I’ve been fielding some questions lately about why the state of West Virginia awarded the College of Joseph the Worker an economic enhancement grant. Some people think it is odd that we gave money to a college based in Steubenville to expand its operations into our state. I thought I’d take a moment to clarify the reasoning behind the grant.

The College of Joseph the Worker is a very innovative institution. It is a college that offers a robust education in the Western intellectual tradition, with students earning a bachelor’s degree that focuses on the meaning of work, the duty to family life and the obligations of citizens for civic engagement toward the common good. At the same time, the students learn a skilled construction trade, such as carpentry, HVAC or electrical. This model is a response to the general failure of normal universities nowadays to prepare students for real life. After touring their workshops many times, and examining what they’ve done for Steubenville, this is what I found compelling about this college: They offer an amazing alternative for our young people. Students are educated intellectually and vocationally in the trades: The head and the hands are brought together to form independent, hard-working citizens with real skills. I think this is exactly the kind of institution we want and need more of here in West Virginia.

But the college is even more unique because as the students learn their skilled trades, they work on real job sites, doing real, productive work for the community. To this end, the college runs numerous development operations — renovating old buildings and constructing new ones. During the course of their four-year program, the students put in thousands of on-the-job training hours on these projects to beautify the communities they work and learn within. But, and this is the really interesting part, because the college is a nonprofit organization focused on the common good of the community, these projects on buildings in the community are selected not merely for economic profitability, but for much more than that — they are selected because they are beneficial to the people who live in the actual community.

In Steubenville, for example, the college has renovated dilapidated houses and buildings on historic North Fourth Street, which are now beautiful structures. These beautiful projects have brought about the burgeoning renaissance in Steubenville’s long-struggling downtown. Families have now moved in and a great deal of small businesses have now opened up. I want this same thing for Weirton and Hancock County, because not only will the college offer scholarships and paid on-the-job work to train our own young men and women with real skills, that training itself builds up and beautifies the very communities in which it takes place. Again, this is a very innovative and responsible model — just the sort of thing we need in West Virginia.

The matching grant awarded to the college was designed to commit it to expand across the river into the Weirton area to do just that. The college has committed to establishing training facilities in Weirton, which will be built soon. Shortly thereafter, it will launch renovation and new construction projects to help beautify parts of Weirton and northern Hancock County. Eventually, it will develop a full-scale campus in our state. It is important to note that the entirety of the grant will be invested in Weirton and Hancock County. And they have committed to invest far more than just the initial grant amount on these projects. In fact, they have matched it by more than double the amount.

But this initial monetary investment in Hancock County is really just the tip of the iceberg. Once established in Hancock County, the college isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to exist in Hancock County as a self-sustaining entity: It will continue to train local West Virginia students and continue to work to beautify our communities, in perpetuity. This means more and more buildings restored, more and more construction projects completed and more and more good, honest, hard-working and well-educated West Virginia boys and girls graduating from their program. It will help some of our young people remain in our communities, earning good income through fulfilling work, and help beautify our local area for our people. To this end, the grant is a good investment — especially considering the unbelievable amount of waste that the state government so often engages in. This grant is aimed at the actual common good of our local communities here in West Virginia, at helping an organization that has actually committed to that common good — and one that has a proven track record of delivering on that commitment.

It is, of course, true that the college is currently an Ohio-based organization. But, as everyone from the Weirton area knows, the common good of Weirton and Steubenville are often bound together. In many ways, they are one metropolitan area, and so the movement of the college across the river into West Virginia is natural. What is more, economic enhancement grants partly exist for precisely this reason — to bring out-of-state organizations into our state.

That is one of their basic functions. To that end, this grant is no different. I know this because about three years ago, I wrote the bill that became law, which created the fund for these grants in the first place. Establishing this grant fund was an idea I had at the time — to save and set aside surplus funds to enable resources to go toward nonprofits and municipalities, to strengthen and beautify local communities (and contrary to what many media journalists have claimed, it is not a fund dedicated to water and sewer money.) The overall point, though, is that now this trade college is no longer merely a college in Steubenville. It will now also be a college in West Virginia. This was the whole reason for it — to provide good investment in our area of West Virginia.

These are the reasons for the grant. These are good reasons. They are much better reasons than those that are given in defense of the great deal of money spent on all sorts of government programs, dubious nonprofits and entrenched bureaucracies in Charleston. It is hard not to see, in many of the criticisms from media journalists of this grant, so many sour grapes. Many liberals in the media seem to want us to spend our resources on liberal things. All one has to do is look at the hundreds of millions of state subsidies given out to large multi-national corporations, who care nothing for our local communities, but which promise to deliver corporate “green” energy jobs. And liberals, especially many in the media, are often mad when our state’s resources are brought home from Charleston to be used locally to build up non-liberal projects, instead — especially organizations that support strong community bonds.

Well, too bad. The aim of this particular trade college — to train young kids with real skills to become flourishing independent men and women, all the while, beautifying our communities while doing so — is far more in line with the loving ethos of family and community that our local citizens hold so dear, over and against what many of the liberal elites — who run so many of our administrative bureaucracies in Charleston and the media — typically value (which is usually anything other than home and hearth). It’s not too much of a surprise then that they don’t like this college’s investment in our local area of West Virginia. In fact, it makes me even more sure that it is a good thing — for it has all the right enemies.

In the months and years to come, I think it’ll become obvious that this grant was a good investment for Hancock County, and that its critics were more interested in scoring political points than producing results for what is genuinely good for our beloved, and yet often struggling, local communities. This project was more than six months of work that was well thought out — and I’m confident of a positive outcome from it for our people.

(McGeehan, a resident of Chester, is a Republican state delegate)