About the project:

Nonprofit: Save Our Cumberland Mountains, (becoming Statewide Organizing of Community eMpowerment)
Project Title: Save Our Cumberland Mountains

Their work is no longer confined to the mountains of East Tennessee and they are not merely an organization of poor and working class white people. SOCM has steadily expanded its work to Middle and West Tennessee and worked toward a goal of racial diversity. It will formally change its name to Statewide Organizing of Community eMpowerment, still SOCM, but with a new mission and a new face. The members believe it is more important than ever than to preserve their institutional memory – where they came from and the sacrifices made many years ago by mountain folks, mostly gone now, that have made possible where we are today.

Telling SOCM’s story illuminates the larger story of changes in Central Appalachia over nearly four decades. Appalachia is a poor region. The War on Poverty was launched here in 1964, and lasted only four years. By the early 1970s, Appalachians were coping with a variety of seemingly unrelated issues. These included land preservation, strip-mining effects on environment and human health, and lack of local resources due to lightly taxed land-holding companies.

SOCM was launched in 1972 to give Appalachians a voice, a way to unite in facing the region’s challenges. SOCM’s efforts helped pass the first Tennessee coal severance tax, bringing money into communities for schools and roads. Reflecting changes in the Appalachian region, SOCM’s mission adapted and grew. From a foundation focused on mineral extraction, fair taxation and coal-related health concerns, SOCM expanded to address timber and toxins issues. As Pacific Northwest chip mills relocated into the region, SOCM organized against widespread logging and problems connected with clear cutting.

Today, the counties SOCM serves have improved economically. Appalachia is less isolated, with growing economic and demographic diversity. Yet all thing move in circles. In east Tennessee, strip mining is again an issue. As the disastrous fly ash spill of December, 2008, shows, preserving the environment in this resource-rich region is an ongoing battle.

The imagery: Karen Kasmauski has proposed a project to help preserve that memory and those sacrifices by collecting stories from those SOCM leaders who survive from the earliest days through all of the victories, disappointments and changes along the way. Her work will help chart the evolution of the grassroots community organization from a handful of brave mountain people willing to stand up to the coal barons to the SOCM of today, an organization that is known not just across the state but throughout the region.

The photo essay will be rich with pictures showing the sense of the land and the people living upon it. To round out the essay, historical pictures from SOCM’s archives will be incorporated into a video and oral history of the founding members of SOCM. In giving them voice, the photographer will examine how their lives led them to activism. Many of these brave women and men are now ill with aliments from their life-long exposure to coal dust and toxic elements in their environment.

Imagery in service to the nonprofit: All the media that Kasmauski produces will be made available to SOCM for use in their public awareness efforts, in improving their web presence and to help in documenting the history of this important American organization.

Discover more about Karen Kasmauski
Learn about Save Our Cumberland Mountains