Kendy Alvarez
Conference Co-Chair
Kendy Alvarez is a civic and economic development professional with a career focused on strengthening rural communities through entrepreneurship, cross-sector collaboration, and inclusive leadership. Born in Trinidad and Tobago and raised in rural Pennsylvania, she brings both lived experience and professional expertise to her work advancing place-based economic strategies that support small businesses and local vitality.
Professionally, Alvarez is the Program Manager for The Covation Center, Inc. where her focus is the Historically Disadvantaged Business Grant. She served as Economic Development Coordinator for Ferguson Township, where she supported development of the Economic Development, Growth and Innovation Strategic Master Plan. She is also the Principal of Chaconia, LLC, a consulting practice that applies systems thinking to assist organizations in strengthening operations, align strategy, and scale impact. Her work has included guiding organizational realignment, facilitating multi-stakeholder feasibility efforts, and building sustainable partnerships between communities and institutions of higher education.
Throughout her career, Alvarez has been a consistent advocate for entrepreneurship as a cornerstone of rural economic resilience. She has championed small business development and entrepreneurial ecosystems through collaborations with Brighter Financial Futures, Bucknell University, and Susquehanna University, and has organized and supported programming that connects entrepreneurs to capital, mentorship, and community-based resources. Her approach recognizes that in rural and small-town contexts, entrepreneurship is not supplemental to economic development—it is foundational.
Alvarez’s commitment to community development is reinforced through extensive board and volunteer service. She serves on the boards of Partners for Campus-Community Engagement, Lewisburg Downtown Partnership, and Lewisburg Neighborhoods, and volunteers with organizations including CommUnity Zone, the Union-Snyder Hunger Coalition, Penn State Extension Ag Council, and WellSpan–Evangelical Community Hospital. Through these roles, she advances education, workforce development, food security, health equity, and community cohesion.
A Policy Fellow with the Open Discourse Coalition and a board member of the Pennsylvania Municipal League and Pennsylvania State Mayors Association, Alvarez is also committed to strengthening civic trust and fostering dialogue across differences. She is a 2024–2025 alumna of the Appalachian Leadership Institute, where she deepened her focus on regional prosperity and rural leadership.
Alvarez is a proud Bucknell University alumna and President Emeritus of the Black Alumni Association, where she continues to mentor students and emerging leaders. She currently serves as Mayor of Lewisburg Borough, where she brings her professional background in economic development, entrepreneurship, and coalition building to public service.
Shaunna Barnhart
Local Arrangements Chair
Shaunna Barnhart, PhD, is Director of the Place Studies Program at the Bucknell Ecology Center. As Place Studies Program Director since 2015, she works with a number of collaborative networks on projects that address areas such as: Environmental policy and action, Community revitalization, Environmental justice and community planning, Human dimensions of renewable energy systems, and Place-making, nature connections, and sustainability. As part of this, she manages relationships and research with field sites, including the Coal Region Field Station, which is a network of over 25 partner organizations in the Lower Anthracite Coal Region that collaborate with university partners on community-identified priorities in revitalization, history and heritage, and future directions. Collaborative projects include faculty, students, and staff at Bucknell as well as non-profits, K-12 schools, libraries, and local, state, and federal governments and agencies.
Kenton Butcher
Conference Co-Chair
Kenton Butcher is an assistant professor of English at Bucknell University. He specializes in African American and South African literature and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent essay, "Spatial Passing: The Revelation of Rural Blackness in Zakes Mda's Cion" appeared in the "Black Appalachia" special issue of Callaloo in 2024. In 2025-26, he worked with Dr. Paul Barba and Dr. Khalil Saucier to organize a year-long program at Bucknell, "Black Appalachia and the Search for Nowhere." He recently received a fellowship from the Institute of Citizens and Scholars to complete his monograph, Illegible: Black Appalachian Literature and Self-Publishing. He has also served as a board member for the Tablertown People of Color Museum (https://tablertownmuseum.org/) in his hometown, Tablertown, Ohio, since 2023.
Paul Barba
Program Chair
Paul Barba (Ph.D., U.C. Santa Barbara) is associate professor of History, affiliate faculty of Critical Black Studies, and associate director of the Humanities Center at Bucknell University. He is the author of the prize-winning book, Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), and the editor of Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries, 1700-1860: Bonds of Rebellion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). He also is co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press series Borderlands and Transcultural Studies and the Bloomsbury Publishing series Understanding Marronage: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Engagements.