Grow Appalachia: A New Season

A New Hire

The New Year brings the opportunity for renewed hope, great expectations, and the chance for a fresh start to apply lessons learned and improve our outcomes in this New Year. To help many individuals and families reach these personal goals, Red Bird Mission is pleased to announce that Karen Dial has accepted the position of Family Ministries Coordinator. In this position, she will coordinate programs aimed at improving the health and welfare of at-risk, rural families striving to reach self-sufficiency goals. To best accomplish this, Karen will manage both agricultural projects: Grow Appalachia and Red Bird Farmer’s Project, as well as offer individuals growth though furthered education, benefit attainment, and support services.

Karen is a Christ-centered person dedicated to serving God and the people of the Red Bird Mission area in many capacities. Previous to joining the Community Outreach Staff, Karen has served Red Bird Mission as the Craft Program Manager, the donor Development Associate and a pastor in the Red Bird Missionary Conference for the last eleven years. She has experience in business management, organization building, and working one-on-one with individuals to enhance their natural talents and learn to market their goods. She has experience in fund-raising, building databases and spreadsheets as well as leadership skills. She enjoys working with people and strives to help them achieve their God-given potential in the goals that they set for themselves.

Karen has agriculture experience in growing and maintaining a family garden, canning, and preserving. She also has experience in egg production as she worked on her Uncle’s chicken farm. Karen is also familiar with both agricultural projects she will be managing as she spent the last year volunteering for Community Outreach assisting coordinators and the Grow Appalachia Field Worker with client contacts, and organizational and clerical issues. She is eager to serve the members of both Grow Appalachia and the Red Bird Farmers Project. To gear up for this year, Karen is attending the 2012 Fruit and Vegetable Conference and Trade Show to ensure that she will provide the most up-to-date farming methods and she will work closely with our local farmers to aide them in sharing their experiences and resources with one another to facilitate community capacity building.

Karen is married and has two married children, one works at Memorial Hospital and the other serves in the US Navy. She enjoys two beautiful grandchildren who live close and two who live out of the area. She loves the outdoors, working in a garden, camping, hiking, riding with hubby on the motorcycle, traveling and reading. Please contact Karen at kdial@rbmission.org to welcome her and share your agriculture experience and knowledge to help make this the best year yet!

Last week Karen Dial and I attended the 2012 Kentucky Fruit and Vegetable Conference and Trade Show in Lexington Ky. The conference was attended by many commercial farmers as well as some small private farmers. This gave us an opportunity to hear the issues farmers faced in 2011 and what corrective action they planned to make in 2012.

We touched based with two of our local Cooperative extension office agents, Jeff Casada (Clay County) and Stacy White (Bell County) as well as speaking with David Cooke, Director of the Berea College Appalachia Fund and Louie Rivers,Jr. ( Small Farmer Outreach Training and Technical Assistance Program ) SFOTTAP Director from Kentucky State University.

There were several concurrent sessions at the conference allowing us to split up and take in a lot of very beneficial information to bring back and share with our Grow Appalachia participants. There were sessions on Farmers Markets, vegetable Production, Agritourism and social media, Organic Farming and gardening, Small fruit production, Tree Fruit production and a few Grape and Wine short courses. There were also many exhibits set up for the Trade Show Offering suppliers for nearly anything farm related. This allowed us a chance to collect information on resources available to our program and our participants such as organic supplies, local seed distributors and contacts specializing in Agricultural technical assistance.