Last year, several museums and humanities groups came together to form the Eastern Kentucky Humanities Commission.

The group gathered for its first conference this week in Morehead, at a time when federal funding for museums and libraries is up in the air.

More in this.

I got a phone call one day from a gentleman who said his name was Dustin, and he just wanted to come visit my museum.

He said, I just want to meet to, get to share some ideas.

And I said, sure.

So we set up a meeting and they wanted to get all these different museums and historical societies connected together, which I think is something we've needed for many, many years.

So I was like, I'm in.

That's a fantastic idea.

Today, obviously, is our inaugural conference of the Eastern Kentucky Humanities Commission.

Our very first one, ten months ago, we embarked on a journey that we knew would change the course of the humanities in eastern Kentucky.

We didn't know exactly how.

We have, several of our, organizations over eastern Kentucky that are 60 out of, organizations out of 40 counties that we try to cover.

But several of them are here today, not all of them.

We have Bath County, we have Fleming County, Carter County, Louisa Estill County, to name a few, Mason County, Ashland, just to name a few.

All of these organizations, humanities, historical societies, museums, all of these directors, curators are here.

Scholars, historians, you name it, they're all here today.

And we feel like it is a very valuable thing, to preserve and to promote and to bring awareness, just general awareness of in our communities.

And, with these wonderful people.

Networking today, as we see working together, pulling resources, ideas, different things of that nature.

We can really see us become a bigger and a greater force than than what we have been previously.

I definitely think we need to stick together with the fear of those budget cuts.

It hasn't affected our museum directly so far.

So we're very thankful for that.

But I know there are organizations that are going to be hurting.

So, yes, having these friendships, helping each other reach out to grants and other potential funding is very important to something like this commission, where there's all these new friends that I've made today I think will be very beneficial.

Like Dustin told me, he's like, we're hoping, you know, if you do a program, you can say, hey, this would be a great program at a museum as well, or I have this traveling exhibit.

It would work wonderful for a museum.

I think this is just all beneficial to everybody.

A lot of our organizations are nonprofit organizations.

Therefore, they, they basically run on funds and donations from their communities and from private corporate donors.

What what have you.

And, we are just really working together to pool our resources for, grant writing, networking, things that people are in and know of that other people don't necessarily know, and just hoping to ensure the integrity of our history and our culture.

My hope after today's.

But everyone that is handed knows, okay, we're not alone.

We're we're an army basically.

After today.

So we have people to turn to when we have questions, when we have problems, we have these resources available.

We have traveled 32 out of 40 counties in the last ten months.

And every community has a personal story.

Every community has something that they can bring to this region.

Just resources all together that we could pull from one another, and we could just really make this region bigger and better than what we are today.

The Eastern Kentucky Humanities Commission plans on recruiting more groups to its cause this summer.