Neighborhood Storytelling Practice Design Residency Fellowship
Application DEADLINE has been EXTENDED through Sunday, Oct. 29th (11:59pm)
Invest STL is seeking residents of neighborhoods within North St. Louis City to partner in co-creating a neighborhood storytelling practice. Specifically, we seek to recruit narrative artists, orators, multimedia artists, producers, and those who have made their own practices/rituals around keeping and sharing the stories of their communities.
Selected fellows will serve as independent consultants, not employees of Invest STL. For the estimated 16 hours per month requested over the 7 month co-design process, fellows will receive consultancy compensation of $12,000 total.
Invest STL facilitates investment in the power of people and their neighborhoods to create communities of justice and opportunity in places that continue to endure the legacy of systemic anti-Black racism. We seek to do this by generating trust-based, community-driven, place-based investments; investing in the regional community and economic development system; influencing policies and decision-making that advance equitable development; and reframing prevailing narratives in our region about predominantly Black neighborhoods and the people, power, challenges and dreams that they hold. Catch a glimpse of who we are and how we work here.
The Neighborhood Storytelling Practice Design Residency Fellows will be guided by Invest STL's Narrative + Communications Partner to form a collaborative team for a period of 7 months to develop a framework for the practice – dreaming, designing, and building a process for implementing a resident-powered neighborhood storytelling practice.
The Neighborhood Storytelling Practice is a resident-led storytelling practice that will aim to support everyday people in reflecting and daring to tell a more complete and nuanced accounting of their own experience within their predominantly and historically Black St. Louis neighborhood(s).
For generations, St. Louis has been constrained by the past and our identity is tied to and still influenced today by the reverberations of systemic anti-Black racism through our history, policies, and practices that brought on white-flight and the interstate highway system of the 1950’s, red-lining, the Delmar Divide, and a consistent drum beat of stories generated and circulated by the mainstream media chronicling the crime and blight north of that dividing line. As a region, St. Louis has a singular storyline for Black neighborhoods that is entrenched in misfortune and misdeeds from lead to finish, with limited recognition or curiosity for the beauty, genius, or power that is nurtured and persists within these communities. Our regional spatial view of Black neighborhoods is a monolithic block unworthy of closer view or distinguishing its parts for the 70 plus unique communities as they truly exist. This clipped and flattened shared misbelief ultimately holds regional healing and transformation at bay, leaving Black neighborhoods with an outsized shouldering of the region’s inertia.
We can no longer rely on traditional media outlets and a top-down approach that only enlists professionals, organizations, and institutions to tell the stories of our neighborhoods with the complexity and care they are owed. The path to weaving a tapestry of stories as rich as our realities demands an approach that enlists greater participation in our collective storytelling. Cultivating a neighborhood storytelling practice at scale will support our collective ability to replace the current prevailing narratives in our region of predominantly Black neighborhoods with narratives that inspire pride, engagement, personal agency, collaboration, community accountability, and public will. Nurturing a movement of residents growing in their own storytelling powers can elevate broader and deeper narratives that honor place shaping and place keeping from within our neighborhoods.
The work of re-framing our regional narrative is complex and takes many voices to resonate authentically. Invest STL has the vision, passion, experience, and convening power to welcome those many voices to the table in a rich and inviting way. Our practice of stepping back to listen, watch, learn, and yield is at the heart of our approach to working with and activating community members to participate and embrace their power as creators, directors and producers of their own stories and their own neighborhoods. For communities and individuals we have had the privilege of collaborating with, we are regarded as a yielding and sincere collaborator that actively and consistently demonstrates supporting our collaborators in confronting and wielding their own leadership, power, influence, and brilliance. While we have professional training and experience in story gathering and telling, we understand that experience is but a tool and not the absolute rule as we engage in co-creating this practice with residents.
Between December 2023 and June 2024 The Neighborhood Storytelling Practice Design Residency Fellows will generally gather in person twice per month on dates and hours that work best for the collective for intensive workshops to explore and detail out components of the Neighborhood Storytelling Practice framework.
Our team will facilitate the collective through cycles of generative discussion, ideation, testing/probing, refinement, and consensus for each component of the practice framework. Between workshops, our team will share concepts for the collective to independently explore/consider based on the prior workshop’s directives and to support movement toward refinement and consensus in the following workshop and overall process.
WHO CAN PARTICIPATE:
While the chosen candidates will have experience with narrative and/or community-based arts practices, storytelling, place keeping, and culture building in a broad sense, we are specifically looking for resident co-creators to step into this creative design process with us. To start, the candidate will meet these critical qualifications:
Additionally, we are seeking out candidates with a combination of at least some of these desired characteristics:
*North St. Louis City neighborhoods include: Columbus Square, Carr Square, JeffVanderLou, Covenant Blu-Grand Center, Vandeventer, Lewis Place, Fountain Park, Academy, Visitation Park, West End, Hamilton Heights, Wells Goodfellow, Kingsway West, Kingsway East, Greater Ville, The Ville, St. Louis Place, Old North St. Louis, Hyde Park, Fairground, College Hill, O’Fallon, Penrose, Mark Twain, Walnut Park East, Walnut Park West, North Point, Baden, Riverview.
Please provide the following:
> > Your personal narrative may be written, an audio recording, video, or multi-media
> > Submit materials as .pdf files with links to other content (i.e., audio, video, websites, etc.)
Contact Michael Pagano, Narrative + Communications Partner, at MPagano@investstl.org.