Our Founder

Prior to being adopted I was an orphan in Connecticut, with little hope of having any sort of future, nevertheless a family or community I could call my own. When I was adopted in 1990 by a man in Pocahontas County named Jud Worth, I was also adopted into a community, where neighbor helping neighbor was not just preached on Sundays, but a way of life that every member of the community embraced. While growing up in Pocahontas County, I had the opportunity to see other communities in the state, where neighbor helping neighbor was also a part of the culture that was very much treasured.

By 2000, I was living in Huntington and attending Marshall University. Huntington for a young man like me was a very exciting place to live. However, the community dynamics were different than what I accustomed to in “small town West Virginia.” Huntington was a larger city and had its fair share of social and economic problems.

Then the events of September 11, 2001 occurred. Since the terrorist attacks on that fateful day, I have seen a decline in community spirit, and new found fear of one another. During my travels through every West Virginia County in 2005, I also started to see mom and pop stores that for years use to be social centers of the community fall to hard economic times. Even the community I was raised in, Minnehaha Springs just was not the same.

In October of 2008, I finally had enough of seeing my community continue to become divided from economic hardship, and the fear we had of one another. I decided it was my time to give back to West Virginia what was giving to me, love, support, and hope. This is when I came up with the idea of the “West Virginia get to know your neighbor movement.”

I began to understand that if we as people could come together and see that we are all connected, then we can start to see the shared strengths we possess as individuals, and start to address some of the problems in our towns and cities. However, this can only happen by first, getting to know each other.

I hope you can do your part for your community by joining this idea, an old mindset that gave our communities in West Virginia a foundation, a foundation where neighbor helping neighbor and civic responsibility was a way of life.

Wayne B. Worth