The Jackson County Commission allocated just over $60,000 of American Rescue Plan funds to AWAKE Children’s Advocacy Center for the organization to finish renovation of its current building.

As a stark reminder of the toll that substance abuse has taken on families across the country and across Western North Carolina, a small group of Macon County residents will travel to Washington, D.C., later this month to help erect a temporary cemetery made up of hundreds upon hundreds of hand-painted tombstones.

Maggie Calhoun Bowman’s family has spent the last 17 years making peace with the fact that they will never know how she ended up dead in a rain gully, covered over with leaves and a pink coat.

Perhaps not unique in that the reasons for both its popularity and its controversy are intertwined like the limbs of two grapplers struggling to gain the advantage, dwarf wrestling provides jobs where they’re scarce, boosts local economies with events and promotes positive examples of how dwarfs aren’t so different from their average-sized peers. 

As an associate professor of physics at Western Carolina University who specializes in astronomy, Dr. Enrique Gomez may be used to looking up at the sky, but as the president of the Jackson County Branch of the North Carolina NAACP, he also concentrates on issues that are a little more down to earth.

Economy of scale tends to lean toward effectiveness of action, and that’s a fact that three environmental advocacy organizations in Western North Carolina plan to take advantage of over the coming year. By January 2015, the Jackson-Macon Conservation Alliance, Western North Carolina Alliance and the Environmental Conservation Association, known as ECO, hope to have merged into one organization with a new name and a familiar purpose.