What a year we’ve had! When we sat down as a staff and looked at what we accomplished, we thought it was important to share. Lots of hard work, but none was possible without the support we received from our friends along the way. Here are the highlights of what the James Baker Hall Foundation (JBHF) accomplished in year one:

Ironwood Writer’s Studio students gave a reading performance and art display recently in Harlan, Kentucky. Keeping kids engaged in Appalachia is difficult because of the issues around transportation. The Hindman Settlement School’s Literary Department led by Melissa Helton works to provide year round opportunities for their writing students.

_{PHOTO CREDIT: Tyler Barrett}

During the Kentucky Book Festival in November in Lexington, Jonathan Hall, Director of Youth Programs & Volunteers at The Carnegie Center, co-led a workshop in the room sponsored by the foundation and Spalding University’s Creative Writing Program and it peaked our interest in what they were doing with programming for young writers.

We concluded our first fundraising event in grand fashion sitting on top of the leaderboard at the Blue Grass Community Foundation’s GoodGiving Challenge! What a week we had and our friends came through in a big way.

“We are very excited about the great response we had from friends of the foundation,” states Managing Director Larry Pemble. “We’ve worked hard to spread awareness about our work and we couldn’t be happier about the support we received.”

For the past year, the James Baker Hall Foundation has been supporting the Write to Recover program at the Bullitt County Detention Center. Director Bobbi Buchanan works with the Kentucky Department of Corrections Substance Abuse Program to teach female inmates expressive writing as a way to deal with emotions.

You probably would know his voice from KET, but these days Bill Goodman is far from a TV studio. For the past eight years, Bill has led Kentucky Humanities, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. And it all came about over his love of books.