WHO WE SERVE
Our current public projects clients // program partners include the Marion County Historical Society (The Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program), Ohio State Extension — Marion County // Marion Harding High School (Marion Dreamkeepers, led by Whitney Gherman + Johnnie Jackson), Terradise Nature Center (Terradise Ambient), & numerous private historic building owners for our historic preservation services suite.
Past and current project direction, project design, documentation and media production for Caledonia Northern Folk Studios-fronted arts, documentation, media, public humanities, and/or organizational consultancy projects with United Plant Savers // Sassafras Ohio, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation (in collaboration with the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network), EPICENTER, The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA), VeggieSNAPs // Produce Perks, Wholesome Wave, Harmonious Homestead, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition, Malabar Farm State Park and The Ohio History Connection, alongside numerous private individuals and grassroots community organizations. In the past five years, we have also contributed our services to a wide range of cultural heritage and social justice organizations in several states, including The Tennessee State Library and Archives, The Philadelphia Folklore Project, The Woolman School, WCRS-LP FM, WHYY, KVMR-FM, and WSRN-FM.
Via the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Project, Caledonia Northern Folk Studios community partner/collaborator organizations in Marion County, Ohio include the Marion County Historical Society, Marion, Ohio’s Black Heritage Council, Logos Christian Ministries, Terradise Nature Center, WDIF “TruBlues975” LP-FM, OSU Extension of Marion County’s Vibrant Communities Program, Marion Public Libraries, Marion Area Convention & Visitors’ Bureau, and Marion City Schools. Our work is focused on building and broadening coalition-based work, via a collective impact model brought to Marion County cultural organizing by diversity, equity & inclusion educators and organizers Whitney Gherman and Johnnie Jackson.
We are especially thrilled to serve clients seeking sensitive, community-collaborative oral history, multimedia documentation, media production, listening-based program evaluation and interpretive programming in the Central & North-Central Ohio areaa, and across the state of Ohio. Caledonia Northern Folk Studios takes our Ohio roots seriously, and we love the opportunity to amplify the voices, images and perspectives of Ohio's diverse local cultures. We also welcome pitches for projects out-of-state and across the United States. If an adequate travel package is provided, we will consider international work -- especially for projects on comparative cultures of environmental health and local foods systems.
Our work has been supported by the Marion Community Foundation — Wopat Community Fund, Ohio Arts Council, Ohio Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio History Fund, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, United Way of North-Central Ohio, the Rotary Club of Marion County, the American Folklore Society, the Kentucky Oral History Commission, Puffin Foundation West.
caledonia farmers market: Summer music series
Caledonia Northern Folk Studios has been proud to partner with the Caledonia Farmers Market since 2022 to develop, help fundraise for, & coordinate the beloved Caledonia Farmers Market Summer Music Series: bringing unique live open-air musical performances by regional North-Central Ohio performing artists to Caledonia’s iconic & historic Public Square on summer Saturdays from 10-1PM.
ARTS at terradise
Since 2021, Caledonia Northern Folk Studios has been honored to grow capacity for Terradise Nature Center — an innovative hybrid nature center & arts/heritage programmer located along the Whetstone (Olentangy) River just outside of Caledonia — through arts & culture program development & coordination: including Terradise’s pathbreaking Terradise Environmental Arts Residency, our Caledonia Conservationists Exhibit, & our Alumni // Winter Arts Workshops. We provide full-service program coordination, grant-writing, & evaluation.
MARION VOICES
Since 2017, Caledonia Northern Folk Studios has spearheaded community-collaborative, racial & economic justice-centric design, leadership, strategic planning, & fundraising for the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program at the Marion County Historical Society: Marion County’s countywide folk + cultural arts for social justice program. Marion Voices successfully spun off as an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit in 2021.
OHIO HERBAL ELDERS
In 2019, CNFS’s Jess Lamar Reece Holler answered a call from Ohio herbalist & Sassafras, Ohio founder Lily Kunning of Haven Herbs (a worker-owned herbal medicine co-operative in Union County, Ohio) to design & lead an oral history program to document the stories & experiences of Ohio’s founding generation of herbalists & traditional medicine practitioners. The project — the Ohio Herbal Elders Project — then joined forced with United Plant Savers: a nationwide organization focused on traditional medicinal plant conservation, headquartered at the Goldenseal Sanctuary in Meigs County, Ohio. The Ohio Herbal Elders Project received a small ArtSTART Grant from the Ohio Arts Council to pilot the Ohio Herbal Elders process in 2020, which resulted in an oral history interview + full farm tour with Paul Strauss of Equinox Botanicals — a founding member of UpS & pioneering Southern Ohio herbalist. Project interviews + media forthcoming.
unitedplantsavers.org
CENTRAL APPALACHIAN FOLK + TRADITIONAL ARTS (CAFTA)
In August of 2018, Caledonia Northern Folk Studios answered a call from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation to launch an unprecedented 113-county folk + cultural arts survey of all Appalachian Regional Commission counties in Ohio, West Virginia, & Virginia. CNFS assembled a team of ten dynamic public folklorists, documentary arts, & cultural workers; & incorporated the team under the leadership of the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN) based out of Lexington, Kentucky. Our team won the bid. CNFS’s Jess Lamar Reece Holler went on to serve as Fieldwork Coordinator for the full team project — drawing up core project ethics, methodology, & research design; & leading the team in fieldwork methods & audio recording + photography best practice instruction — as well as serving as the CAFTA project’s Eastern Ohio Fieldworker: documenting folklife & traditional arts + performing a detailed needs assessment of the cultural arts sector in twenty counties in Eastern Ohio, & making detailed recommendations for MAAF’s forthcoming CAFTA Folklife Program Plan to serve folk & traditional artists & arts organizations across Eastern Ohio. Jess’s extensive County Reports on the Folk/Cultural Arts Landscape in Eastern + Southeastern Ohio are available upon request.
GREEN RIVER AMBIENT
From May to July 2019, Caledonia Northern Folk Studio Principal Jess Lamar Reece Holler was Artist-in-Residence at Green River Utah’s EPICENTER: a transformative community housing justice, rural arts, & community-based design studio mobilizing arts, design, & community-engaged praxis to build responsive, appropriate housing for working class communities in the popular tourist destination & rafting city of Green River, Utah, in Eastern Utah’s Book Cliffs region. During her residency, Jess designed & built the GREEN RIVER AMBIENT community soundscape library — documenting over 60 distinct Green River + surrounding soundscapes along the way — & she also consulted & coached EPICENTER in organizational ethics & artist residency program practice: including conducting a full rewrite of EPICENTER’s Artist-in-Resident work contract which retained ownership over residency arts materials for visiting artists; & lead an internship program in community-collaborative social justice oral history for EPICENTER Interns & Program Staff.
GROWING RIGHT: ECOLOGICAL FARMING in OHIO, 1960s-Now
From 2016 to 2019, Caledonia Northern Folk Studios created, designed, & lead the statewide organic farming oral history + public history effort know as the Growing Right Project (Growing Right: Ecological Farming in Ohio, 1960s-Now) in partnership with the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association, & with generous grant support from Ohio Humanities & the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Across the program’s three-year run, Growing Right conducted upwards of 50 interviews with early-generation organic farmers, growers, marketers, suppliers, & organizers in upwards of 38 of Ohio’s 88 counties; designed an extensive digital public history website; built out YouTube & other multimedia pieces combining project photography, oral history, & soundscape audio files; indexed many of our project interviews; & designed a unique traveling pop-up Growing Right exhibit, which traveled to upwards of 20 farmers’ markets, fairs, festivals, & local foods grocery stores in Ohio + Pennsylvania. The project’s web domain expired with the conclusion of project funding in 2020. We are working actively to get the Growing Right project back online.
VEGGIESNAPS OHIO
From 2015-2017, Caledonia Northern Folk Studios’ Jess Lamar Reece Holler worked with both Wholesome Wave and Ohio’s VeggieSNAPS (now Produce Perks) farmers’ market incentive programs to document community, grower, & market experiences with the VeggieSNAPs program through on-the-ground participant interviews, photography, media documentation, & weekly blog-posts for the Wholesome Wave blog. In Summer 2017, Jess came aboard as VeggieSNAPS’s Program Assistant, & served a network of fourteen farmers’ market & hundreds of growers across three counties in Central Ohio; & provided recommendations, insights, & tools — including an interactive map of Columbus parks, recreation centers, & libraries to be used for VeggieSNAPs marketing — to help make this EBT-doubling program more accessible to more working-class Central Ohio communities. VeggieSNAPs transitioned to the leadership of Cincinnati-based ProducePerks in Fall of 2018.
SEASONING THE NORTHSIDE MELTING POT
Caledonia Northern Folk Studios served as Project Photographer + Fieldworker for the Mid-Ohio Food Banks-funded Seasoning the Northside Melting Pot project: a collaboration between Harmonious Homestead & Foraged & Sown Farms — both in Clinton Township, Columbus. The project produced a portfolio of over 2,000 unique images of the dynamic growing project — which included open community markets, seedling giveaways, & farmstead tours, & was designed to catalyze the unique multi-ethnic community dynamic of Columbus’ North Side.