Applications for the 2024-25 RUX cohort are open!
Apply for this one-of-a-kind place-based creative leadership program by Monday, March 11.
Starting today, Monday, February 12, applications are open for the 2024-2025 Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange cohort!
Each year, RUX accepts 50 Kentuckians into a distinguished cohort that is diverse in thoughts and beliefs, geography, and their experiences of age, ability, expertise, gender, race, sexuality, culture, and class. Those accepted into this nationally-recognized program will complete the leadership curriculum over two years, while traveling across Kentucky and building collaborations with their fellow cohort members.
Now in our tenth year, RUX has become known for enabling proactive conversations about Kentucky’s most complex challenges. Last year, the cohort learned about issues such as the mounting challenges of scale facing Western Kentucky farmers, the disproportionate environmental justice issues facing Louisville’s West End, and the ongoing issues of access and health equity in Appalachia.
They learned about these issues by spending time in those communities alongside those most affected by these challenges. Through these firsthand accounts, cohort members returned home with an insider perspective on the challenges facing Kentuckians, the extraordinary solutions that community members have devised, and how those may be applied to their own communities.
It’s through these relationships that RUX helps Kentuckians see Kentucky’s communities with a new perspective, which ultimately helps them see their own community differently, along with their role in it. Alumni say that RUX helped them develop the confidence to enact change at home, and build the skills and networks to turn their vision into reality.
With 275 alumni and 133 institutional partners, the RUX network includes some of the state’s most celebrated artists, chefs, entrepreneurs, farmers, community development leaders, and poets, alongside prominent elected officials, lawyers, teachers, healthcare workers, and tradesmen.
Together, we are working to build relationships across difference and uplift a Kentucky story that is as exciting, diverse, and complex as Kentuckians. In 2024, the RUX cohort will visit Campbellsville & Taylor County from May 17-19, and Owensboro & Daviess County from June 14-16. Cohort members will also have the option of attending a relationship & partnership-building weekend with RUX alumni at Carter Caves State Park in August.
To learn more and apply, visit www.kyrux.org/apply. The application period will close on Monday, March 11.
ABOUT THE KENTUCKY RURAL-URBAN EXCHANGE:
The Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange (RUX) is a creative leadership program that strengthens professional and intercultural competencies while building connections across racial, economic and geographic divides — towards our shared future. RUX Community Intensives change the context of professional collaboration to help members deepen bonds, inspire stronger accountability, and create the conditions for innovation.
Now in its tenth year, this partnership between Art of the Rural and Appalshop has earned national acclaim in the Christian Science Monitor, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, US News and World Report, and national conferences such as the Rural Women’s Summit and the Kennedy Center Arts Summit. Past host communities include Campbell, Daviess, Fayette, Estill, Harlan, Hart, Jefferson, Kenton, Knott, Letcher, McCracken, Muhlenberg, and Warren Counties. The Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange (RUX) has served more than 275 Kentuckians from 60 counties since 2014.
About Appalshop:
Appalshop is a non-profit multi-disciplinary arts and education center in the heart of Appalachia producing original films, video, theater, music and spoken-word recordings, radio, photography, multimedia, and books. Their education and training programs support communities' efforts to solve their own problems in a just and equitable way. Each year, Appalshop productions and services reach several million people nationally and internationally. http://appalshop.org/
About Art of the Rural:
Art of the Rural is a decentered, collaborative organization with a mission to resource artists and culture bearers across the country to build the field, change narratives, and bridge divides. Our initiatives are long-term, trust-based efforts that co-create relationships and impacts across the traditional dividing lines of culture, land, and lived experience. http://artoftherural.org/