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The Partnership for Appalachian Girls’ Education (PAGE) was created almost 15 years ago with the mission to educate and empower girls so they can become leaders in a new Appalachia.
Its founder, Deborah Hicks-Rogoff, grew up in the area and saw for herself that mentorships and afterschool programming for young girls could simultaneously honor the region and show them a future of possibility.
Located in Madison County, the organization evolved from a dream to a reality now serving 75 girls annually on average with year-round opportunities. The organization is now looking to expand under new leadership. Hicks-Rogoff stepped down as the executive director last month, when she passed the baton to Rebecca Stephens.
Stephens has a background in education, having taught English in middle school and also at the college level in Johnson City, Tennessee. After teaching, she worked with Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, traveling the world to have conversations with students and educators about the teachings of human rights in the classroom. We interviewed Stephens to learn more about PAGE and the growing offerings of the organization. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EdNC: In your own words, can you tell me what the Partnership for Appalachian Girls’ Education is and why it was created?
Stephens: PAGE was created to empower girls and help them to become leaders and imagine what the future of Appalachia can be. It is bringing them into the conversation and bringing a kind of education, with opportunity and mentors that sometimes can be really hard to find in the area.
Deborah is just such a dynamic person. She was from western North Carolina and said, I want to take world class education and bring it to girls here and help give them other opportunities. She founded PAGE in 2010 with herself and three undergraduate Duke students, and they started in one room at the Spring Creek community center.
There were nine girls in the first group, and they began with a digital learning project, talking with seniors and telling their stories. It was just such an enriching experience for everybody. PAGE helps girls get connected within their local community and value the stories within that community.
PAGE is really intergenerational. You’ve got elders from the community coming in and teaching about quilt making, or people coming in and talking about aquatic ecology. Students are working with skills that were traditional and collecting stories from community members and making this huge story archive. They are seeing that their story matters, that the stories of their community members matter.
It’s not just saying, you know, you need education so you can go elsewhere and get a job. It’s acknowledging these stories are important. Your stories are important, and you can create any story that you want for yourself. It just empowers them so much, while still creating that strong community connection.
EdNC: At PAGE, there is a middle school program, a high school program, and college internships. Within these categories are there different projects?
Stephens: So the afterschool program is 12 weeks per session and meets every Wednesday at the local middle school. Our afterschool program is pretty dynamic, so one of the things that we do is we invite community partners to come and facilitate different after school events.
For example, we’ve got The Kudzu Collective coming in, and they’re native to Madison County, and they’re going to be showing the girls how to cook with kudzu and how to make different plant prints.
One of our other community partners (are) Marshall Native Gardens and the Madison County Library. The girls are actually going on a field trip to the library where the gardens are, and they’re helping put together an illustrated guide to all the plants and making a scavenger hunt for people who come to the library.
It’s this reciprocal relationship between what the community partners need and what we can give them, and then what they can give to us.
Other times when we don’t have a community partner coming in, students get to choose what they want to do, and that’s so important, right? We work with Madison County Schools, and they let us have a space there where we can work out of at the middle school. There’s this great blend of just kind of fun, but also learning that happens at the afterschool program.
As for summer, there’s one summer session for the middle school girls and one summer session for the high school girls. College interns come and they help us to facilitate these summer sessions. The interns are able to pull the girls off in smaller groups, and they lead them in literature circles and other kinds of activities. And then the girls come together at other points as a whole group.
The interns are pulled from colleges like Berea College, Duke University, Mars Hill University, UNC Asheville and are able to come and stay with us for the whole summer session.
EdNC: You’ve mentioned partnerships with the school district and the library. Are there any other partnerships you use for transportation or any other wraparound services?
Stephens: For transportation we use Madison County School buses, but we pay the bus drivers for additional time. That’s one thing that PAGE does, is it’s a real value add to the community in a lot of different ways. One is through community partnerships, but also economically.
During our summer programming, we have our farm-to-table kitchen angels. We serve the girls two meals a day during the summer, and our farm-to-table kitchen angels work with local farms to source all of the food. So not only is the money going to locally sourced materials from farms, but the kitchen angels themselves make a very competitive wage, and they’re able to have summertime work. A lot of them are food workers from the Madison County Schools, and we pay them over the summer, so they have that extra income during the year.
EdNC: Could you tell me a little bit more about the STEM programming?
Stephens: That’s one place where we’ve really been growing our programming. Over this past summer, we had two local scientists come in and they offer an aquatic ecology workshop.
So the students went out to Laurel Creek and to other places, and they learned how to collect dragonfly nymphs and how to identify the different stages of the dragonfly development. They would go from collecting in the creek to the Laurel Community Center, where they had microscope cameras set up so they could measure the dragonflies at the different stages. They used a site called iNaturalist where they could upload their findings.
It’s a site that’s designed for a citizen naturalist, so the girls realized that they were producing something that wasn’t just valuable for what we were doing during the summer, but it was valuable within a larger scientific community. And then our documentary art specialist helped create cyanotypes from the pictures that they had taken. So it was just this whole interdisciplinary segment that PAGE offered during the summer session.
EdNC: Are you serving just students in Madison County?
Stephens: So originally, yes, but we started what’s called Mobile PAGE. It was really in its pilot stages last year. Our program director, Maia Surdam, worked with a woman named Fatima from Asheville’s south side community at a place called Delta House.
And so Mobile PAGE basically is taking our PAGE model of bringing this sort of literacy education, oral histories, and providing these really dynamic opportunities for girls and working with community partners to see where can they build on our expertise and knowledge, and how can we help them to facilitate a similar program where they are.
So we had that pilot year at the Delta House, and it went really well. We’re going to continue that this year as well and see if we can continue to grow that element of Mobile PAGE. The other place that we’re really trying to expand is with a group called La Esperanza, which is a grassroots community group that supports Latinx families in Madison County.
We’ve done pop up PAGEs with them before where we’re doing a small hands-on workshop, like cyanotyping, and they enjoyed that and loved it. And they’ve also referred us girls that they thought would be really interested in our summer program, and so we’re hoping to expand Mobile PAGE with La Esperanza.
EdNC: If there was anything you would want people to know about PAGE, what would that be?
Stephens: What I would most want them to know is the importance of these relationships, and it’s not just about education, which I think is really important. It’s about growing that sense of self. A lot of them are coming in, and they are shy or soft spoken, but by the time that they’ve gone through the program, they find this sense courage and confidence and community and voice and agency, and that they feel kind of the sense of family and connection.
I think sometimes in education, we can get really focused on data output, you know, are they succeeding in one class or another? This sort of holistic approach to girls education that PAGE is able to offer sets them up for a lot of success in the future, but it also strengthens the community where they are.
“I think one of the things that really drew me to PAGE was seeing that we’re inviting girls to reimagine what Appalachia can be. We’re saying you have the skills to be able to do that, and that Appalachia is important and it’s valuable, and you’re important and you’re valuable, and your story is important, so is the story of your family. I think that kind of depth is what sets PAGE apart.”
Rebceca Stephens, executive director of Partnerships for Appalachian Girls’ Education
Editor’s note: The Dogwood Health Trust and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund support the work of PAGE. They also support the work of EducationNC.
