Fellow Spotlight: 2022 Heller MPP Segal Fellow Catherine Gooding
“Because of the Segal Program, I gained insight and connections that helped me build a career I’m passionate about, making a meaningful impact in West Virginia!”
Catherine Gooding serves as the Economic Development Specialist at the West Virginia Brownfields Assistance Center at Marshall University. Her work bridges environmental justice and economic development by focusing on the remediation and productive reuse of vacant, abandoned, and contaminated properties. “I get to dabble in a lot of varied topics,” Catherine explains, “from housing to small business development to creative placemaking—all rooted in environmental health and sustainability.”
What drives her most is the opportunity to collaborate with communities across West Virginia. “I love my job because I get to work with cool people in small towns all over WV and be part of bringing their dreams for their communities to life,” she says.
Currently, Catherine is engaged in several impactful initiatives. One of the most significant is her involvement in the Appalachian Community Transformation (ACT) Now Coalition, a multisectoral network focused on economic diversification and community development in southern West Virginia’s coalfields. Through this coalition’s Accelerate WV project, she and her colleagues are supporting 16 grassroots teams as they develop tailored economic resilience plans. Catherine is piloting a site reuse planning process that she hopes to expand across more communities in the future. “It’s been exciting to test this process with our ACT Now teams and think about how we can replicate and scale it,” she notes.
Another emerging focus of her work is the issue of vacant school buildings, a pervasive problem across West Virginia. Catherine recently convened a vacant school taskforce with several institutional partners to address the wave of school closures in recent years. “In just the past eight years, 84 public schools were approved for closure,” she points out, “often robbing small communities of their local identities and critical resources.” Her team is currently in the research phase, aiming to eventually present policy recommendations to the state legislature to either reduce future closures or facilitate the reuse of these buildings.
Catherine graduated from the Heller School during a pivotal time in her field. Federal COVID-19 recovery packages like the American Rescue Plan Act and Inflation Reduction Act funneled historic levels of funding into rural and disadvantaged communities, including those she works with in West Virginia. However, she notes that the landscape has shifted in recent months. “Resource availability has become a lot more uncertain, with even some committed, in-progress grant dollars being taken back by federal agencies.”
This uncertain environment has reaffirmed forCatherine the importance of collaboration and coalition-building. “It’s a challenging moment which has highlighted the importance of coalition work and collective impact,” she reflects. Together with partners, her team is deeply engaged in evaluating their impact and refining their mission. “Sharing expertise, making connections, and collaborating on projects is more important now than ever before.”
Catherine credits the Segal Fellowship with helping her define her career path. Entering her Segal Summer Internship at the the Center for Coalfield Justice (CCJ), she had only a “vague idea” of how land use and environmental concerns might intersect with economic justice in Appalachia. “My internship gave me the language to describe that interest and a window on how those issues come together in real life,” she says. It was through that formative experience that she discovered her passion for environmental remediation and justice.
During her second year as an MPP student at Heller, Catherine used Segal’s Professional Development Funding to return to West Virginia for the Small Communities, Big Solutions conference. That event marked a turning point. “It was that conference that first introduced me to the ACT Now Coalition in its early stages and many of the colleagues I now have today.” She still attends annually. “It’s always a cool moment of reflection to think about how far I’ve come since that first one that Segal helped me attend as a student.”
Fellow in Action Highlights
Learn more about how our Segal Fellows are also making a difference across fields and throughout the COVID pandemic.
Segal Fellow COVID-19 Frontline Workers
Segal Fellows Election Spotlight