“You can almost draw a line from when the Seale Theater shut down to the decline of our community,” Sue Christian of OCARE, an Owsley County, Kentucky nonprofit, tells us. “It was like the symbolic piece of glue that held us together.”
Owsley County is home to about 4,200 people. Largely decimated by the decline in tobacco revenue, nearly half of Owsley County lives below the poverty line. It ranks as the 5th county in the US with the lowest household income. Drugs are also an issue, which has led to 1 in 5 kids being raised by someone other than their parents.
“As OCARE, we’ve always strived to provide something positive for at-risk youth to do,” Sue explains, lighting up as she shares the 15+ year journey to reopen the Seale Theater as a movie theater, a community play space, and coffee shop.
“Many in our community thought we were crazy,” Mamie (JoAnne) Richardson, volunteer chair of OCARE laughs as they show us pictures of the Seale prior to the first phases of clean-up. Closed in 1985, it was overtaken with vines and much of the roof had decayed.
Knowing that their community needed a win, Sue became what she called a ‘reluctant grant writer’ and wrote and received an EPA Clean-Up grant. This grant and work with other partners has allowed them to clean out the building and remediate the lead and asbestos – work that has been taking place since 2017.
“This has been one long project, but a project of the heart. Here recently though, we reached the point where we were tired,” Sue described. “We hit a wall, where we had tapped all the grants we could, and we didn’t know how we were going to be able to fund these things.”
At that time, OCARE had just joined SPARK, Mountain Association’s Nonprofit Collaborative, our initiative to build capacity for very small nonprofits in Eastern Kentucky. Sue and JoAnne worked with Judy Sizemore, a SPARK consultant, to do a strengths and weaknesses assessment of where OCARE stood.
“Judy said look at all you’ve done. She helped us see the water and the dirt, instead of the mud it has become, and gave us courage to go back to City and ask for funding. And sure enough, they saw all that we had done so far and the vision, and they funded us!”
Leveraging other grants and in-kind donations of labor, the Seale is nearly ready to be drywalled, painted and completed, for which they are currently fundraising. They would like to believe that it was their work that has started something in Booneville, the county seat. The mayor and other community members have gotten to work on fixing up other blighted buildings in the small downtown.
Already home to some of the fastest internet in the US, as the community picks up momentum in its revitalization and works to bring more jobs to the area, OCARE saw just one thing that had the potential to bring it all to a halt: lack of childcare access.
Many of the in-home childcare providers in the county shut down during COVID, leaving the county with only a Head Start program for ages 3 and up that operates only until 2:30pm. As OCARE began to hire interns to run its thrift shop, they encountered this problem first-hand. Most of their Work Ready participants were single moms and they did not have reliable childcare.
Sue, who also works for Partners for Rural Impact, and JoAnne scoured the county, along with Appalachian Early Childhood Network, looking for people who would be willing to open daycares.
“Everyone said, ‘if you ran it, I’d work for you,’” JoAnne said.
Once again rising to meet the needs of their community, OCARE undertook extensive plans, and again fundraised and leveraged money and labor, to remodel their thrift shop into a childcare center. In summer 2024, OCARE will open the Owl’s Treehouse: Childcare & Learning Center. They can take up to 40 kids and already have 35 spots reserved.
Between the Seale Theater and its Undergrounds Coffee House, and the Owl’s Treehouse, OCARE will have around 16 employees.
The journey of OCARE over the years shows how hardworking champions and long-term investment are required to bring change to our communities in Eastern Kentucky.
Follow along the Seale restoration here: https://www.facebook.com/SealeTheaterProject/
