Rural Economic Collaboration

The Northern Appalachian Socio-Economic Collaborative (NASEC) began several months ago in the counties of Cattaraugus and Allegany, New York.  As expected this region is part of Appalachia and is a high poverty area.  NASEC started because a few people wanted to see change but knew that long term sustainable change could not be accomplished by one person alone.  

We reached out to other Appalachian focused organizations but were turned away every time because we are too far north and outside of their support areas.  They would not even share solutions and successes with us so we would not have to start from scratch.   Undaunted, we started working together towards the development of a number of initiatives that we thought would make a small but immediate difference and start revving up the motor of economic change. 

Our biggest initiative at this time is our growing initiative. It has three tiers. The smallest tier is one where we distributed a number of plants in cooperation with the Pat Ploetz's Cuba-Rushford School FFA and Ag kids. To begin to teach people how to grow their own food, the kids gave away plants at one of the food bank distributions.

The second tier is our community garden initiative. The goal of this part of the program is to show people that they can grow their own food over the summer here, thus freeing up some needed funds to help meet other needs in their lives.

We looked all over for a central location to host this garden but none was available to us. Adam Buzzard came up with the brilliant idea to host garden boxes and our first box gardens went up. (See photo collage.)  Various businesses have sponsored some of the boxes as part of the collaborative effort. The gardens are tended by different people and organizations as well.  The produce will be donated to the Cuba Cultural Center and distributed as part of the food pantry distributions.

The Cuba Library has a whole themed program around theirs this summer and the kids in the program are tending theirs, giving them skills that will last a lifetime!  You can see our boxes around Cuba, NY and we hope to have many more next year all over the two county area.  We hope that our growing project will generate more interest in local produce and encourage people to grow their own.

The third tier will be the largest, most high impact part of this initiative. It is our "fallow farms" tier. The ultimate goal of NASEC is to get outside money coming into our region to stimulate the economy and bring jobs. All around us we see beautiful farms that are not being worked. We are building a coalition of growers and will be growing garlic this fall. We are starting small in order to do a "proof of concept" so we can start the learning process and get our seed garlic in our fields in this fall.

We don't want to rely on government money to get us going. We will be crowdfunding this part of the initiative to help us with startup costs for our seed and other growing needs such as equipment repairs etc so we can get our fields planted and maintained. We will look to our supporters at that time to share our link to help us get this part of the program launched successfully.

We know that many people do not know how to prepare fresh produce so we are also launching a cooking program this month. We will be having cooking classes and demonstrations as our produce is harvested so that we can teach easy ways to prepare this healthy and nutritious food.

In cooperation with the County Extension, we will be offering food preservation classes so that people can learn how to preserve the food that they grow in their gardens.That also starts this month. 

This year is our "proof of concept" year for this initiative. It has not been without its challenges, and we are learning a lot very fast. We hope to take our "lessons learned" and do a better job next year and as we perfect our processes, we hope to expand our programs locally as well as teach other communities so that they can leverage our success to help themselves!

Collaboration is the only way we can bring significant change to our region and it is never easy but we hope to get better at it over time.  We appreciate your interest and support in our programs.  Follow us on Facebook for further information.