Alumnus Daniel Henninger ’05 found a love for the mountains at Lees-McRae; now he works to give back to the people of the region
After graduating from Lees-McRae with a history degree in 2005, Daniel Henninger went straight into a master’s program in Christian education at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. When he graduated with his new master’s degree in late 2008, the country was facing a recession that made finding work for newly graduated college students extremely difficult.
What Henninger couldn’t see at that time, however, was how the ways he overcame that struggle, and the different skills and areas of expertise he gained along the way, were all integral to his current career of giving back to members of his community through his work with Appalachia Service Project.
Following graduation, Henninger worked as a general contractor and a youth minister as he moved around the southeast. When his final post as a youth minister brought him to Kingsport, Tennessee, he began volunteering with Appalachia Service Project, a home repair organization that serves Central Appalachians and is based out of Johnson City. Now he works at the organization full-time.
“It’s kind of a mixture of stuff that I fell into, like construction, as well as the ministry aspect that I went to school for,” Henninger said. “We serve the people of Central Appalachia primarily. Typically, it covers West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and east Tennessee. A lot of the area is coal country, where the coal mines got shut down, or folks have been laid off on disability because of black lung and other injuries. A lot of them live in mobile homes. Some live in homes that were built by the coal companies as cheaply as possible, and they now own it because the coal companies aren’t allowed to own it, but they’re still very cheaply built and were put up very fast. Now they’re falling down.”
The goal of Appalachia Service Project, and Henninger’s personal goal, is simple: to make homes throughout Central Appalachia safer, warmer, and drier, a goal that the organization accomplishes through home repair, disaster recovery, and new-build programs.
Henninger wears many hats throughout different parts of the year. His role with the organization involves everything from approving plumbing and subcontractor projects, recruiting and vetting summer volunteers, managing the organization’s construction consultants (the professionals who guide the volunteers), compiling and updating training materials, and even finishing up repair projects the summer volunteers were unable to complete.
While the work he does at Appalachia Service Project doesn’t relate directly to his degrees, Henninger said his time at Lees-McRae prepared him for life and professionalism beyond just the lessons he learned in the classroom. Being at Lees-McRae, he said, instilled within him a love for the mountains that impacts his life every day and led him to this work with Appalachia Service Project.
“My wife took me back up to Lees-McRae a couple months ago and we watched the Summer Theatre production ‘From the Mountaintop: The Edgar Tufts Story,’ and my story is kind of similar to his. Edgar Tufts was going to be this big minister and do these big things. He went to the mountains and fell in love with them and stayed for the rest of his life building up everything there,” Henninger said. “You can love the mountains, and love being in them and hiking and everything, but not really care about the people that live there. Looking back at that Edgar Tufts story—and I had read ‘And Set Aglow a Sacred Flame,’ the book about him—he went there just to do an internship, and he ended up founding a school that became Lees-McRae, and founding Grandfather Home for Children that is now part of Lees-McRae, and founding Grace Hospital. He loved the mountains and the area, but he also loved the people, and that’s kind of what we do and what draws me to Appalachia Service Project.”
