This story by Taylor Sisk appeared on The Daily Yonder on March 4, 2026.
The first time Gwen Johnson laid eyes on Ben Fink, he was on stage at Kings Creek Volunteer Fire Department performing a shape-note song.
Johnson was a board member and a driving force of Hemphill Community Center, a venerable gathering place in the Eastern Kentucky community of Jackhorn. At the time, in 2016, the center was in financial distress. Johnson was desperate to keep it open and had heard “there was this guy running around here with some money to spend.”
That guy was Fink. He’d recently arrived in the region and was serving as creative placemaking project manager for Appalshop, a grassroots cultural and media organization based in nearby Whitesburg. He’d helped found the Letcher County Culture Hub, which was offering grants to local organizations.
Was there money available for the community center?
Johnson had been told by a friend that Fink would be at this function at the fire station. “I went in, and I asked my friend, ‘Where’s he at?’ And he said, ‘He’s right up there singing.’ And I’m, like, ‘Who the… is this guy?’”
Clearly, he wasn’t from around here.
Fast forward to today, and the Hemphill Community Center is abuzz. It hosts live events, holds a domestic-abuse support group, has an afterschool program, and is home to Black Sheep Brick Oven Bakery, whose employees include drug-court participants.
Fink, 41, spent five years at Appalshop. In addition to helping revitalize the community center, the Letcher County Culture Hub’s array of projects included the largest nonindustrial solar energy project in the region’s history. These successes entailed bringing together people of different political persuasions and particular interests.
“We recognized that, actually, our lives are richer for working with people whom we had previously written off,” Fink said.
Fink is an artist, a teacher, a consultant, a researcher, and a writer. He is an organizer, a facilitator – a cross-cultural convener. He’s worked in communities across the country, rural and urban, staking out a common ground on which to build. Though presently living in Philadelphia, he remains firmly rooted in rural.
Upon meeting the people of Letcher County, Fink would often disclose to them that he was “a communist Jew from the Northeast.”
“I’d kind of slip it in once we had established some rapport.”
“It works, I think, because it names what’s on their mind already,” he said. “They know I’m a weirdo from far away, who probably thinks very differently from them about politics and culture and religion and a whole bunch else.
“But what I’ve learned is, no one is asking me to think or be the same as them. They’re just asking me to be up-front and honest about who I am and what I’m about, and I’m genuinely curious and interested in who they are and what they’re about.
“Plus, it gets them to laugh, which is always helpful.”
Left for dead in the decline of the coal industry, the people of Letcher County are fashioning a future. Fink discerned his role here.
“He made himself busy in the community,” Johnson, now co-director of Hemphill Community Center, said. “He showed up.”
‘Not As Helper and Helped’
“At my heart,” Fink said, “I’m a singer and a theater-maker, and all the other stuff that I do is kind of an offshoot of that.”
He grew up in a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. His dad is a journalist-turned-housing advocate; his mom, a social worker-turned-attorney. From his parents, he gained “a sense of there is right and wrong, and you’ve got to fight for what’s right.”
At 17, he directed “The Cradle Will Rock,” a 1937 socialist labor opera. In his 20s, he grew frustrated with “the limits of a lot of activist theater, and activism more generally,” he said, “a kind of approach to public life where you know what’s right, you gather everybody around you who agrees with you, and then you go make everybody else wrong.”
It wasn’t working for him because not much was getting done. “In many contexts, that kind of approach to public life is more effective at making you feel good and secure than it is at actually making a lot of change.”
While in graduate school at the University of Minnesota (his dissertation was on culture wars), he became involved in performances that were in the Theatre of the Oppressed tradition, an approach to theater that’s used to promote social and political activism, to resolve conflicts, and as a community-building tool.
Among the theater companies he worked with in Minneapolis was zAmya Theater Project – which includes actors who are, or have been, unhoused – producing plays about homelessness, economic inequality, and related issues.
He came to embrace the notion that “we can talk not as helper and helped, server and served, privileged and less privileged, but as two people who care about some of the same things, come from somewhat different backgrounds, but also have some similarities, and can do stuff together as equals – and that was earth-shattering for me.”
Through this work, Fink met Michael Kuhne, a writing professor and Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner. What made Fink so effective in this work, Kuhne said, was that he “believes in his core the radically democratic principles” of this unique approach to theater. And he navigates through it “with humor and humility.”
As a kid, Fink had attended an arts camp in rural southern New Jersey called Appel Farm, which is also home to the first successful Jewish farming community in the country. Throughout his years in Minneapolis, he returned there to teach in the summers. It offered his first in-depth experience of rural culture.
Further immersion was soon to come.
An ‘Affirmative Culture’
Arriving in Eastern Kentucky to begin work at Appalshop, Fink very quickly became attuned to a communal sense of pride.
“There was what I later learned to call an affirmative culture here,” he said. “There was this palpable sense of, ‘Yes, we are poor; yes, we have been exploited. Yes, all of these negatives and deficits, but we are really proud to be here.” This made a profound impression. “I had never before felt proud to live where I lived.”
He quickly gained a sense of belonging, but “Nobody was expecting me to be like everybody else here. And, frankly, if I’d tried, they would have seen through me immediately as a faker, which I would have been.”
His position was, “I’m going to stand strong in who I am, but also laugh at myself a little about it, give you the room to laugh with me about it, and be really, truly, and genuinely curious about who you are and what matters to you.”
He joined Roadside Theater, an ensemble of storytellers and theater-makers under the Appalshop umbrella. Having flourished in Eastern Kentucky for more than four decades, the company explored opportunities for partnerships in other regions.
Thus was born the Performing Our Future Coalition. By the time Fink left Appalshop in 2020, partnerships had been forged through the coalition with folks in the Rust Belt, the Black Belt of Alabama, urban and rural Wisconsin, and predominantly Black West Baltimore: “Making plays together, making music together, training and organizing together, recognizing common issues.”
Another initiative he helped launch was Hands Across the Hills, a dialogue and exchange project between residents of Letcher County and Leverett, Massachusetts, likewise a rural community, but, in Fink’s words, a “liberal, wealthy” one.
The seed of the project was a presentation Fink gave at an art and social justice conference in St. Louis just after the 2016 election. That presentation was subsequently published as an article on Bill Moyers website and reprinted in several publications, including Salon.
It was, “as we say in community organizing, an ‘agitation,’” he said. “The election showed that rural people have power, and so we who care about things like justice and equality for all have two choices.”
“One is we can continue what we’ve been doing, which is some combination of ignoring, brushing off, and villainizing people from rural places. Or we can actually show up, pay attention, listen, and work together. And if we do choose to show up, pay attention, listen, and work together, there is a ton of potential for small ‘d’ democracy across a lot of lines that we think are inviolable.”
The residents of Letcher County and Leverett held disparate views on many issues and similar ones on others, including that this nation was not beyond repair. They learned from one another.
“The Leverett people were shocked when, among our delegation, was a young trans person, and someone literally said to me, ‘They have trans people there?’ And I said, ‘They’re everywhere.’”
‘Save the Dumb Hillbillies Foundation’
Gwen Johnson has suffered her share of “do-gooders” passing through Letcher County: “The Save the Dumb Hillbillies Foundation, that’s what I call them,” she said, “and there’s been scores of them.”
Fink, she came to learn, was fully present. He listened; he heard. He continues to return to Letcher County, working as a consultant on a variety of projects.
Fink’s work regularly harkens to his Ph.D. studies and an analysis of what he calls the “framework of a culture war.”
“What do I mean by the framework of a culture war? I mean the script that’s been handed to you by somebody in the 1%” – the wealthiest; the perceived elite – “that says, ‘That other person, that other group, is your enemy,’” he said. “One group is told that another group is coming for something that deeply matters to them.”
“And as long as both groups take that script at face value and don’t question it, they’re both going to lose, because the goal is always divide and conquer.”
It’s essential, Fink urges, that we “recognize where we do and do not agree, and specifically question this assumption that because we disagree on one thing it means that we are mortal enemies.”
He acknowledges there are exceptions – “If you are an actual active hatemonger, that is a different conversation.” – but in most cases, there’s common ground. And “we are not going to build the majority that is necessary to end a rule by hate and fear if we do not work with the people we have been taught to hate and fear.”
Johnson suggests that too often underserved communities have “a dreaming problem.”
“The coal companies told us what we could have, and it was limited,” she said. “Our vision couldn’t go beyond what we were told we could have.” Within the walls of the Hemphill Community Center and throughout Letcher County, a community shoulders against those limits. Collectively, they look beyond.
Fink has learned much from this community, including a lesson from Pastor Misty Johnson of Ignite Church in the town of Neon: “She likes to say, ‘People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.’”
“Ben is caring,” Gwen Johnson said. And “he doesn’t have any trouble dreaming.”
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.