BUSINESSES & ORGANIZATIONS ›› pivoting
BEN DUVALL - IRWIN W ELKINS , RANDOLPH COUNT Y Virtual Ramps
Elkins Depot Welcome Center takes its festival online. what do you dowhen your organization decides to cancel its largest event of the year? At the Elkins Depot Welcome Center we decided to turn our community event into an interactive online experience. Now in its 12th year, the Ramps & Rail Festival has grown to 50 food and craft vendors and thousands of potential attendees. This would obviously exceed the mandated limit on public gatherings, so, in the interest of public health, we made the decision to postpone the festival until 2021. Our followers were understanding but disappointed, and we wanted to find a way for our community to participate in some other way. Karen Carper, a volunteer at the Elkins Depot Welcome Center and the Highlands Trail Foundation, came up with the idea of a virtual ramp celebration. Our virtual celebration involved two social media contests to keep people talking about ramps: a giveaway and a cookbook. We put together a gift basket of ramp-themed items from local businesses Naylor’s Hardware and the Delmonte Market and local artist Brad Basil, including digging tools, a cookbook, an apron, ramp salt, and more to encourage people to collect and cook their own ramps. To enter, people simply had to like our page and tell us their favorite recipe, memory, or tradition involving ramps. More than 200 people from all over shared their favorite ways to eat ramps, memories of digging ramps with family, and stories of the strong smell that ramps are known for. We also decided to collect recipes using ramps for a cookbook that will be made available at next year’s festival. We invited local restaurants, friends, community members, and all our social media followers to submit their best recipes, and we have received more than 50 recipes from more than 40 people. We will give a free copy of the cookbook to everyone whose recipe is included. In the end, our promotions succeeded in getting hundreds of people involved in the mission of the Ramps & Rail Festival: supporting our community and celebrating our region’s unique wild vegetable that is the ramp.
Signs of Creativity City Neon stays essential as conditions evolve. If you’re a third-generation owner of a family-run business and the company hasn’t laid anyone off since it was started in 1963, you feel motivated to keep things going. That was the situation Chris Atkins of City Neon in Morgantown was in when the economy started slowing down in March. City Neon is a sign-making company that was created by Chris’s grandfather. So he came up with an idea that would help other businesses during the pandemic and, at the same time, would mostly use materials he already had on hand and keep his 35 employees busy. By April 2, City Neon was offering face shields and sneeze guards on Facebook. The face shield was a single curved piece of clear plexiglass, banded around the forehead, great for food service workers and doctors and dentists. The sneeze guard was a rigid expanse of clear acrylic for installation at cash registers and other points of contact between workers and the public. As the economy began to re-open in early May, City Neon was there for that, too—offering to make temporary signs that would explain businesses’ social distancing operations to customers.
16 wvl • the community issue 2020
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