The Ozark Skillshare Project is an ongoing initiative to bring educational resources and self-organizing skills to the residents and overall community of Alton, Missouri. In 2018, we hosted two summer camps, which were two week-long concentrated organizing efforts during which participants helped administer a survey on educational needs of community members. We also held several community events during these two weeks, and had a lot of discussion on the background of the community and rural America in general.

This zine records the experiences of participants in the Ozark Skill-Share Project’s summer camps. We put this together to show people what we did, and also to show you what our experience of rural America is and that change there is real and possible. In total we had 6 campers join Thomas Sallings and myself. This zine includes responses from 5 of them, plus our responses as organizers.

Future developments of the project for 2019 are forthcoming. For now, I hope you enjoy this zine! I’ve done a fair amount of work and research in rural America and have a lot of thoughts on the urban/rural divide in the U.S. If you’re interested in that subject, you might like to read my article “Why White Activists Need to Go to Red States.”

The zine is available as an online document here.