Resource Spotlight: Appalshop
In Monday’s article, “Who Gets to Tell a Community’s Story?” we discussed why we think local storytelling matters, and why it's better when a town gets to tell its own story.
Appalshop, a nonprofit media and arts organization in Whitesburg, Kentucky, has been doing exactly that since 1969. They use film, radio, music, theater, and more to help people across Appalachia record their stories, and a lot of that work has ended up being seen and heard far outside the region. Youth have always played a major role at Appalshop, and continue to engage in their community with support.
Where Appalshop Began
It all started in the fall of 1969 with a community film workshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. The workshop taught local youth to operate 16 mm film cameras, and the hope was that they would pick up skills they could use to find work. Bill Richardson, the instructor, was a young man himself, fresh out of graduate school at Yale. Several of the people who made films in that first workshop ended up turning it into a career.
Back then, Appalshop says, eastern Kentucky was seen as "the poster child for American poverty," and the workshop gave local people a way to answer stereotypes with footage they shot themselves. Within a few years, Appalshop also ran Roadside Theater and a record label of its own, June Appal Recordings, and today Appalshop’s film catalog lists more than 100 films. Some of them have screened at Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art, and others have aired on PBS.
Young People Behind the Camera
Appalshop's youth work found a home in 1988, when the Appalachian Media Institute, or AMI, was founded. Students there learn how to shoot, record, and edit, but they're also asked to dig into questions about themselves and their hometowns along the way.
The Summer Documentary Institute
The big one is Appalshop’s Summer Documentary Institute, a desirable eight-week paid internship. This year's session ran from Monday, June 8 to Thursday, July 31, out of Appalshop's space in Jenkins. Anyone between 14 and 22 who is from Central Appalachia and still resides there can apply, and you don't need any experience behind a camera to take part. Interns spend the first part of the summer watching documentaries and talking them through. After that come hands-on workshops with AMI staff, Appalshop filmmakers, and local artists, and by the end each group has a finished film. Past films have taken on everything from the opioid epidemic to what it's like to be LGBTQ+ in the region.
Over 1,200 young people have gone through AMI so far, and Appalshop says 80 percent of its interns end up going on to higher education. Taken together, their films (many of which can be found on AMI's YouTube catalog) are a record of how young people have viewed their own communities over several decades.
More Than One Way to Tell a Story
Film was the first thing Appalshop did. During the 1970s, it also started a Mountain Photography Workshop and a literary journal called Mountain Review, and June Appal has been putting out music by regional artists since 1974. Roadside Theater, meanwhile, has taken its plays based on local stories to 43 states and to Europe.
Appalshop has gotten into podcasting, too. Joshua Outsey, who works as Appalshop's Community Archive Coordinator, gathered stories from Black churches across Central Appalachia and turned them into Intersections of Faith and Freedom, a five-episode podcast that came out in 2025 (all five episodes are free on YouTube). The episodes get into church traditions, faith songs, incarceration, and liberation work. If you've only ever heard Appalachia described one way, it's a good place to start.
WMMT Community Radio
WMMT 88.7 FM, Appalshop's radio station, went on the air in 1985 and broadcasts at 15,000 watts from Mayking Peak in Letcher County. That's enough to reach parts of five states: Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The station runs on listener support. Its roughly 50 volunteer DJs (some of them under 20) host music and other programs, and they come from the same mountain communities the station serves. Appalshop says 98 percent of what goes out over the air is produced locally.
Tune in and you'll hear plenty of mountain music, but WMMT also has public affairs shows like Mountain Talk and Mountain News and World Report. One program that stood out to us is Calls from Home, where families can send messages over the radio to relatives who are incarcerated. In the spring of 2026, the station launched an emergency preparedness cohort with groups that provide services in Letcher County and the counties around it, so that information moves more easily between the station and those groups in times of need. The plan is for it to meet once a quarter. That same spring, WMMT's fund drive doubled as a celebration of 40 years on the air and wrapped up with a free live show at its studio in downtown Whitesburg.
Archives and Community Media
The Appalshop Archive was set up in 2002 to look after all of this, and its collection covers film, video, audio, and photographs, plus items donated by Letcher County residents. Its photographs include more than 3,600 negatives taken by William R. "Pictureman" Mullins, who worked locally as a commercial photographer. When flooding hit Whitesburg in July 2022, the water did serious damage to Appalshop's headquarters and to much of the archive, and staff have been working to recover what they can ever since. Most employees now work out of Jenkins, Kentucky, while WMMT has a new studio at 253A Main Street in Whitesburg.
Other local groups can get help telling their own stories, too. Appalshop's Community Media Initiative trains organizations to make their own media and helps them with the technical side. It also runs Making Connections News, which has put out more than 200 radio and video pieces about the region's changing economy since 2010, broadcast on WMMT and shared on social media.
Why Telling Your Own Story Matters
Donna Porterfield once remembered seeing an early Roadside Theater play and said, "Neither one of us had seen theater that was about us or our people." Appalshop's films are made in that same spirit, with very little narration so the people on screen can do the talking, and one critic described the work as "an unsentimental exercise in authenticity." Teenagers at AMI are taught to work this way too. So when a 16-year-old from Letcher County points a camera at her neighbor, she's the one deciding how that neighbor (and that town) ends up on screen.
To be clear, Appalshop doesn't speak for all of Appalachia, a region that stretches across 13 states and is home to all kinds of communities. What it does is give the people it works with the tools and the airtime to tell their own stories.
Bill Richardson's graduate school thesis argued that video could be "an amazing recorder of community." More than 50 years later, it's hard to argue with him.
How to Watch, Listen, Visit, and Take Part
You can experience Appalshop's work no matter where you live. WMMT has a live stream at wmmt.org, and many of Appalshop's films can be watched for free in its YouTube film catalog. The Appalshop Archive website also lets you browse part of the collection.
If you're between 14 and 22, are from and live in Central Appalachia, and want to try making a film, keep an eye on AMI's website each spring, since that's when Summer Documentary Institute applications open. This year, applications were accepted from April 2 to May 3.
If you'd rather visit in person, Seedtime on the Cumberland, Appalshop's music festival, comes around every June at the solar pavilion in Whitesburg, and it's open to the public. The pavilion hosts other community events in town too, and WMMT has opened its Main Street studio to the public for events like this spring's fund drive finale.
Learn More
Want to help keep all of this going? You can donate to Appalshop directly, or if radio is more your thing, give to WMMT, which holds fund drives in the spring and fall. To hear about new films, AMI's next round of applications, or what's coming up on WMMT, check Appalshop's website and its news page, where updates go up about once a month.
