“You’ve just got to roll up your sleeves. Do we fail and fall straight on our face with things? Yes, everything from a recipe to someone going back to jail or the flood coming and washing out everything. There’s things you have no control over. There are failures, but there are triumphs,” Gwen Johnson says as the camera rolls.
Gwen and her mother, Mabel, were recently featured in a film about their incredible efforts to give new life to Hemphill Community Center, formerly Hemphill Grade School, located in a former coal camp in Letcher County, Kentucky.
“This was my fifth-grade classroom,” Gwen says on the film as they walk through the two-story building. “This is the school where my mom went to school, where I went to school, and where my kids went to school.”
“They broke our hearts because they closed it,” Mabel, who earned the title of ‘everybody’s mamaw’ before her passing, said. “We said, how do we have a meeting space for the community? Let’s do something to try to save it. And we did.”
Over the years, they established Hemphill as a community center. It has continued to serve as a beloved gathering place in the area, now hosting music, dancing, and arts workshops. It is also home to Black Sheep Brick Oven & Bakery, a second-chance employment program for people in addiction recovery, and a Coal Miners Memorial garden. It is a place that locals come to gather, and a place that people who have since moved away come back to visit and reminisce.
“People think I make money here,” Gwen laughs as she works in the kitchen at Hemphill, “but this is where I spend money.”
That reality came to be too true around 2019. Along with other nonprofits in the area, they found themselves at risk of closing their doors due to rising energy costs – with bills of over $2,000 in the winter. Mountain Association’s Energy Team came in to explore solar and efficiency savings. We facilitated energy audits and upgrades, ultimately financing a $48,500 solar installation, completed by Wilderness Trace Solar, who trained local workers as part of the installation. This allowed Hemphill to save nearly $7,000 a year on their electric bills and continue providing its critical community services.
However, when the historic deadly floods of 2022 came, destroying the nearby town of Neon, Hemphill became a regional hub for resources. And still, two years later, people are using the facility for Wi-Fi, showers and laundry as recovery continues to stretch on. As a result, energy usage has increased. So, once again, we worked together to find savings.
We discovered that replacing four outdoor lights, at a cost of just $450, will save over $1,000 per year in electricity costs (and be much brighter!). We also helped design an expansion of the center’s solar panels along with battery storage, so they can also be a resiliency hub in the face of future power outages and flooding, which are only becoming more frequent. The work was completed by local installer HOMES Inc. (who now has installation capability thanks in part to the training from Wilderness Trace and from Mountain Association’s technical assistance).
Mountain Association partnered with General Motors to make this solar expansion and storage project possible. By combining more than $35,000 of General Motor funds with additional funds from the Solar Finance Fund, Hemphill’s energy costs will not only be lower, but the added solar battery storage will ensure that they can supply their building with enough electricity to power their lights, outlets, WiFi and refrigerators should disasters, such as floods, hit the region again.
“Solar and efficiency has been a gamechanger in how we reinvent ourselves moving forward into the future.”
