Two Communities, Distinct Stories: 2025 Neighborhood Story Projects
This spring, two Neighborhood Story Project (NSP) teams are engaging in place-based research to ask questions and uncover answers about their Tennessee communities. Dr. Amie Thurber created the NSP framework “out of a concern that those most affected by community change often have the least voice and power in shaping the place they live.” Each three-month project follows the same process of building foundations for collaborative research, conducting place-based research, and documenting and presenting their findings. However, the research questions and the resulting projects are unique to each team.
The teams consist of two trained co-facilitators and 8-12 residents. Over the course of 12 weeks, they will choose a research topic, collect data, and share their findings in a public program. The 2025 NSP cohort includes teams from the Robertson County History Museum in Springfield, TN, and the Morgan County Genealogical and Historical Society in Wartburg, TN.
Training
Over a weekend in February 2025, the co-facilitators for each project met with Dr. Thurber and Humanities Tennessee staff in Nashville to learn the NSP framework, hear from past project teams, and gain momentum for the work ahead. The training included a grounding in the research behind the NSP process, working through the activities in the Facilitator Guide, figuring out administrative details, and making initial plans for the projects.
Robertson County History Museum
Janet Palmore and Nikki Moreland are co-facilitating the Robertson County History Museum Neighborhood Story Project. Palmore, the museum’s director, views the project as a first step in engaging the community’s fast growing Hispanic population. In her initial research, Moreland, a museum volunteer, found that according to the census numbers, the Hispanic population of their area has quadrupled in the past three decades. However, both facilitators find that the Hispanic community is underrepresented in their town’s civic life.
Palmore hopes this project “fosters a stronger sense of connection and belonging within the community by giving our Hispanic neighbors a platform to share their stories and traditions…I just want to create an opportunity for deeper understanding and appreciation among all the residents here in Robertson County, and I hope to be able to see how we can better serve them within the museum as well.”
The pair have been meeting with community stakeholders and forming their working group with plans to start the three-month project at the end of March 2025.
Morgan County Genealogical and Historical Society
Derek Hawn and Jill Jones-Lazuka are the co-facilitators for the Morgan County Genealogical and Historical Society NSP. Hawn, a museum volunteer, has an interest in Morgan County’s waterways – specifically changes that have been occurring to life along the Emory River. Jones-Lazuka, the organization’s president, suggested doing an NSP about the river in conjunction with their museum. Their NSP is unique among previous projects because it encompasses life in a county-sized rural area as opposed to a concentrated neighborhood.
Hawn hopes their NSP will result in a project that says, “This is what the Emory was. This is what it did….this is why your family is here. This is everything moving on up into what people are doing nowadays.” He’s also hoping that the recorded interviews the group will conduct will become a continuing resource for the museum because “this might be the only time [interviewee’s] stories are ever heard. And what better way to have it archived [so that] their voice can still be heard years down the road?”
The Morgan County group started almost immediately after the Nashville facilitator training. Hawn said they had an easy time recruiting their 12-member working group after asking around their community and already have interest from people willing to be interviewed.
