OUR SERVICES
Photo Description: Heritage Hand-Painted Ice Machine — LaRue, Ohio, at the Meat Locker, for the Marion Voices Countywide Folklife + Cultural Arts Survey — January 2020. Photo Credit: Jess Lamar Reece Holler || Caledonia Northern Folk Studios, for Marion Voices. For more, see: marionvoices.org/culture-keepers-roster/
Caledonia Northern Folk Studios offers a wide range of cultural work, arts, heritage, and general non-profit and organizational consultancy services — with a focus on social justice & equity for, in, & by working-class communities — in addition to award-winning documentary photography, film/video, & audio recording work. We specialize in visionary, transformative capacity-building and community-collaborative social justice oral history & folk/traditional/cultural arts documentation & programming for small non-profit arts, culture, public history, and heritage organizations. We are based in North-Central Ohio (Marion County), and prioritize work in our state; but are open to appropriate consultancy organizations anywhere. Our work is mission-based — meaning, we only take projects that align closely with our own mission, values, and commitments to social, economic, and racial justice in cultural organizing. We are also an active and activist consultancy — we don’t just give advice. We’re also available for, and take great pride & joy, in doing the work: from interviewing to community-collaborative process facilitation to board retreats to exhibit and event series. We can do the work for you, or, even better: we can teach you how to do this work for yourself. Read below to learn more; & click the button below to book your free initial 15-minute consultation with Caledonia Northern Folk Studios to share about your need or opportunity, & to see if we’d be a good fit for your needs!
WHY CALEDONIA NORTHERN FOLK STUDIOS?
Our work combines methods, ethics, and fundraising, outreach, & visioning insights from three distinct fields, for a dynamic hybrid approach: arts organizing and administration, public history and heritage (including oral history and historic preservation), and cultural organizing and activism (most notably, folk/traditional/cultural arts organizing, from the tradition of community-collaborative public folklife practice.) Caledonia Northern Folk Studio’s work is deeply rooted in social justice praxis, and in helping to transform non-profit arts, culture, and heritage landscapes towards racial, economic, and environmental justice. Our toolkit thus includes both capacity-building, technical assistance, and support work for historically underfunded and marginalized communities, movements, and organizations; and transformational justice, community engagement and collaboration, deep diversity/equity/inclusion training, and divestment work for historically white-serving institutions who are maybe just now waking up to the necessity of big, structural changes & divestments. It needs to happen — it’s (been) time. We work with individuals, staff, and boards; but prefer to take a holistic approach focused on deep, sustainable change, and on long-term organization capacity and stability. We are not interested in virtue-signaling, shallow diversity and inclusion work, that is surface-level only — our work helps organizations walk the talk. We tell it like we see it; and aren’t afraid of recommending — and walking you through every step of — big, necessary, transformative change.
WHO WE SERVE: CULTURAL WORK NON-PROFITS + ORGANIZATIONS
Photo Description: Altar scene at Kirkpatrick Church of Christ — Kirkpatrick, Marion County, Ohio, for the Marion Voices Countywide Folklife + Cultural Arts Survey — January 2020. Photo Credit: Jess Lamar Reece Holler || Caledonia Northern Folk Studios, for Marion Voices. For more, see: marionvoices.org/culture-keepers-roster/kirkpatrick-church-of-christ/
Within this mission, we specialize in consultancies with small, grassroots, and community-based non-profit and co-operative arts, culture, heritage, and environmental organizations, and provide professional development (board development; fundraising & development planing; strategic visioning & plannning; brand strategy; organizational ethics & guiding documents reviews), technical assistance (grant-seeking, grant-writing, strategic language, program development, fundraising strategy, & transitioning from all-volunteer to paid staff/working board), and general capacity building. We are especially skilled in connecting organizations to a fuller gamut of possible arts/humanities/heritage funding, infrastructures, and program models; and in innovative, justice-grounded strategies for community collaboration, outreach, and engagement, and deep diversity, equity, and inclusion work for organizations seeking to better listen to and serve their community. Our consultancy practices are effective and transformational because they are grounded in principles and methods gleaned from our extensive and ongoing work in oral history and ethnography: organizational change and community engagement requires deep listening.
We also partner with non-profit arts, history, heritage and cultural organizations in community-engaged cultural documentation, program development and media production — often through the community-collaborative planning and execution of county folklife surveys, oral history projects, and folk arts programs with organizations who have never before attempted such work. We design our folkloristic, oral history and multi-media documentation and consultancy services to meet your project's needs. We specialize in bringing public history, public humanities and documentary arts lenses to community-based projects and non-profit organizations working on issues of social, environmental and food justice. Our wheelhouse is soup-to-nuts production, entirely in-house: due to our diverse tool-kit and wide network of friends and collaborators, we're adapt at executing and project-directing full fieldwork-to-exhibition workflows, and are happiest working directly with communities and partner organizing to design fieldwork to help you build our your desired programming, with an eye to audience engagement, access, and social movement organizing. We document anything; but projects around vernacular experience/folklife, occupational culture/labor, environment and ecology (and especially environmental health), racial & economic justice, and grassroots freedom movements are closest to our hearts. We produce our own media — including celebrated photography, film/video, and audio recording; and our full house equipment kits are included in the price of our consultancy work. (We’re kind of like secretly artists, but we don’t like saying that, because there’s more important stuff to get done.)
WHO WE SERVE: HISTORIC BUILDING OWNERS + COMMUNITIES
We also do historic preservation consulting; and can run all aspects of your or your organization’s National Register of Historic Places Nomination Process — whether you’re looking to nominate a single building or a full historic district (mobilizing the power of historic preservation for grassroots community revitalization!), we can handle all aspects of the research & writing of nominations, National Register questionnaires, and associated architectural photography. Unlike other historic preservation consultants, our core approach to historic buildings emphasizes spatial and social use — we’re not just interested in the architect or the plans, but the sometimes surprising and against-the-grain way people & communities have used, abused, and renegotiated spaces. Our National Register work thus combines deed & lease, newspaper, & archival research with oral history & folklife interviewing, focused on the way buildings get lived in, and what they mean to their communities. We’re passionate about historic preservation for all sorts of buildings and time periods; but we have an especial soft-spot for North-Central Ohio vernacular architecture, working-class commercial and industrial buildings, sites & environments, and historic resources within twenty years of the sliding line of the “recent past” — which means, these days, buildings & spaces from the 1950s-1980s, and work for, in, and with communities & locations who are underrepresented on the National Register. At CNFS, we’re passionate about making historic preservation accessible to everyday people — and that means demystifying the process & empowering everyday, working people in how to preserve, research, write about, & advocate for their own built environment. There’s a reason you mostly see billionaire developers and their team of lawyers out there winning historic tax credits. It has to do with capitalism, time, & power. It sucks. That ain’t democracy. We’re here to change that. Our consultancy services in preparing nominations are ordinarily reimbursed for building owners in part or in full via Ohio’s Pipeline Initiative for properties with high potential for rehabilitation for commercial re-use; we’re happy to walk you through that process to help realize your dreams of saving your town/Googie laundromat/local abandoned elementary school, even — especially — if you’re not loaded. All the historic preservation to all the people.
We welcome work with new partners and emerging projects; and we especially value curatorial and documentation ethics that value close collaboration and sharing authority with the communities being documented. We're also proud to partner with a network of talented documentarians, videographers, graphic designers and sound artists for specialized projects -- we love working with our wider community of fellow practitioners for arts-inflected documentary, public folklore and public arts projects. Give us a shout if you want us to help pull together a team to meet your needs. We are especially excited to partner with small, small-budget, historically under-served or all-volunteer organizations, to help build capacity towards greater impact, stability, and growth — and to help make non-profit cultural, arts, and heritage work accessible to all, regardless of income level.
FULL LIST OF CALEDONIA NORTHERN FOLK STUDIOS SERVICES
Caledonia Northern Folk Studios specializes in Folklife/Oral History/Documentary Arts Direct Services, Organizational Ethics, Community Engagement, & Strategic Planning Consulting for Cultural Work Non-Profits, and Historic Preservation Services. Within each category, we offer a range of customizable specialized services — including grant-writing, project direction, direct media production work, customized consulting, coaching services, organizational workshops, presentations, & more. See below for our services within each of our three main arenas of service.
MEDIA, FOLKLIFE, ORAL HISTORY + DOCUMENTARY ARTS SERVICES
field documentation (oral history interviews, folklife documentation, photographic documentation -- place, process, portrait, film + video work, environmental + landscape documentation, survey fieldwork)
local, county-wide and regional folk/traditional arts and cultural heritage surveys (including folklife surveys, organizational needs assessments, artist/practitioner documentation, and movement- and community-based oral histories)
historic preservation writing, research, & advocacy, including the research, documentation of, & preparation of National Register of Historic Places single-building, multi-property, & district nominations; and the conduction of preliminary historic & cultural asset field surveys for municipalities, counties, non-profits, & communities
personal + family + movement oral history (as raw audio/image files, produced, and for print production/biographies)
fieldwork-based programming recommendations and execution (curated media toolkits tailored to your organization's purpose; project design and best practices; oral history/folklife ethics; folklife/oral history project management and program design)
media production (photo sets, multi-media short pieces, audio + radio pieces, video, film)
We are often able to provide, in-house, fairly-waged transcription, logging and indexing services for Caledonia Northern Folk Studios media projects, as well, enabling us to guarantee living-wage payment of all practitioners across the full scope of your folklife, oral history, or documentary arts project. Upon request, we will consider bids for labor and leadership for archival and digitization projects depending on our project load. For these, we prefer projects that include project planning or curatorial consultancy; and especially favor archival and digitization projects in conjunction with oral history or fieldwork documentation work.
Work samples (including full ethnographic fieldwork kits -- field notes, logs, etc., and consultancy reports and advising plans) available upon request.
ARTS/CULTURE/PUBLIC HUMANITIES PROGRAMMING
curatorial (metadata + content management, exhibition design, label copy, community co-curation, interviewing, digital/Omeka, oral history/media-based exhibitions and installations; sound art/place-based installation; audio tours)
programs and events (cultural/arts-based events, public programs, & curricula)
program evaluation (qualitative/interview-based, for non-profits in place-based local foods systems & environmental justice work, or beyond)
training consultancies, resource guides, staff trainings and educational workshops (oral history interviewing, folklife fieldwork methods, fieldwork-to-production workflows, integrating oral history and historic preservation, oral history applications, environmental humanities, the new public humanities, community-collaborative project design, oral-history/fieldwork based exhibitions, reciprocal ethnography and consent)
ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTANCY, TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE, + CAPACITY BUILDING
organizational development (strategic planning; fundraising/development planning; board development; mission-work; brand strategy; ethics audits + founding document reviews), organizational models consultancy, and non-profit start-up consultancy (for beginning or all-volunteer/unincorporated organizations)
program development (for arts, culture, history, heritage, environmental programs — esp. those involving community-collaborative method)
deep diversity, equity, & inclusion work (board diversity strategy; labor ethics consultancy; diversity plan development; capacity-building for racial justice & historically marginalized organizations/groups; divestment + early-stage transformative racial justice strategy for historically white-serving institutions)
community collaboration, outreach and engagement (including publicity, marketing, and direct service; community engagement strategies; design for reciprocity)
professional development (including cultivating connections to wider fields and consulting on leading-edge practices in arts, culture, public history, and community engagement and social justice work)
fundraising & development (including developing fundraising & development plans; annual fund consultancies; grant matrixes; grant-writing & grant-writing strategy; & development of baseline grants/program language toolkits for future fundraising cycles)
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: WORKING WITH CALEDONIA NORTHERN FOLK STUDIOS
A note on time // project cycles: Because we are a project-based consultancy, and do capacity-building and documentary cultural work with multiple organizations across the region, often on multi-year project cycles, and usually simultaneously, we are sometimes limited — for great reasons, trust us! — in how many new consultancy projects we can accept on a short-term basis. This is a matter of being fair to our currently contracted projects. Other times, our schedule is wide open. If you know you’d like to work with us in the future, contact us soon, and we’ll work out a feasible calendar to get your goals accomplished! We currently have openings for a few (2-3) small-to-medium project consultancies in the North-Central Ohio region beginning in early August. If that’s not you, contact us anyway: we’re usually able to work something out that makes sense & feels breathable for everyone involved. We also understand that sometimes things are urgent — you discover that perfect grant a day before it’s due; or, eek, your cool historic building is falling down, and it would be really great to access those tax credits, like, yesterday!!!! Yup. We get it. That’s OK. We’re pretty chill — just shoot us a note, and we’ll make it work if we can!
A note on equipment: Unless specified, we provide all fieldwork documentation equipment necessary for the consultancy you arrange — whether for CNFS-led oral history or folk arts documentation programs, or for trainings for your staff or organization. You may pick your desired equipment from a list of available pieces and file format specifications; or you may allow us to decide what best fits the project needs. Caledonia Northern Folk Studios maintains a constantly-updated roster of state-of-the-art audio, photographic, and video equipment; and some limited short-term loaner kits (iPads, speakers, etc.) for audio-visual playback in exhibit and public program contexts. If additional equipment, software or materials are required for successful completion of a project — of if your organization would like to retain equipment after the period of performance for our work together — purchase of equipment (and & list of recommended options) can be developed for you as a part of project fees.
A note on travel: We are based in North-Central Ohio, but are happy to consider traveling for fieldwork, documentation and oral history projects. In these cases, we will work with a client to assess a reasonable work day fee and per diem. Mileage compensation or equivalent follows federal standard rates. In most cases, fees for program recommendations or media production following on-site fieldwork days will be assessed separately and take place after on-location fieldwork. As we grow our consultancy, we are especially excited to serve the twelve-county region of North-Central Ohio — please do let us know if you’re an organization in Marion, Delaware, Morrow, Union, Hardin, Wyandot, Crawford, Richland, Logan, Hancock, Seneca, or Huron County! We love our neighbors, and are so excited to grow & nurture transformative, community-collaborative cultural work for social change in our region! Please note that always — & especially now! — we don’t really do airplanes, sorry!
ON RATES & JUSTICE WORK
Caledonia Northern Folk Studios is proud to fight for fair, living wages for cultural workers. Are rates are field standard, and reflect our status as an independent, freelance cultural work consultancy. The American Folklore Association recommends that independent folklorists be paid at least twice the comparative hourly rate of a salaried worker to reflect the added costs freelance & independent practitioners must assume.
At Caledonia Northern Folk Studios, we practice what we teach. We believe in a living wage for cultural workers, and all people. This is the core of our Caledonia Northern Folk Studios’ Equity Budgeting model. We also pay all interviewees & community collaborators on oral history & folklife projects; and will not consider projects that do not or cannot consider fundraising to meet this basic ethical commitment.
We also strive to practice accessibility in our offerings; & to acknowledge the historic & strategic underfunding of BIPOC-led, community-based, & justice-aligned social movement projects within the non-profit industrial complex, & under the ongoing regime of white supremacy in the United States. If you are a low-income individual or community organization working for social change, and would like to partner with us, we would be happy to consider sliding scale rates. We're excited to share our passion for transformative, community-collaborative documentation and programming with groups doing good work in the world. Contact us with any inquiries.
Our services available a la carte or packaged; we’re happy to work with you to custom-design a service package that works for your needs. Discounts available for multi-service projects.
GET STARTED TODAY
Don’t wait for your next grant deadline to realize you need a specialist on your team who can help you design for equity budgeting or take on a full-service oral history project. Contact us today: we’d love to get to know you, your team, & your projects; and figure out how we can help you meet your goals of aligning community-based cultural work with ethics & principles that help build more just worlds. We offer an initial fifteen-minute consultation free of charge to learn what you need, & see how we can help! Contact us today!