Gerry Roll, Hazard Perry County Community Ministries

"Building community may be personal, but it’s contagious. Once you start, it spreads like wildfire."
- Gerry Roll, Hazard Perry County Community Ministries

Read transcript from August 29, 2003 Leadership Talks Archive

Join Leadership Talks on Friday, August 29, 2003 at 1 pm EST for a live, online interview with 2002 Leadership for a Changing World awardee Gerry Roll, Executive Director of the Hazard Perry County Community Ministries (HPCCM), a community services organization that helps families in need live safe, self-sustaining, and independent lives.

Roll has served as executive director of HPCCM since 1991. Her most significant achievement, she believes, is helping her community understand the need for linked services. In order to achieve self-sufficiency, people need decent and affordable housing — but they also need high-quality, affordable childcare, good-paying jobs and decent health care. "I don’t accept the idea that we can discuss opening a new factory without addressing child care," says Roll. "It all goes together."

In just two years, she brought the community together to create Comer Haven Crisis Center, a homeless shelter two blocks from City Hall. Today, that serves more than 1,500 people annually — providing shelter, food and family support services. HPCCM has also created a support program for families at risk of becoming homeless, and opened three new child-care centers. "Through community organizing and building partnerships, we have developed one of the most highly regarded early childhood programs in the state. Our centers are locally controlled, family oriented and community based. These children are going to school ready to learn," she says.

Under Roll’s direction, HPCCM developed a transitional housing program that provides a continuum of services for families transitioning from homelessness to self-sufficiency, and even to home ownership. Over the past three years, a tenant based rental-assistance program has housed more than 25 homeless families. Roll’s work has changed Kentucky policies; as a result of the example set by her organization, the state now distributes all non-entitlement emergency shelter money to rural areas that have built their own shelter facilities and created continuums of care. With Roll’s guidance, the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky promoted the creation of the Kentucky Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

Her central leadership challenge is to maintain the system she and others have created over the past decade. "I am preparing for that by constantly reminding my community and myself that it’s not all about me, it’s about us. Together we built it, and together we will sustain it," Roll says. She is developing new leadership among the staff of Community Ministries and in the community at large through the board of directors and other partners. "In five years I want to be right here in Hazard, Kentucky, continuing to build good systems that work, offering people good options so they can make good choices."

For more information

Leadership for a Changing World profile

HPCCM website

"The Truth About the Real Beverly Hillbillies," Gerry Roll