Whether you live in the Bywater, Mid-City, the Seventh or Ninth wards or beyond, the rich, historied stories of the people and small businesses across the city are essential to the fabric of New Orleans.
Recognizing the importance of preserving these stories, in 2004 two local teachers, Abram Himelstein and Rachel Breunlin, co-founded a nonprofit called The Neighborhood Story Project (NSP). Over the past 20 years, the organization has been publishing local authors and hosting lectures and cultural exchanges, producing more than 15 books in partnership with the University of New Orleans.
NSP’s first headquarters was in an old corner store in the Seventh Ward.
“For 17 years, we hosted classes, exhibits, workshops and concerts that were based on what the fieldwork was telling us: What do New Orleanians love about their neighborhoods? What brings out the best in us, and how can we create a space that nurtures these ways of being?” said Breunlin.
A professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of New Orleans, she said she was on board from the project’s inception.
“When the NSP was founded, I was teaching at John McDonogh Senior High in Downtown New Orleans while working on a degree in applied urban anthropology, and I met another teacher, Abram Himelstein, who was also a creative writer and DIY publisher,” she said. “Abram had the vision to start a project where we co-created books with our students and then had block parties to celebrate. He named it ‘The Neighborhood Story Project,’ because our students loved to represent their neighborhoods: ‘I’m from the Sixth Ward!’ ‘I’m from the Ninth Ward!’ That first year, we learned a lot from hanging out on our students’ blocks, in corner stores, barrooms and churches. We formed close ties that are still important to us today.”
When the corner store flooded during Hurricane Ida, the organization’s headquarters was moved to the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at UNO. The Neighborhood Story Project has since created a series of films with long-term partners that are designed to accompany the oral histories it has collected.
NSP is also working with Tulane’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and the Preservation Hall Foundation on an album of the concerts it recorded over the years at the corner store.
Breunlin serves as NSP’s director.
“At the heart of my work is doing the fieldwork and writing with our partners to create books, exhibits and public programs,” she explained. “Abram is now the editor-in-chief of UNO Press, so we continue to collaborate on the publishing of our books,” said Breunlin, who is celebrating her 20th year on the UNO faculty.
“I would not be able to do long-term fieldwork and community outreach — or be able to be as consistent with the care of the books and relationships that are embedded in them — without my department’s belief in the power of public anthropology,” she said. “It’s also an honor to share this work with our students. They come from all over the region to take my courses in public culture and storytelling. I design the courses so that they can also have a chance to connect with some of the NSP’s long-term partners like the Spirit of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors and the community-based museum The House of Dance and Feathers.”
In addition to institutional support from UNO, the NSP receives funding from grant projects and donations in a diversified plan to maximize its budget.
“Over 20 years, we have had many sources of funding — from book sales to donations to grants for specific projects,” explained Breunlin. “We are currently part of a Mellon Foundation grant at the University of New Orleans called ‘Collaborative Public Humanities in Action,’ which supported ‘Botanica,’ our more recent exhibit at the Louisiana State Museum’s Cabildo.”
The NSP is a close-knit team of five including Breunlin, Book Series Editor Helen Regis, Ethnographic Photographer Bruce Sunpie Barnes, Graphic Designer Gareth Breunlin and internship support from Maddie Fussell. While the project has become more than just a job for Breunlin and the entire Neighborhood Story Project team, they all agree the benefits exceed the tasks of managing budgets and fundraising.
“Books take years to make, and you will never make up the money and time you put in,” Breunlin said. “It does not work as a straight business model, but it works in so many other ways. My dream is to have operating support that allows us to go at a pace that honors the time needed to complete community-based projects that have national and international audiences without exhausting ourselves.”
The impacts of the NSP can be seen in its catalog of publications, as well as the stories told at cultural events and exhibitions, something that Breunlin notes as motivation to keep going into its next decade.
“In 20 years, we have gone through many cycles. I am proud of the nine books written by our public high school students. The first five witnessed the year before Hurricane Katrina from many different vantage points, and the ones written between 2007-2009 documented the way young people and their families rebuilt their lives after the storm.
“The school we worked in does not exist anymore, but these books are still read and continue to sell out.”
The Neighborhood Story Project
Neighborhoodstoryproject.org // IG: @nspnola
