Neighborhood Story Project

Since 2004, the Neighborhood Story Project has worked with public schools, grassroots organizations, community-based museums, and other important cultural institutions to create books, exhibits, events, and courses that explore how individual life histories and creative practices are connected to the broader cultural and historical dynamics of the city and the world. We believe in the power of cross-cultural conversations and co-creativity to strengthen our communities.

Following our mission of "Our Stories Told By Us," the Neighborhood Story Project invests in long-term, creative partnerships that use the methods of collaborative anthropology to create books, exhibits, public programs, and cross-cultural exchanges. For 16 years, we ran a cornerstore in the Seventh Ward as a workshop and gathering space but had to move out due to severe damage from Hurricane Ida in 2021. It has taken a long time to find a new home, but have now been welcomed by the International Center at the University of New Orleans. It seems like good timing because our documentary film, Tukki: From the Roots to the Bayou, won Best International Documentary at the African International Film festival this year (See the trailer above). We are dedicating this year’s Give NOLA to help renovate the new space and continue to build on our projects: 

• Build an open-sourced, community-based database of our oral histories, photography, films, and music.

• Launch Subtropique, a bilingual, international journal to connect our communities in New Orleans and around the world

• Continue to produce the All Saints Day community altar and concert (free and open to the public) in the fall, and the New African Orleans Festival in the spring.

• Support collaborations between New Orleans and Senegal in our work with Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors.

Testimonials

Since their founding in 2004 The Neighborhood Story Project has used the art of collaborative ethnography to create a vast collection of community-based stories in south Louisiana and beyond. The organization, in partnership with the University of New Orleans, creates portraits of the region by working with their collaborators to move the contours, planes, and angles of a place out onto a cultural canvas. They layer creative nonfiction and in-depth interviews, artifacts, folk and fine art, photographs, and music, among other materials, to craft an immersive space for learning and examination. For many years, The Neighborhood Story Project has turned their books into exhibitions and programs where their audiences are not only observers, but participants, who are able to connect with the lives and narratives presented, and can come away with a sense of how life histories are seated in wider social and cultural contexts. The Neighborhood Story Project often revives and preserves histories which may have been overlooked by mainstream media, and of places that are otherwise at risk of disappearing. Their ethnographies form the basis for art, publications, and performances, creating a new historical record of a place. --Prospect New Orleans, Yesterday We Said Tomorrow

Firmly rooted in community and clearly aligned with NSP's longstanding credo: "Our Stories Told By Us," Le Kèr Creole is ethnography as it should be-by, with, and for the people. This is a generative rather than an extractive method. It is less about the production of academic knowledge or expertise, and more about what happens when we position and share Black history and culture as "an offering to the future" (p. 88). This is a timely and powerful gift-particularly as anthropology re-centers itself in the ongoing strike for freedom. --Rebecca Carter. Anthropology & Humanism

It is not your typical ethnography. Rather it evokes the emotional, multi-sensorial engagements of powerful persons and personalities, tensions and intentions, deeply felt. The many authors and contributors to Fire in the Hole have conveyed the spirit of creative culture-making. This is history as lived, and we are privileged to hear it from those who made it." --Henry Drewal, African Art historian in a review of Fire in the Hole