Last summer, 34-year-old Bijoulea Finney and her husband Drew packed up everything they owned in Austin, Texas, and headed East. They’d just become the owners of a 75-acre homestead in southwest Virginia, outside Floyd. “I had never been to Virginia in my entire life,” Finney said. “And so we brought […]
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About 400,000 children across the U.S. are growing up inside the foster care system, overseen by government employees who are overworked, and agencies that are historically underfunded. When the opioid epidemic hit, foster care systems saw a massive increase in the number of kids in their care. West Virginia has […]
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On his family’s farm in Randolph County, West Virginia, 20-year-old Collin Waybright has a hobby that’s very different from streaming TV shows or playing video games. Waybright is one of the state’s youngest falconers. To be a falconer, you have to love birds and Waybright fits the bill. “They all […]
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While the president has asserted that children are “almost immune” from COVID-19, public health experts say many things are unknown about how the virus impacts youth, particularly long-term. “The short answer is that we do not know,” said Dr. Mariana Lanata, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who works at Marshall […]
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When you think of some of West Virginia’s biggest economic drivers, extractive industries like coal or natural gas are likely the first things that often come to mind. But agriculture has been a fixture in West Virginia’s economy for hundreds of years. Yet today, farmers struggle to keep their business […]
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Resourceful. Self-reliant. These are some of the values many people who live in the mountains pride themselves on. But could we sustain ourselves? As part of our occasional series “Wild, Wondering, West Virginia,” Lana Lester of Wyoming County submitted her question to the Inside Appalachia team: “Could West Virginia Be […]
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