Southern Virginia Development Program
Halifax Heritage Project
The History Beneath our Feet
What makes people love a place, and hate it? What makes them want to stay, and why do they want to get away? Why do some people come to a place and settle down, and go through others just as fast as they can? The answer is history.
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Projects that highlight a region's history and heritage promote educational excellence, support economic development, and promote local tourism. They provide strong reasons to protect the region’s cultural and natural resources. They can create a sense of place and civic pride. They can help communities to build a strong citizen base that is active and engaged in the life of the area. When the humanities do this sort of work they contribute to community development.
VFH would like to help communities to secure the necessary funds and expertise to make use of the humanities in this way, as a way of fulfilling its mandate to serve the people of Virginia by promoting the humanities. In the county of Halifax, Virginia VFH will undertake a carefully monitored program of funding and development, testing whether and how it is possible to bring several projects to bear in a community to create a 'critical mass' of humanities projects that help to move a community forward economically and culturally. It is developing the research expertise and the programming to conduct a pilot project that brings many resources – federal, state, local, and corporate – to bear on a community’s overall goals for cultural life and economic development.
A Sense of Place
A sense of "who we are" and "what we have" are two keys central to attractive, vibrant communities. They come from facts about the past, about the roots of now in the hopes of then. They come from appreciation of local natural and human resources, from waterways and farms to music and food. Each of these has a local flair and twist that people who live there love, and that people who come from away love to experience.
Every community has a history, and music, art, work, stories, and traditions that make it unique and sustain its people. Sometimes these histories have painful chapters that distort the community today. Sometimes traditions become outmoded or unproductive. The facing of such historical periods and the reworking of traditions to serve the present are also part of creating place, pride, and productivity.
People who take time to understand their past, reflect on the virtues of where they live, and assess what traditions they wish to pass on can create true communities, places that are in short supply in the world today.
Then they can present their true communities to the world, and easily develop many ways to carry on community traditions, from museums to historical plays and books to stories and music. In this way, they can become magnets for new but careful growth, retain their populations, and survive the ups and downs of the global economy. This is the model of the "humanities in local development."
Humanities Venture Capital
Communities need little financial or professional support to honor the past, understand the present, and carry on their traditions. These are part of community life, and people do them every day. But they do need financial support – and sometimes professional expertise – to document their history, rediscover those pieces that have been lost, interpret how their own history interweaves with the larger history of America and the world, and then present their community to the world that comes to visit it. This is not inexpensive, but it is synergistic; different projects can feed on and then promote one another, and soon an energy can build that carries the community into new areas of work and new grant possibilities. What is needed is money at the beginning that can get several projects involving different community groups engaged at once. This is "humanities venture capital" – funding concentrated in one community that allows that community to reach the takeoff point in the development of its cultural resources.
VFH sees this way of working as a new way of bringing the humanities to bear on the process of local development. We would like to help Halifax bring the humanities into their local development efforts by:
- working with the county to find new sources of funding;
- searching out whatever resources are needed to take advantage of those funding sources, and
- securing a cohesive package of grants for the area that would promote a developing public and community identity.
Halifax is a history place; it is rich in the past which still feels connected to the present there. It is rich in an architectural heritage that has been destroyed elsewhere. It is rich in rivers and natural resources. It is rich in the stories of people who have overcome great odds to live there and thrive. Most important, it is rich in people who care about it. More funds will allow citizens of Halifax County to make this clear to themselves and to those who come to visit and perhaps to stay.
As we move forward with projects in Halifax, we will keep track of a variety of indicators of success: local involvement; attendance at events; funds raised; programs conducted, and overall citizen and participant satisfaction. We hope that this process, carefully documented by Research and Education, will give us a method that might serve as a starting point for work in other parts of the Commonwealth.
