Members | Future Generations Learning Community

My name is Austin Donahoo and I am from Greer, SC. I am currently 24 and serving my 3rd year as an AmeriCorps VISTA at a small relief organization called Greer Relief. I joined the MA Program because I wanted to gain more experience in community development, and I feel this will be helpful with my long term goals of helping in local development. 

Betsy Taylor is founding director of the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN) www.likenknowledge.org and a cultural anthropologist.  Over the past 25 years, she has worked for community-driven development in Appalachia and South Asia to integrate issues of health, agriculture, forestry, culture and environmental stewardship.  In popular and scholarly venues, she writes about environmental and social justice movements, democratic planning and participatory research, women’s issues, the commons, democratic reclamation of academe / professions.  She co-authored, with Herbert Reid, the book, Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2010). At the University of Kentucky, she served as Co‐Director of Environmental Studies, Research Director for the Appalachian Center and on the faculty of the Social Theory program, and during her years at Virginia Tech, she was a research faculty member in the Appalachian Studies program.  She served on the steering committee of the U.S. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative from 2013-2017. She served as chair of the Human Rights / Social Justice Committee of the Society for Applied Anthropology from 2015-2017.  Many of her writings can be found on her website.