Indigenous land return” (Barger et al., 2025). To learn more, please visit: Lessons from Place: Indigenous-Led Rematriation for Strengthening Climate Adaptation and Resilience.
Forest Livelihoods
Over the last few months, we have gone from the season when bark peels easiest to the time when the ginseng berries are turning red and getting ready to plant. In between, Forest Livelihoods has been continuing to recruit landowners and forest users for LiKEN’s Community Wealth program, which offers landowners help accessing resources to improve their forests. The project also seeks to support forest-based livelihoods through regenerative forestry with a focus on non-timber forest products such as tree syrups, medicinal and edible forest plants, native fruits and nuts, and mushrooms.
In June we held an FSA clinic in Matewan WV to get forest landowners their farm number, and a landowner info session in Estill County on the conservation of ruffed grouse habitat co-hosted by the Kentucky Division of Forestry.
Our CECs waded into the KY river in Lee and Leslie County for the Kentucky River Clean Up dragging out tires and gathering trash in a joint effort with CW partners Kentucky Riverkeeper. Meanwhile, our staff on the WV/KY line helped Friends of the Tug Fork River remove over 700 tires from the river, and they got a full crew of fifteen kids out on the water and learning about conservation and ecology during FOTFR’s annual paddle camp.
LiKEN received an $80,000 grant from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation to complement our community wealth work in southern West Virginia. Forests in the Southern coalfields of the Mountain State are one of the primary global sources for medicinal plants like goldenseal, locally known as yellowroot; black cohosh; ginseng; and many others. We are working with wild stewards, forest farmers and other regional agroforestry organizations to find ways to access higher price points paid for material that can be verified as being sustainably produced.
We had a great training co-hosted with Future Generations University at Big Laurel Learning Center in Mingo County teaching technical service providers how to evaluate forestlands for economic opportunities other than timber. Wayne and Loretta Robertson, proprietors of Retta’s Folk Remedies, a Wayne County apothecary that produces herbal products made from a wide swath of native plants and fungi joined us. As we move into Fall we will continue to offer trainings and events, including a yellowroot (goldenseal) planting in Leslie County on September 29th in partnership with Grow Appalachia, and we will be co-sponsoring the Kentucky Maple Syrup Association’s annual Maple School in Winchester, KY on November 1st.
Water Collaboratory
Water Pressure Project: Train-the-Trainer
Deborah Thompson, Impact Director, and Madison Mooney, Community Care Coordinator, supported and participated in a train-the-trainer program that Rural Community Assistance Partnerships (RCAP) organizes to support all the Technical Assistant Providers (TAP’s) workers across the Nation. Deborah and Madison presented our work for how we connect with the community, who we see as important stakeholders, and how important local knowledge is for understanding one's community and getting to the root of supporting local and community change. Being able to share the unique working partnership we have with RCAP, LiKEN, and the Pacific Institute (PI) was such a powerful experience.
Martin County Cleanup Projects
LiKEN’s Community Care Coordinator, Madison Mooney, was asked by the Appalachian Artist Festival Board to host another “CityWalk Creek Clean Up” to prepare downtown Inez for their third annual Appalachian Artist Festival. This cleanup was a huge success in terms of both its attendance and the amount of trash and debris being removed from the waterways. Thank you to all the residents who participated in these cleanup efforts along with the different organizations throughout the community and county such as Thrive, ARO, Mountain Citizens, and Martin County Concerned Citizens who came out to support this cleanup event!
Along with Ella Helmuth of the Appalachian Citizen Law Center and Martin County Concerned Citizen’s President Nina McCoy, LiKENeers Madison Mooney and Deborah Thompson presented at the Interim Joint Committee on Veterans, Military Affairs, and Public Protection on July 30. This Committee meeting focused on a lot of different water and wastewater conversation between the Kentucky of Division of Water, Kentucky Rural Water Association, Martin County Water and Sanitation Districts, and Friends of the Tug Fork River work with a combination of local voices that support not just the work within the Tug Fork River but all different forms of clean up efforts happening across the state of Kentucky.
Stories of Place
This summer, with support from Mid-Atlantic Arts, and in partnership with Friends of the Tug Fork and the University of Kentucky, LiKEN’s Stories of Place program is launching a survey of Woodlands Arts in Central Appalachia. Woodland arts and crafts have a deep history within the region, reaching back beyond pioneer settlement to Native American practices. The biodiversity of the Central Appalachian hardwood forest continues to support and inspire the transformation of species into a wide variety of forms, often celebrated in works of art–both traditional and modern. How can the arts support the health of the forest as community wealth? Coordinated by Mary Hufford (director, Stories of Place) and Karen Rignall (Commons Governance Fellow), the initial survey will engage communities at the headwaters of the Tug Fork in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky in creating a database of woodland arts, crafts, and practitioners throughout the Central Appalachian region. This database will support fundraising and program development in schools, senior centers, parks, and public venues throughout the Central Appalachian region.
If you live near a tributary of the Tug Fork and would like to participate in the survey, please fill out our online interest form here, or write to Mary Hufford: hufford@likenknowledge.org or Karen Rignall: karen.rignall@uky.edu. We’d love to hear from you.
Madison Mooney, Community Care Coordinator, and Phill Barnett, LiKEN's Communications Director, supported an annual festival located in Martin County, Kentucky known as the Appalachian Artist Festival. This is the third year that the Appalachian Artist Festival has been held in this community. Madison Mooney supported a pop-up open mic event that took place during the festival. Residents sang songs, shared poems and stories about where they were from and what home meant to them, and some even read from their own published books about their experiences being from Appalachia and Martin County. Madison also supported a new exhibit known as “Maw and Paw’s Knick Knacks” which was an exhibit that focused on old gadgets, doo-dads, and artifacts from the local past.
Land & Revenues
In April of this year, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) terminated the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities grant program, to comply with White House Executive Order “Unleashing American Energy”. This funding was the primary revenue source for the Appalachian Heirs’ Property Center, a project of the Land & Revenues (L&R) program at LiKEN. Despite that funding setback, the L&R team has continued to form partnerships, weave supportive networks, and build resource environments for heirs’ property owners in Central Appalachia. In July and August, the L&R team organized free Last Will & Testament Clinics in Pikeville and Berea as part of the LiKEN project Community Wealth from Healthy Rivers and Forests. At these two Will Clinics, eight volunteer legal practitioners drafted wills for 44 Kentucky residents, delivering $13,200 worth of free services directly to community members and potentially preventing dozens of properties from falling into the tangled title status of heirs’ property. The season for Last Will & Testament Free Clinics is not over! We are holding two more free clinics at Stanton in Powell County on September 29th and Beattyville in Lee County on October 29th, with growing interest in neighboring counties too.
Beyond L&R’s direct service programming, we are finding new and exciting audiences to educate about land ownership patterns and issues in Central Appalachia. Earlier this year in April, Land & Revenues Director Kevin Slovinsky spoke on the ethics of heirs’ property research at a convening hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. In June, Kevin spoke at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Policy Summit along with attorney and co-founder of HeirShares, Mavis Gragg.
Reflecting on the presentation at the Policy Summit, Kevin said:
“The audience was from all over the country and from many different professions. I had to figure they weren’t familiar with eastern Kentucky, so with a relatively small amount of time to talk about a big issue, I emphasized two points often understated in lessons about heirs’ property: it is the most common form of collectively-owned land in the United States and heirs’ property owners and forest users have unique knowledge about the land that is often overlooked by researchers.”
We are always looking for opportunities to bring Appalachia into conversations about land, and bring land into conversations about Appalachia! If you know of any good audiences for the Land & Revenues team to engage with, please reach out to Kevin Slovinsky and kslovinsky@likenknowledge.org.
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