Judy Bonds Center for Appalachian Preservation

The Judy Bonds Center for Appalachian Preservation, named for our late executive director and 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, serves as Coal River Mountain Watch's community center, volunteer housing, office, and sustainable economic demonstration site in Naoma, WV. At the solar-powered Center, we are growing a half acre of industrial hemp and have beehives and a garden, across the street from the Naoma post office, in a community long impacted by the coal industry. Here we host visiting journalists, writers, and filmmakers to see mountaintop removal firsthand. We house short- and long-term volunteers and interns who assist our work, and we host visiting student groups for tours and service projects. The Center serves as headquarters for the Tadpole Project to clean up area streams and roadsides, the Coal River Environmental Education for Kids (CREEK) program, the Show and Tell Energy Education and Policy (STEEP) project, and our work monitoring sites for pollution events and violations. The Center serves as home to “Voices for Appalachia – A Portrait-Story Project - Written and Narrated by Hundreds”. The Judy Bonds Center also hosts community meetings, cultural events, parties and showers, the county bookmobile, and the mobile rabies clinic. With our battery backup, we can continue serving the community in events such as power outages and natural or industrial disasters.

If you’d like to reserve the Center for a party, shower, reunion, meeting, or other event, contact us at coalriver@crmw.net or 304-854-2182. We have a large kitchen and plenty of seating with café booths, tables, and chairs. Visiting student groups can use our dorm-style lodging upstairs, where we also have more kitchens, bathrooms, and living rooms.