ABOUT US

JESS LAMAR REECE HOLLER, Caledonia Northern Principal (b. 1988: Westerville, Ohio) is a community-based cultural worker, non-profit consultant, folklorist, oral historian, public historian, historic preservationist, exhibit co-curator and multi-media documentarian working between Caledonia & Columbus, Ohio. With Johnnie Jackson, Jess is co-founded of Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History: North-Central Ohio’s dynamic regional folklife + arts-based economic development non-profit.

Jess specializes in capacity-building for small, grassroots, and community-based organizations and non-profits using a hybrid arts, heritage, and folklife toolkit; and is passionate about organizing and advising towards deep, transformative racial, social, and economic justice work in the non-profit cultural work sphere. Jess is also passionate about historic preservation, place-keeping, arts- and heritage-based sustainable economic development, and culture-driven grassroots downtown revitalization efforts in rural communities across the U.S. — including in her Jess’s family’s hometown of Caledonia, Ohio, located in Northeastern Marion County, where Jess has been working collaboratively to document, preserve, & revitalize the town’s Public Square commercial block since 2006.

Jess thinks/writes/organizes around labor in the cultural work sector — including wage standards, precarity, freelance/contract models, grassroots/community partnerships, ethical collaboration across power differentials, and dual-system reforms that make cultural and public humanities work more sustainable both for practitioners and for communities/narrators. She has written on these questions, and tentative solutions for a more just & truly accessible field, and for emerging practitioners, in particular, for AASLH’s History News; and for NCPH’s Ethics & Economic Justice Working Group. With Sarah Dziedicz, Jess co-chaired the Oral History Association’s Independent Oral Historians Task Force from 2019-2021: organizing to advocate for and promote more equitable wages and practices for freelance, community-/movement-based, and non-institutional oral historians and cultural workers across the field. Jess is deeply committed to equity budgeting in community-based public history, oral history, & folklife work — i.e., making these practices more sustaining, more equitable, and less extractive for the historically-marginalized communities they are all too often forced upon. Ask us & we’ll show you how. (Hint: pay everyone. For everything. Every time.)

As a non-profit consultant & community member, Jess serves on the boards of the Terradise Nature Center along the beautiful Whetstone (Olentangy) River in Caledonia, Ohio (Marion County) & The Neighborhood Network, which runs WCRS-LP FM (Columbus’ community-powered radio station) where Jess has served as a DJ since 2013. Jess’s non-profit capacity-building services also include grant-writing, strategic planning, evaluation program development, audience & stakeholder analysis, graphic design, & marketing. Since 2020, Jess has been proud to develop arts & culture programs for a range of small non-profits in the region.

Since Caledonia Northern Folk Studios launched in 2014, we have consulted with, supported, and/or developed cultural work, community engagement, capacity-building & first-person documentary/oral history/audio projects for the following organizations and entities including: Malabar Farm State Park, the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association, VeggieSNAPs // Produce Perks Midwest, Foraged & Sown Farm, the Kentucky Oral History Commission, Marion County Historical Society, United Plant Savers // Sassafras Ohio, Mid-Atlantic Arts, EPICENTER, Black Heritage Council of Marion, the Village of Caledonia, the Caledonia Farmers Market, the Marlboro Township Historical Society, & Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History.

Beyond Jess’s public humanities, community cultural organizing & regional arts coordinator efforts, Jess has been a college & community radio DJ since 2008. Jess currently hosts & produces Night Plant Radio — a (mostly) weekly radio show on Columbus’s community radio station WCRS-LP FM dedicated to 1970s-1980s ambient, environmental, experimental, incidental, library and ~~ background sounds ~~ wcrsfm.org || @nightplantradio.

JEFFREY PAUL NAGLE, History & Heritage Research Associate (b. 1987: Silver Spring, Maryland) & Historical Consultant // Principal at MESSIER OBJECT, joined Caledonia Northern Folk Studios in 2021 as a Part-Time Research Associate to help build capacity for our historic preservation consulting & cultural heritage tour programs — doubling our capacity for transformative consultancy work to prepare regional nominations of vernacular buildings, districts, & sites to the National Register of Historic Places; and reinvigorating our work to develop the Ohio Soft-Serv Trail & other North-Central Ohio cultural heritage tourism resources through a focus on bike tourism & other combined sustainability-recreation-heritage solutions. Trained as a historian of labor, technology, and the environment, & with extensive experience in community-collaborative oral history & history-from-below approaches, Jeff brings over decade of experience as a teacher, archival researcher, writer, oral historian, transcriptionist & public humanist; and a decade of allied experience working in sound design, engineering, and DJ’ing, both in field settings and for community radio. Jeff’s past & ongoing projects center histories of community-centered regional planning, vernacular negotiations of spectacle in the history of the Worlds’ Fairs of the 1980s, & imaginations of environmental & energy futures in Appalachia. He is a veteran of the GetUP-Grads unionization campaign.

CALEDONIA NORTHERN FOLKLIFE STUDIOS is a cultural & non-profit capacity-building consultancy and community-based folklife, oral history, historic preservation & documentary arts studio based in Caledonia, Ohio. The consultancy is named after a north-stretching road in the small town of Caledonia, where Jess's mother was raised and where Jess’s grandmother still resides. From the 1930's-2010, the Reece family ran a community grocery store, Reece's Market, in the Temple Block Building in downtown Caledonia. Jess has been working since high school on a vision to procure the store and continue its legacy with a difference: as a cultural organizing and regional capacity-building center for assets-based cultural, arts, and heritage organizing in the region, towards sustainable economic development, more vibrant communities, and cultivating pride-in-place & necessary justice-based transformations. Proceeds from Caledonia Northern Folk Studios cultural work & capacity-building consulting goes towards the restoration of Reece’s Market, & the neighboring Masonic Block Building — future home of a regional North-Central Ohio cultural arts capacity-building & documentary arts educational center, arts space, & local foods aggregator marketplace. If you want to help make it happen, get in touch!