After teaching in Massachusetts for five years from 1912 to 1917, Dingman moved to Kentucky to establish the Smith Community Life School under the auspices of the United Presbyterian Church.

[1] James, originally from Canada, was a physician[2][3] and a devout Methodist, who encouraged his children toward humanitarian service,[4] while Mary, a specialist on working conditions for women, would become one of the most-known peace activists in the Inter-War Era.

[13][14] She instructed her students in providing social services in addition to education, including practical skills like community organization, health and sanitation programs, family counseling, as well as how to build and repair their school facilities.

[16] The CSMW was a professional organization of Progressive Era reformers, designed to allow social workers to meet and share strategies for improvements in the area.

[15] During the Great Depression, under Dingman's leadership, the CSMW expanded programs to include recreational activates to offset the stark realities of life.

[19] Dingman was one of the driving forces in pressing for an economic and social survey of the conditions in the Appalachian region and worked with Dean Thomas P. Cooper from the University of Kentucky to prepare a plan.

The first preparatory meeting was held in 1925, at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, but the results, Economic and Social Problems and Conditions of the Southern Appalachians, would not be published by the federal government until 1935.

[18] The Depression brought other changes for Dingman, as her sister Jeanette, mother of future Nobel Prize winner, John B. Fenn, and her family relocated to Kentucky after her husband lost his job in New York.