Following President Lyndon Johnson's State of the Union message of January 8, 1964, in which he announced his War on Poverty, CSM staff member Milton Ogle organized a group of students from Berea College to help repair a one-room school in Harlan County, Kentucky.

[5] A prototype summer project was tested by an AV staff member and three students, who spent eight weeks in Clay County, Kentucky, providing recreation and remedial work for the children in a remote hollow.

The new funding allowed Ogle to hire staff, including Gibbs Kinderman, a recent Harvard graduate who had taken part in the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi in 1964.

Also in spring 1965 the AVs received a $139,000 community action demonstration grant to support 150 college students for an eight-week summer project in eastern Kentucky.

[7] As the AV students and staff became more deeply involved in poor rural communities, they began to see local politicians and school leaders as part of the problem rather than allies in uplift.

During the previous winter, field coordinator Steve Daugherty became concerned about a landslide from a strip-mine bench that threatened a house at the head of Jones Creek,[10] above Verda on the Clover Fork of the Cumberland River in Harlan County.

Daugherty contacted the original Knott County members of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGSLP) that had generated widespread publicity when the Widow Combs resisted strip-mine operators, and 80-year-old Dan Gibson threatened the bulldozers with his rifle in 1965.

For their part, the McSurelys spent eighteen years in various courts, first to get back their personal papers and books, and then suing for financial damages various individuals who had held them illegally, with only limited success.

[17] Congressional leaders were becoming concerned by the controversies generated by OEO's community action programs across the country, and in 1967 Oregon Representative Edith Green authored an amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act, attached to an appropriation bill, which assured that local political officials would have more influence on CAAs.

Walls issued a statement challenging the constitutionality of KUAC and the legality of the hearings, noting the topic of the water system would be better suited for a public utilities commission.

[19][20] Although the KUAC hearings caused serious difficulties for the AV, the most immediate casualty was Thomas Johns, the liberal president of Pikeville College, who faced what was most likely the only conservative student revolt in the United States in 1968.

Unconstrained by the earlier history of one-room schoolhouse service projects in Kentucky, the West Virginia staff moved immediately into the contention over poor people's representation on the county community action agencies.

Their greatest success came in Raleigh County, where insurgent groups gained control of the CAA board and named Gibbs Kinderman executive director.

Kinderman and Tom Rhodenbaugh formed Designs for Rural Action, which supported the Black Lung Association and the Miners for Democracy movements which helped Arnold Miller become the reform president of the United Mine Workers of America following the murder of Joseph Yablonski.

Federal funding for the AV was over,[26] and working part-time, Walls attempted to downsize in a fashion that could successfully spin off legal services to Appalred, the Grassroots Craftsmen co-op to the Commission on Religion in Appalachia (CORA) under Ben Poage, and welfare rights activities to local groups.