Building Community with A Greater Applegate
By Angelique Stewart, Co-Executive Director — A Greater Applegate
The Applegate River winds through the Applegate Valley between Jacksonville and Grants Pass.
This 35-mile-long valley has about 20,000 residents and is split between Josephine and Jackson
counties—and a small section in California’s Siskiyou County. It contains five recognized
unincorporated communities: Ruch, Applegate, Williams, Wilderville, and Murphy.
The complicated patchwork of geography and multiple, sometimes conflicting, government
agencies can challenge residents’ sense of a shared identity and make advocating for themselves
difficult. The Applegate lacks many basic services and community supports, including health
care, public transportation, internet and cell phone service, and support for entrepreneurs and
businesses. To help the Applegate work on some of these issues and be an even better place to
live, A Greater Applegate (AGA) works to build community and economic development in
Applegate Valley.
AGA held dozens of listening sessions in 2021–2022 in order to identify issue areas and projects
that local residents want to work on together. Working from the framework developed in those
listening sessions, we focus our work in community building around four concepts:
1. Making connections among people
2. Building capacity to be better able to serve the local community
3. Guiding community-led action so that the local community decides what work we are doing
and is involved in every project
4. Shepherding community-building culture to foster and encourage Applegaters’ sense of unity
and pride while creating more resilient communities
Using these four concepts to help businesses and organizations in the Applegate, AGA has
developed 3 Networks: Business, Nonprofit, and Food and Farm. The Business and Nonprofit
Networks hold meetups to encourage peer-to-peer learning and conversation, and AGA offers
many workshop opportunities throughout the year on topics ranging from marketing to
accounting to social media. The Food and Farm Network also has get-togethers and runs our
Farm to Food Pantry program, which buys meats and produce from local farms and ranches and
donates it to the two Applegate Valley food pantries.
Our community-led Working Groups include Wander Applegate (sustainable tourism), Health and Wellness, Education, Outdoor Recreation, Forest and Fire, the Arts, and History. Each of these groups has chosen to work together to achieve some projects outlined in our listening sessions. Our new website, wanderapplegate.org, launched earlier this year to promote sustainable tourism by highlighting some of the places to go and things to do in the Applegate.
Forest and Fire has great cross-agency support from BLM and USFS, and they were awarded some collaborative grants for fuels reduction to reduce wildfire risk, and Outdoor Recreation is working on a comprehensive online recreation map for all things Applegate.
Within the Applegate’s many small neighborhoods, we build community at the hyper-local level by sponsoring gatherings and potlucks, and we assist with things like setting up emergency phone trees, neighborhood listservs or Facebook groups, and mapping assets and resources for emergency preparedness. We also award yearly Innovation Grants, which have supported a wide-array of community projects in the past 4 years, all in the $1,000–$2,000 range.
We are planning a “Stay Local in Jacksaphine County” week in mid-September, with fun
activities and events in Applegate Valley, including games, bands, and a movie night.
Watch our website, www.agreaterapplegate.org, for details, and come join the fun. 
The Team at AGA!
