Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp., venture-capital firm born from War on Poverty, has created or kept 25,000 jobs

Robert Shaffer (H-L photo by Tom Eblen)

One of the most successful of the War on Poverty programs, which has created or maintained 25,000 jobs in southeastern and southern Kentucky, celebrates its 50th year this month, Tom Eblen writes for the Lexington Herald-Leader.

It was the brainchild of Robert Shaffer, now 88, a New Jersey resident inspired to help the poor by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. When the Johnson administration offered him a job in the Office of Economic Opportunity, Shaffer, inspired by Harry Caudill's book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, insisted he be sent to Kentucky.

In 1968 Shaffer moved to Eastern Kentucky and helped create Job Start, which later changed its name to Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp., a non-profit that helped create small companies owned and run by low-income Kentuckians. Though it works with large partners, most of the time it works with startups, entrepreneurs and farmers, helping them with tech issues and providing small government and private loans, Eblen writes. Jerry Rickett, a native of the region's Wayne County, has led the organization since Shaffer retired to Berea, Ky., in 1989.

"In the past half-century, Kentucky Highlands has helped create or maintain 25,000 jobs in its 22-county service area of Southeastern and Southern Kentucky," Eblen writes. "About 15,500 of those jobs still exist. The organization has assisted more than 800 businesses and helped them secure nearly $423 million in financing." A dinner tonight in Somerset, Ky. will honor Shaffer and several local companies KHIC helped create.

The program has faced challenges from the beginning: in the 1960s local bigwigs didn't like developments they couldn't control. These days, low-income people often struggle with drug abuse, poor credit, and high debt from medical bills and loans, childcare, and transportation to work, Eblen writes. But Shaffer thinks the program has been successful because its low-income participants are involved as full partners from the start, and KHIC's board always has low-income members. "That’s part of what makes us work," he said. "They help us stay relevant to the folk we’re trying to serve."