The Importance of Regional Resource Guides

Adult Literacy Service Providers in Appalachia. Counties highlighted in green represent counties with responding providers

By: Marcus J. Hopkins

July 31st, 2024

The Appalachian Region is a gloriously diverse region comprising some of the most magnificent natural landscapes in the United States. These bucolic settings, however, often result in their residents being unable to access services, such as accessible educational opportunities, reliable Internet connectivity, affordable transportation, and comprehensive healthcare and social services.

Across much of #Appalachia, many residents regularly struggle with endemic poverty - persistant, long-term poverty in a particularly region that may span across generations. When examining poverty statistics from 2022, more than 1 out of ever 4 residents (27.1%) earns below 150% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), compared to the national average of 20.3% (Figure 1). The percentage of residents living in poverty gets worse in more rural parts of the state—particularly in West Virginia, Kentucky, and southerwestern Virginia.

Figure 1 - Poverty in Appalachia (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023)

The problem with endemic poverty in Appalachia is that it has proven very difficult to combat. The region's rugged terrain and reliance on low-wage jobs, such as agriculture and extractive industries (e.g., coal mining) means that Appalachians have to work harder to earn a living and travel farther than other Americans to access to the same services and quality of life that many take for granted. And still, many of the barriers they face are ones that they cannot personally control.

At the individual level, it is very difficult to improve the quality of an area's schools, Internet access, roads, or healthcare services. These are services that should be the responsibility of state-level politicians and administrators to fix, but all too often go neglected.

As a result, many people living in Appalachia are either unaware of or believe that services do not exist. This makes the creation and distribution of regional and local resource guides essential.

While many Appalachian jurisdictions have at least some guides to help local residents find services, the natures of both information gathering and operational viability often results in these guides containing outdated information.

This is particularly true of educational resource guides for adults. While dozens of comprehensive guides exist for educational services for school-aged children, these types of guides for adults are more difficult to find and tend to be less reliable, as they often contain information that is several years out of date or include providers that no longer exist or who are unresponsive to information requests from potential students.

APPLI Board member, Audrey Peters, MA

This summer, APPLI is working to expand and update our Appalachian Adult Education Directory to ensure that adult learners have access to accurate information to access the services they need. These efforts are being spearheaded by APPLI Board member, Audrey Peters, who is reaching out to new organizations to add to our existing list of providers.

If you are aware of any organizations who should be added to our list, please reach out to Audrey at apeters@appli.org.

In addition, we will be developing county-level resource guides that will be released on an iterative basis, allowing APPLI's users to find public and social services local to them, as well as linking our users to existing resource guides.

These developments are central to our mission—to increase equitable access to high-quality, affordable, and accountable healthcare and social services to improve the quality of life of Appalachian residents.

Please stay tuned for more developments as we continue to expand our resource guides, and please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help us continue our research and advocacy efforts in Appalachia.