A five-year commitment totaling $640,000 has been made by the Anne & Gene Worrell Foundation to support the new regional humanities center that opened Monday at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise.
The announcement was made Tuesday by Virginia Humanities, the state humanities council. The Virginia Humanities at UVA Wise, housed within the university’s Center for Appalachian Studies, is the second of several new regional humanities centers being launched as Virginia Humanities celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Each center will be headquartered within an existing regional organization, in either a cultural nonprofit or a two- or four-year college. The first center opened at WHRO Public Media in Norfolk this summer, according to a news release.
The Wise center will focus on telling the region’s stories and on connecting cultural nonprofits with grant funding, according to Jinny Turman, associate professor of history at UVA Wise, who also serves as co-director of the Center for Appalachian Studies and coordinator of the new center.
The Worrells have deep roots in Southwest Virginia, where they met as camp counselors and bonded over a love for the outdoors. Together, they built Worrell Newspapers, starting with the Bristol newspaper and eventually expanding to include more than 30 papers across the country.
[Disclosure: The Anne & Gene Worrell Foundation is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
In 1986, they created the Genan Foundation — now known as the Anne & Gene Worrell Foundation — to support their commitment to philanthropy, the release states.
“Integral to a healthy region is maintaining a sense of place and preserving what makes a community unique. For the Worrells this included preserving cultural heritage, history, the arts, and traditional knowledge,” Holly Hatcher, president and CEO of the foundation, said in the release.
The UVA Wise center will “amplify stories from across the region and illustrate the ways the humanities bring communities together to foster dialogue and understanding,” the news release states.
It will serve as a regional hub for grant funding that promotes the humanities in Southwest Virginia, Turman said. “It will help the cultural and historical nonprofit organizations in our region tell stories, which is kind of what the humanities are,” she said. “It’s about storytelling, and it can be done through literature, history, it can be done through oral history, and collecting and distributing archival materials that help us connect with each other and share our stories with the world.”
Turman added that she will meet with regional organizations that want to apply for grant funding and help them develop proposals. She will also put together an advisory board that will help review those proposals.
Virginia Humanities at UVA Wise will serve the counties of Tazewell, Smyth, Washington, Russell, Buchanan, Dickenson, Wise, Scott and Lee and the cities and towns within those counties.
The center is expected to begin accepting grant applications Jan. 1. For more information, visit VirginiaHumanities.org.
