Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill COOPERATION In one of her early reports to a Woman's Board of Home Missions, the head worker of The Harlan County Community Life School in Kentucky told of a great opportunity for cooperation which was opening up to her and her associates. " Our storekeeper," she wrote, " is giving up his store, and the community hopes to take it over and run it on a cooperative basis. The mountain people are peculiarly at the mercy of their storekeeper, and if our venture is successful, it ought to be of great economic and educational benefit. " The cooperative store can be a great medium to stimulate the raising of produce and to help give the people the true value of their money in return. It is a step toward the brotherhood of man, and we are praying that our religion will be strong enough to stand the test of Christian cooperation." The young woman, a trained leader of social vision and deep religious purpose, realized that the great problems of the world may be staged in any one of these little hamlets. She counted it a God-given privilege to get into sufficient touch with the life of one small community to help it to help itself. Responding to her leadership, the people cooperated in the development of a better public school. A CommunityChurch was organized with a program of service for the whole community. Then there were added a self-supporting Sunday-school, with other Sunday-schools in outlying settlements; a community nurse who covered many miles in her ministry of healing; young men's and young women's clubs, promoting social life in the community ; a moving-picture machine; and the holding of inter-community gatherings, as, for instance, when the Smith community was hostess to all the surrounding country, during a great patriotic celebration on the Fourth of July. ...