Conferences come and go, jazzing people with ideas and inspiration. Often, the buzz soon fades with the return to the workaday world.
But the Try This West Virginia conference sends people home with the promise of boosting their ideas and inspiration with a little seed money and informal membership in a growing movement of healthy lifestyle change agents spread across the state.
"People come to Try This to trade ideas and inspire each other. When they go home, they have two weeks to apply for a mini-grant," said co-director Kate Long.
In the past three years, Try This has awarded 154 mini-grants of up to $3,000 in 42 of the state's 55 counties to get local programs up and running - in some case, literally. The grants have seeded everything from running and walking clubs, community gardens and school-based health centers, to biking clubs, farmers markets and adult sports leagues.
Individuals and teams awarded grants are assigned a helper, a person who checks in with them and tries to make sure they have what they need to pull off their project.
The many programs that have sprouted across the state are part of a long game with a pretty ambitious goal, Long said.
"Our stated goal for Try This is to help - and 'help' is an important word there because we're not the only ones doing this - knock West Virginia off the top of the worst health lists," she said.
The mini-grants have helped spark a host of hyperlocal and regional programs and efforts by people who have often never contemplated seeking a grant or launching a local project.
"In many cases, the team members have never written a grant in their lives or considered themselves leaders," Long said. "In that sense, our real mission is creating a network of grassroots healthy community leaders."
This year's Try This conference takes place June 2 and 3 at West Virginia Wesleyan, in Buckhannon. Part of the growth of the effort is the availability of "Second Stage" grants of up to $15,000 to build larger projects or expand existing program models to additional schools, communities and counties.
Knocking West Virginia off the top of the list for its high rates of obesity, diabetes and other chronic illnesses that shorten people's lives and ripple through families will take awhile, Long said.
"That's going to take at least a decade. But our intermediate goal is to create a network of average West Virginians who know each other and inspire each other and believe that they have the power to roll the ball forward," she said.
Point Pleasant resident Gabe Roush attended the 2016 Try This conference, intent on learning more about developing biking as a community fitness activity in his hometown.
Roush, 27, had just been elected to the Point Pleasant City Council before coming to the conference. "The platform that I ran on is increasing recreation here in Point Pleasant, targeting younger generations," he said.
After attending and speaking at breakout sessions on biking at the conference, Roush and friends went on to earn a $1,000 mini-grant. They formed a group called the Point Pleasant Bike Trail Project Committee, with the aim of eventually building a bike trail throughout the town.
The group, while still intent on promoting biking, has morphed into one that encourages overall physical activity inspired by what they learned at the conference, Roush said. They used the mini-grant funds to buy outdoor exercise equipment such as pull-up bars, parallel bars, a rock-climbing wall and other activities, creating what they dubbed the Fit Pit at the city's Harmon Park.
The Fit Pit opened recently, but they will stage a formal opening with a ribbon cutting Saturday, Roush said.
Roush said he hopes the group's efforts inspire younger West Virginians.
"It's easy to get swallowed into the pessimism in our state," he said. "West Virginia is an aging state as is, and it seems there's a lot of time not a whole lot to offer people under 40 years. ... If I could help improve that, I was happy to do that."
Chuck Talbot recently earned one of the first round of Try This Second Stage grants - one for $8,500. The grant will help him and an assistant, Doug Penn, expand to other schools and other students an already successful Putnam County program teaching elementary school youth how to grow and market their own food.
"All kids should have this in elementary school," said Talbot, a West Virginia University Extension Service agriculture and natural resources agent for Putnam County.
"We've got over 1,200 kids learning how to grow their own food," he said. "When we're looking down the road for food security in Putnam County, this is where we're going to find our farmers and horticulturists and our nutritionists."
Humans are the only species that don't teach their offspring how to find food or get food, Talbot said.
"Right from the get-go, other species train their young. But we've lost that generation of Mamaw and Papaw that don't work in the gardens anymore," he said. "So, all of our food comes from the grocery store, and that's a bit misleading."
Talbot's work is a good example of the aim of the Second Stage grants, Long said.
"We are taking organizations and groups that have a great track record in a given area and giving them a grant to mentor other West Virginia communities," she said,
Stephen Smith, a co-director of Try This West Virginia, said they've been "blown away" by the response to the mini-grants. That led to the Second Stage grant program, which has received funding help from the West Virginia University Health Sciences Center.
"The quality of the programs is growing," he said. "So, it created almost a gap, a need for more substantial work to happen."
The response to the conference and its blossoming grant programs can be seen as a counterweight to the pessimism and often-voiced despair about declining opportunities in the Mountain State, Smith said.
"The pain in West Virginia that people feel, and the worry we all have for our kids and communities, is real and rational," he said.
"There is, we believe, another side to that coin which is the resilience and the hunger and the sort of cold anger that comes from having experienced that pain and frustration and disappointment and all of the injustices that have been visited upon the state," he said.
Yet that same pain, worry and fear, Smith said, "is also a source for innovation and hope and resilience, and we saw that with the mini-grants.
"I've had the opportunity to be a community organizer in a couple other places around the country, and what people are wiling to do for just the chance to make a difference in their communities is not like anything I've seen any other place I've been."
Groups interested in the conference and both grant programs can visit the conference website at trythiswv.com or email stephen@ourfu turewv.org or kate_long@hotmail.com.
Reach Douglas Imbrogno at douglas@wvgazettemail.com 304-349-3017 or follow @douglaseye on Twitter.