How a community in Southern Virginia is helping locals develop digital skills
“Most people don’t think of ‘South Boston, Virginia,’ when it comes to technology, but it’s there,” says Darryl Kent.
Kent is a native of South Boston, Va., population 7,500, in the southern part of the state. It’s just after noon, and he’s on his lunch break, talking on video chat about his responsibilities working for an outdoor furniture company based there. The shelves behind him are lined with PC towers awaiting maintenance; he’ll run diagnostics on them to get them back into service.
Amid the flashing lights, the whir of the machines and the fans cooling them, Kent will open his laptop to check the cameras and the doors of the facility. He’ll then call up a list of new hires and departures and get to work updating their access privileges in the company’s system.
“If it involves technology,” Kent says, “I have my hands on it.”
Manufacturing is a big industry in South Boston, where it’s a 50-mile drive to the nearest big city. But luxury outdoor furniture brands in remote areas need information technology (IT) expertise to function in today’s increasingly digital economy.
Kent says he had known his entire life that he wanted a career in IT. As a kid he threw himself into anything that involved technology, including robotics, audiovisual editing classes and extracurriculars. Later, he moved 160 miles east, across the state, to study computer science at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. Three years into the program, he had to return home to South Boston where he enrolled at the IT Academy at Southern Virginia Higher Education Center (SVHEC). In early 2021, he got a job as a help desk analyst for his current employer, which has offices around the world. And he continues to draw on his experience from the academy today. “I’ve had many a time where I’ve just been hit with a random problem,” says Kent. “And that hands-on knowledge from the academy is something that I can always look back to and immediately grasp onto.”
Our guest blogger, Zachary Whitlow (pictured left), is a Community Revitalization Specialist at the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD), working closely with the agency’s Virginia Main Street (VMS) program and Rural Community Development Initiative (RCDI). He loves helping communities across Virginia unleash the power of small-scale, grassroots revitalization to build a sense of place and ensure economic vitality!
EMPOWER Broadband and the Southside Planning District Commission (SPDC) have submitted a grant application to the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development’s Virginia Telecommunications Initiative (VATI) to provide universal fiber-to-the-home broadband coverage, over a 36-month timeline to remaining unserved and underserved areas in the Counties of Brunswick, Halifax, Mecklenburg and the southern portion of Charlotte. 
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A new face has joined the team of the Halifax County Industrial Development Authority
A large-scale hemp processing and cannabinoid (CBD) oil extraction facility, Golden Piedmont Labs, has begun production in Halifax County, playing a key role in Virginia’s No. 1 industry: agriculture. The processing plant is the first of its kind in Virginia.
James Gordon, the owner of Springfield Distillery, comes by his interest in whiskey naturally. “I grew up with memories of my father moonshining,” says Gordon, who opened his Halifax County distillery in August 2016. “My father is one of the first two private individuals in South Africa to get his license for distilling liquor. I get to tap into 25 years of distillery experience.”
