Peggy Mathews, Dome #9, 1972 to 1974
When we built the Domes in 1972, I was 18 and had finished my freshman year. I worked on the Mold Crew with Joan Stern, and the project architect Dave Wheeler was our supervisor. Joan and I became “dome mates” by default and though we didn’t know each other going into the project we became good friends and our friendship continues to this day.
I moved out of Baggins End to East Davis in 1974 and then graduated in 1975 with a degree in Applied Behavioral Sciences (ABS), which is basically a degree in community organizing and development. As part of the ABS program, students were required to do an internship at a human services agency, a union, or a non-profit organization in the Spring quarter of their junior year. I got an internship at the Highlander Research and Education Center in east Tennessee, which opened up a whole other world of activism to me. Highlander is internationally known for its work in the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s – the anthem song “We Shall Overcome” was created at Highlander.
The action research I did for Highlander took me all over the Southeast and Appalachia and opened my eyes to what life was like for the majority of people living in this country. I was profoundly affected by my experience at Highlander, and it put me on the path of working for social, economic, and environmental justice in rural America.
After graduating in 1975, I returned to Appalachia, to eastern Kentucky, where I worked for room and board at a handweaving center. My plan was to live and work in Appalachia for a couple of years, and then return to northern California where I would raise horses on a ranch. But then…… in October 1976, I met Jim Thompson, who I married 10 years later in 1986, and I got a paying job as a community organizer with Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM, pronounced “sock ‘em”) a coalfield citizens group in east Tennessee fighting strip mining in their communities.
Those were exciting times in my field of work when the anti-strip mining movement was growing. It was 1977 and, due to pressure from anti-strip mining groups in the West and Appalachia, Congress was considering national legislation to regulate the industry. I accompanied SOCM’s president to Washington, DC where he testified before a Congressional subcommittee that was drafting what would become the Surface Mining and Reclamation Act of 1977, which was signed into law by President Carter. Then in 1981 when Reagan became President, government funding for nonprofit organizations dried up, and access to funding for social and environmental justice groups became a serious issue. SOCM sent me to a 10-day intensive training on grassroots fundraising where I learned how to raise money from individuals, and how to train grassroots leaders how to raise money in their communities. I became SOCM’s first grassroots fundraiser and built its fundraising program.
From then on, my professional work focused on raising money and teaching others to raise money for social change. I was the founding executive director of Community Shares of Tennessee, a statewide federation of social, environmental and economic justice organizations raising funds together through employee giving campaigns in the workplace. I retired from Community Shares in 1997 to become a consultant and trainer in organizational management and fundraising. Twenty-five years later, Community Shares is going strong under the leadership of the person I recruited to succeed me, and it is now raising well over $500,000 each year for social change organizations in Tennessee. I am very proud of that.
On the personal front, my experience living at Baggins Ends laid the foundation for how I would choose to live – IN community with others. In the early 80’s, Jim and I joined a co-housing community called the River Farm, located on 200 acres in the mountains of southwest Virginia on the banks of the Clinch River. In 2000, we began building a house on the River Farm. We had professionals build the foundation, put on the roof, put up the sheet rock and finish it, and install the electrical and plumbing, and we did all the rest. It took us many years to complete, but in 2008 we moved to our new home and we love it!
Most of the 21 members of the River Farm live off-site, while Jim and I and three other members live on the property. Several of the adult children of some of the River Farmers, including my step-daughter Kelley and her husband
Yancy, are now members and shareholders (the River Farm is a sub-S corporation). We have monthly work weekends where we come together to work on various farm projects and then have fabulous community meals in the “common house”. If someone wants to join the River Farm, they must attend work weekends and our semi-annual board meetings for one year. Sound familiar?
Between 1991 and 2014 I lost both my sisters to cancer, leaving me as the last surviving daughter. So when I retired from my consulting practice in 2015, my new job was managing the care of my parents. They were divorced and lived on opposite ends of the country, so I was going back and forth between Los Angeles where my father and step-mother lived, and southwest Virginia where my mother lived in a co-housing community for seniors, just 45 minutes from our home. In September of 2019, my mother died at age 97. And just 4 ½ months later in early February of 2020 (just before our country shut down for the pandemic) my father died at age 98.
I feel very blessed to have this life I lead. I have two wonderful and talented step-children (ages 55 and 57), a kind and loving son in-law, and two very smart and talented granddaughters (ages 14 and 16). I love being retired. We have a big garden and Jim puts up all the vegetables we grow. When we’re not gardening, we are either looking for dead trees to cut up for firewood, or getting together with our River Farm neighbors for work and play.
Photo: River Farmers Spring 2022 after a day of spitting wood. Son-in-law Yancy on the left, Jim behind me in red, and step- daughter Kelley next to me. My 2nd Kiva is in my lap.
