|
Kentuckians For The Commonwealth
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) is a grassroots community organization under the original name of the Kentuckian Fair Tax Coalition. It began when 26 people from 12 countries met in Hazard on August 17, 1981. Though statewide, KFTC has deep roots in eastern Kentucky where coal mining remains the dominant industry. KFTC is a multi-issue organization of working-class families, with a history of working for land reform, environmental justice, and low income assistance programs. In the 1980s, KFTC was part of a campaign to end strip mining using the broad form deed and has since continued to provide support to the Appalachian region. Joe Szakos was one of the founding organizers. Notable accomplishments The first major issue that KFTC tackled was tax reform. They wanted coal and timber companies to pay their fair taxes to support healthy communities in the Appalachian mountains. On January 7, 1982, KFTC held their first meeting to develop a platform for an upcoming Kentucky ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or economic movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from the local level to effect change at the local, regional, national or international level. Grassroots movements are associated with bottom-up, rather than top-down decision making, and are sometimes considered more natural or spontaneous than more traditional power structures. Grassroots movements, using self-organization, encourage community members to contribute by taking responsibility and action for their community. Grassroots movements utilize a variety of strategies from fundraising and registering voters, to simply encouraging political conversation. Goals of specific movements vary and change, but the movements are consistent in their focus on increasing mass participation in politics. These political movements may begin as small and at the local level, but grassroots ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Community Organizing
Community organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to each other or share some common problem come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest. Unlike those who promote more-consensual community building, community organizers generally assume that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless. Community organizing has as a core goal the generation of ''durable'' power for an organization representing the community, allowing it to influence key decision-makers on a range of issues over time. In the ideal, for example, this can get community-organizing groups a place at the table ''before'' important decisions are made. Community organizers work with and develop new local leaders, facilitating coalitions and assisting in the development of campaigns. A central goal of organizing is the development of a robust, organized, local democracy bringing community member ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coal Mining
Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United Kingdom and South Africa, a coal mine and its structures are a colliery, a coal mine is called a 'pit', and the above-ground structures are a 'pit head'. In Australia, "colliery" generally refers to an underground coal mine. Coal mining has had many developments in recent years, from the early days of men tunneling, digging and manually extracting the coal on carts to large open-cut and longwall mines. Mining at this scale requires the use of draglines, trucks, conveyors, hydraulic jacks and shearers. The coal mining industry has a long history of significant negative environmental impacts on local ecosystems, health impacts on local communities and workers, and contributes heavily to th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Working Class
The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in manual-labour occupations or industrial work, who are remunerated via waged or salaried contracts. Working-class occupations (see also " Designation of workers by collar colour") include blue-collar jobs, and most pink-collar jobs. Members of the working class rely exclusively upon earnings from wage labour; thus, according to more inclusive definitions, the category can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies, as well as those employed in the urban areas (cities, towns, villages) of non-industrialized economies or in the rural workforce. Definitions As with many terms describing social class, ''working class'' is defined and used in many different ways. The most general definition, used by many socialists, is that the working class includes all those who have nothing to sell but their labour. These people used to be referred to as the proletariat, but that term has gone out of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Land Reform
Land reform is a form of agrarian reform involving the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution, generally of agricultural land. Land reform can, therefore, refer to transfer of ownership from the more powerful to the less powerful, such as from a relatively small number of wealthy or noble owners with extensive land holdings (e.g., plantations, large ranches, or agribusiness plots) to individual ownership by those who work the land. Such transfers of ownership may be with or without compensation; compensation may vary from token amounts to the full value of the land. Land reform may also entail the transfer of land from individual ownership—even peasant ownership in smallholdings—to government-owned collective farms; it has also, in other times and places, referred to the exact opposite: division of government-owned collective farms into smallholdings. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Environmental Justice
Environmental justice is a social movement to address the unfair exposure of poor and marginalized communities to harms from hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses.Schlosberg, David. (2007) ''Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature''. Oxford University Press. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harms is inequitably distributed. The global environmental justice movement arises from place-based environmental conflicts in which local environmental defenders frequently confront multi-national corporations in resource extraction or other industries. Local outcomes of these conflicts are increasingly influenced by trans-national environmental justice networks. The movement began in the United States in the 1980s and was heavily influenced by the American civil rights movement. The original conception of environmental justice in the 1980s focused on harms to marginalised racial groups ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Broad Form Deed
As a legal document, the broad form deed severs a property into surface and mineral rights. This allows other individuals or organizations other than the land owners to purchase rights to resources below the surface. These parties also receive use of surface resources — such as wood or water — to facilitate gathering the resources below ground. Based on English legal theory but an American creation from the early 1900s, the broad form deed was used by land and coal companies in many states within the Appalachian Region. Early history Details An American creation, the broad form deed did more than just transfer the title of all the mineral rights along with mining rights. The holder was also granted rights to do what they deemed necessary to locate minerals, create any infrastructure needed to amass and relocate the minerals, utilize any resources on the land for mining purpose (like trees or water), and allowed the holder to not be held liable over any damages or the condi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joe Szakos
Joe Szakos (born March 8, 1954) is a community organizer and author. He was coordinator of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) from 1981 to 1993, and was the executive director of Virginia Organizing from 1994 to 2017. After stepping down from the directorship, he became the Lynchburg Chapter organizer until his retirement in November 2020. Early life Joseph Szakos was born March 8, 1954, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. His paternal grandparents were Hungarian immigrants, and his maternal grandparents were Italian immigrants. He earned a bachelor's degree from Washington and Jefferson College, graduating in 1976 with honors in political science and sociology. He earned a master's degree from the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago in 1979. Career as community organizer Szakos began his work in eastern Kentucky working on housing development in David ( Floyd County) in 1979. He worked as a reporter for the ''Martin Countian'' in Inez, Kent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Surface Mining
Surface mining, including strip mining, open-pit mining and mountaintop removal mining, is a broad category of mining in which soil and rock overlying the mineral deposit (the overburden) are removed, in contrast to underground mining, in which the overlying rock is left in place, and the mineral is removed through shafts or tunnels. In North America, where the majority of surface coal mining occurs, this method began to be used in the mid-16th century and is practiced throughout the world in the mining of many different minerals. In North America, surface mining gained popularity throughout the 20th century, and surface mines now produce most of the coal mined in the United States. In most forms of surface mining, heavy equipment, such as earthmovers, first remove the overburden. Next, large machines, such as dragline excavators or bucket-wheel excavators, extract the mineral. The pros of surface mining are that it has a lower financial cost and is a lot safer than undergrou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Felony
A felony is traditionally considered a crime of high seriousness, whereas a misdemeanor is regarded as less serious. The term "felony" originated from English common law (from the French medieval word "félonie") to describe an offense that resulted in the confiscation of a convicted person's land and goods, to which additional punishments including capital punishment could be added; other crimes were called misdemeanors. Following conviction of a felony in a court of law, a person may be described as a felon or a convicted felon. Some common law countries and jurisdictions no longer classify crimes as felonies or misdemeanors and instead use other distinctions, such as by classifying serious crimes as indictable offences and less serious crimes as summary offences. In the United States, where the felony/misdemeanor distinction is still widely applied, the federal government defines a felony as a crime punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year. If punishable by e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Appalachian Voices
Appalachian Voices is an American environmental organization. Their stated environmental concerns include eliminating air pollution, ending mountaintop removal, cleaning up coal ash pollution and promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency. The organization has offices in Boone, North Carolina, Charlottesville, Virginia, Norton, Virginia, and Knoxville, Tennessee. Appalachian Voices publishes "The Appalachian Voice," a 71,000-circulation, bi-monthly news publication covering environmental and cultural news in the central and southern Appalachian region. History The Appalachian Voice publication was started in Boone, North Carolina in February 1996 by Harvard Ayers and Than Axtell as part of the now-defunct Southern Appalachian Highlands Ecoregion Task Force, a chapter of the Sierra Club. Ayers, seeing "a need for an advocacy organization that could focus exclusively on local issues related to Appalachia," officially founded Appalachian Voices as a 501(c)3 organizatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
