Digital Stories

Students in Power+Place Collaborative courses work with community partners and storytellers to learn about the history of diverse communities throughout Alamance County. Students conduct oral history interviews with community storytellers, and then work with those storytellers to co-produce a short digital story based on their interview. These stories are then screened publicly and shared widely via social media channels and place-based visual installations. View stories below.

Local Heroes

Meet some of the local heroes that the Power + Place Collaborative has had the pleasure of interviewing. These resident activists each make the community better in their own unique way!

Photo Galleries

Community members opened up to share their stories with Power + Place Collaborative team. Check out photos of our participants below.

Reports

Press

Past Events

2024 County-Wide Book Club Dialogue – American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience

September 26, 12:30-2:00pm

Design Forge Community Event
Embodied Wisdom: Catalyzing Social Change

March 13, 2024, 5:00 – 8:00 pm at Elon Community Church

Savannah Keith Gress, independent consultant
Victor Udoewa, NASA

Sometimes our best efforts to solve group, organizational, societal, and systemic challenges result in unaffected, worsening, or temporarily resolved problems. We usually rely on individual analysis and strategic thinking using mainstream, institutional knowledge sources. What if we were to access the wealth of other types of knowledges in the world around us: aesthetic, intuitive, emotional, spiritual, relational, energetic, communal, lived experiential, embodied, etc.? There are a number of practices, both old and new, that explore these other types of knowledge by creating awareness and using intention to act. Join the Elon and Alamance community in exploring the rich wisdom of our shared stories and collective embodied knowledge. This interactive session helped participants imagine opportunities to create social change and craft a strategic path forward.

Sponsoring departments or organizations: This event is sponsored by the Power and Place Collaborative, the 2024 Design Forge, Impact Alamance, and the North Carolina Humanities (a statewide nonprofit and the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities).

2021 Event

Place Based Visionary Organizing & Creating Power and Transformation: Why Detroit Matters?

Richard Feldman – Monday, September 21, 2020 – 2:00-3:00 pm

After the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, James and Grace Lee Boggs initiated the journey to redefine revolution for the 20th and 21 centuries.  The legacy and lineage of James and Grace has been committed to creating theory and practice to re-imagine, re-define, and rebuild Detroit from the ground up.  The decades of work on the ground have seen the emergence of community farms, community homes, place-based schools, commitments to the thinking and practices of New work and New Culture, the role of emerging, organic intellectuals and artists and the establishment of liberated zones.  It has been a journey of intergenerational relationships, critical connections, relationship building and the fundamental recognition that the system of racial capitalism, patriarchy, ableism and the destruction of nature are ending.  It is our time to usher in a new epoch in human history and it starts with the simple theme: Change yourself to Change the world.” James and Grace Lee Boggs believed that our work was about governing and place.

Rich Feldman is a member of the James and Grace lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.  He has worked with James and Grace Boggs since he was 22 and is now 72 years of age.  He worked the assembly line at Ford Motor Company for 20 years on the assembly line, 10 years as an elected official and 10 years with the International Staff of the union. He co-edited the book; End of The Line: Auto Workers and the American Dream in 1988.  Rich has been married to Janice Fialka and the father of Emma (31) and Micah (36.   The family is also active in the Disability Justice Movement, Inclusion and consider this work essential to the Next American Revolution.   Check out:  What Matters: Reflections on Disability, Community and Love  (Fialka)

Place-Making through Community Gardening

Christine Smith – Monday, September 28th, 2020 – 2:00 pm

In this talk, Christine Smith will discuss the role of community gardening in growing community power. As part of this, she will address the sometimes-contentious relationships that can exist between community organizations, university campuses, city governments, and neighborhood residents seeking to co-create community.

Christine Smith is the Executive Director of Seedleaf, an organization in Lexington, KY that provides horticultural training and supports the practice of gardening and small-scale farming in urban space. Seedleaf values the ongoing re-connection of people to land, the incubation of healthy community interdependence and the cultivation of growers toward the goal of developing a robust local food economy and a just and equitable system of stewardship over urban land. Trained academically as a geographer, Christine has been with Seedleaf since 2017. Her gardening experience is rooted in the sub-tropics of Florida where she grew up and her grandmother’s Kingston garden and menagerie filled with ginep, breadfruit, pomegranates, scotch bonnet peppers, fish, pigeons, chickens and stray dogs. She is most proud of her title as ‘Ambassador of Flowers.’

Designing/Disrupting Place: Making the Invisible/Visible

Josina Vink – Wednesday, October 28th, 2020 – 2:00 pm

In this talk, Josina Vink problematizes design practices and frameworks that emphasize standardized, commercialized and imperialist systems. As an alternative, she brings forward an understanding of collective designing, which acknowledges the plurality of design processes already at play that intentionally shape social structures around the globe. She explores how collective designing might help nurture diverse and inclusive spaces. This talk offers a critical, but hopeful, account of the role of design in and for democratic life at a time of great societal transition.

Josina Vink is a designer and researcher with expertise in health system transformation. She has extensive experience leading and facilitating participatory system and service design processes in health care, government, non-profit and community settings. In her practice, she has developed new services, supported policy change, facilitated shifts in practices across sectors, and led social lab processes. Josina’s research explores how design can create profound and significant change in health care by reshaping social norms and beliefs. She is passionate about building resilient service systems to enable a healthy future for all.