Upper Sand Mountain Parishes
United Methodist Church
The Rev. Dorsey Walker
P.O. Box 267
Sylvania, Ala. 35988
(205) 638-2126

Sand Mountain, a poor white, rural area spread along a 40-mile ridge in Alabama's northeastern corner, holds more in common with its Appalachia history and culture than with the Deep South. People here have strong family ties and a fierce loyalty to neighbors and kin. They tend to reject welfare and handouts but to stick together and do whatever they can to help out less fortunate neighbors.

That's what Upper Sand Mountain Parishes is all about; and they've come up with some of remarkable model programs.

The cooperative came about more than 20 years ago, when lay persons and pastors of 17 area United Methodist Churches, recognizing that their congregations were too small to deliver emergency services individually, banded together to form a shared community-service organization. They started with basic emergency services, but soon expanded and started looking for ways to bolster self-sufficiency rather than merely handing out food and clothing. The cooperative seeks to both strengthen local churches and to provide community outreach services.

So, for example, a food pantry (which continues) grew into a gleaning program that eventually became the state's largest, featuring a statewide network of volunteers and truckers that can quickly coordinate a load of fresh produce with an appropriate recipient agency. The parish's "Gardens of Plenty" program provides seeds and fertilizer to an estimated 400-500 neighbors, who live off the produce, and share the excess back with less fortunate people.

The group has turned an abandoned church building into a cannery, using equipment scrounged, where gleaned produce will be put up in non-perishable form for wider distribution. Walker sees a three-fold purpose to the cannery: It will ensure that little of the gleaned produce goes to waste; it will create jobs for the unemployed people who will be paid to run the cannery; and, eventually, he hopes to build community economic development by starting a co-op to grow and process high-quality organic products for sale.

These programs alone, plus the full range of basic services, would already rank the Upper Sand Mountain Parish as one of the most remarkable grass-roots programs in the nation. But there's still more!

A number of years ago, Walker became interested in inexpensive solar power; and over the past decade, in partnership with students at local vocational-agricultural schools, the parish has built or helped neighbors build literally hundreds of solar greenhouses, hot water systems and vegetable dryers.

But now they've gotten on to something even more spectacular: Over the past seven years, working with volunteers and financing from area churches, they have built 14 solar houses for poor people who would otherwise be homeless. Working with the help of local architects and a lot of their own experience, Walker and his staff have come up with a simple plan for a 950-square-foot, one-story frame house that can be put up by a crew of volunteers in roughly six days at a total cost for materials of only $12,000. Assuming an $8,000 cost of labor and land prices that range from zero to $3,000, these houses can be erected for around $20,000 each. In practice, what Walker has done is persuaded individual churches to subsidize single houses with cash and labor. When the house is done, a selected poor family moves in and is expected to pay $75 a month, with one-half of that going to the donor church in an arrangement that repays the material investment in 13 years.

Now, Walker has an even more creative notion: During the coming year, he hopes to form a home-building co-op in which single mothers will learn building trades and start putting up these solar homes as a business! Building self-reliance through community economic development, with a product that puts new, low-cost roofs over poor people's heads? It's hard to imagine a more effective model program than that.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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