Southside Stories Trains Residents to Doc Community 

Tashia Thomas Neal was born and raised in Syracuse. But regardless of supporting the town’s South Side for years, it wasn’t till she set foot on the soil at Brady Farm to take footage as a part of the Southside Stories venture that she discovered in regards to the city farm tucked within the neighborhood.

She says that second of neighborhood discovery is without doubt one of the key strengths of the Southside Stories, a neighborhood storytelling initiative that pairs Syracuse residents with skilled photojournalists to doc the folks, locations and packages enriching the neighborhood. The tales and pictures produced are then printed on Salt, the program’s Instagram and web site.

The program launched in spring 2025, rising from Southside Connections, a collaboration between Syracuse University’s Engaged Humanities Network and 30 organizations throughout the town’s South Side. Residents are given the technical expertise to doc and have a good time the neighborhood, and give higher visibility to the mutual help and on a regular basis resilience occurring within the neighborhood, which incorporates the historic fifteenth Ward.

For Thomas Neal, who was a part of a current cohort of residents educated by the venture, the expertise was gratifying.

“I’m gaining skills I can use for my own photography, even if I’m using my iPhone. I’m meeting new people in the group, and I’m also meeting people in the community I wouldn’t have met otherwise,” Thomas Neal says.

How It Works

Brice Nordquist, co-founder of Southside Stories, director of the Engaged Humanities Network and affiliate professor and Dean’s Professor of Community Engagement within the College of Arts and Sciences, says increase the capability for residents to inform the tales of their very own neighborhood is extremely vital. Not only for speaking to audiences exterior the neighborhood however for “telling the story of the community to the community itself” as a method of constructing delight of place and recognizing the values and expertise current.

Nordquist co-directs Southside Stories alongside co-founders Amy Toensing and Matt Moyer ’94, longtime photojournalists and documentary filmmakers who’ve labored for National Geographic for many years. Toensing beforehand was a college member on the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, whereas Moyer is presently an adjunct professor. Together they run MRock Productions, working with Newhouse graduate Kayla Breen G’24.

Toensing and Moyer initially linked with Nordquist by a distinct Engaged Humanities Network collaboration with Syracuse University Art Museum, the Photography and Literacy program. Together, the three got here up with the mannequin of coaching neighborhood members for the Southside Stories venture, which invitations cohorts of individuals—from excessive school-age college students to older adults—to be taught the fundamentals of images and visible storytelling.

The cohorts then pair with the photojournalists for area experiences to cowl totally different tales within the neighborhood. Afterward, they evaluation their work, critiquing it alongside the facilitators, and return to the sector to get extra photos.

“What we’re doing is not only giving the foundation of understanding how composition and light and color and moment are going to influence an image and what it communicates; we’re also talking about the broader stories that exist, and then teaming up with them to give instruction and let them find their own story in this process,” Moyer says.

Toensing says discovery is a crucial a part of this system because the cohort highlights the tales locally.

“They’re getting outside of themselves, which is important for all of us, to leave our egos behind and become conduits for other people’s stories and to allow people to be seen,” she says.

What Participants Say

For Thomas Neal, this system has aligned along with her skilled work, however she says the storytelling venture has helped her meet people who find themselves doing work exterior of her area and typical day-to-day.

“Being able to meet people who are doing great things and see the impact on other people in the community has been fantastic,” she says.

Over a dozen SU undergraduate and graduate college students have been concerned in tasks related to Southside Connections over the previous two and a half years, and two—Destinyi Fernandez ’27 and Sandra Oduro G’28—have performed vital roles in shaping the Southside Stories venture as analysis assistants.

Fernandez is finding out artwork images within the College of Visual and Performing Arts and serving because the undergraduate analysis assistant on the venture. She participated within the Photography and Literacy program in highschool, studying from Moyer and Nordquist earlier than she arrived on the University. She says the expertise with Southside Stories challenged her in new methods and helped her acquire helpful expertise for her images, pointing to when she took images at Ze Mart and needed to method and interview folks.

“That definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone, because as a photographer, I’m usually more of an observer,” she says. “This experience encouraged me to engage more directly with people through interviewing and storytelling, giving me guidance for communicating with people and conducting interviews.”

The expertise has underscored that she doesn’t need to simply produce a “pretty image.”

“I want it to have an impact,” Fernandez says. “I feel like I’ve learned so much from both [Southside Stories and the Photography and Literacy program] and how I can apply that to my academic life and my career moving forward.”

Why It Matters

So far, this system has printed 5 tales on Salt, with half a dozen nonetheless in progress. Nordquist says as this system grows, he hopes totally different types of storytelling will finally be a part of the visible, documentary tales.

“Our intent with Southside Stories is to celebrate the people and the projects and the businesses and the organizations in South Side and the resiliency and the challenges, all of it,” Toensing says.

Ultimately, Nordquist says the hope is this system can develop into a self-sustaining, neighborhood-run community of storytellers.

“Collective action follows collective storytelling,” he says. “They’re intertwined and inseparable. So if we want to make real, lasting improvement of the city, of the region and of the University, then we have to take storytelling seriously, and we have to respect the power of stories.”