The South Memphis Shalom Zone is teaming up with Crossroads to Freedom at Rhodes College to train youth archivists from South Memphis to interview the elders in their neighborhood.  Over an eight week summer program, high school students will be mentored by college interns with the Crossroads project.  While on the Rhodes campus, youth will learn interviewing techniques that will allow them to discover positive memories and valuable wisdom from their neighborhood elders.  The youth will get hands on experience with video, audio, lighting, editing and other technology skills needed to capture oral histories in South Memphis and preserve the interviews on the crossroadstofreedom.org archive.  At the end of the summer, the youth will present the highlights of the oral histories and what they have learned back to the community.   Through this project, the youth claim their own voice and power to be change agents that build an even stronger South Memphis…just like their elders did and continue to do today.

This project was piloted during the summer of 2013.  You can see the video presentation that the youth, along with their college mentors, created at the end of the summer below. 

The community presentation had about 100 in attendance who excitedly declared this the first annual event of many to come.

With your help, we are eager to see this project continue and expand.  For 2014, the Neighborhood History Project of the South Memphis Shalom Zone will be inviting the youth to come back from summer 2013 and serve as additional mentors and role models to the 2014 youth.  In addition, the returning youth will have a second day each week at Rhodes to get even more hands on experience with editing and archiving the video interviews.

This project exemplifies collaboration at its best as it brings together youth, college students and elders.  It leverages churches and other nonprofits in the community as well as institutions, such as Rhodes, from outside the neighborhood.  In addition, youth meet college interns from colleges across the south including Vanderbilt, Morehouse and others. 

The greatest power of this project happens as young people sit across from older people and rediscover how much each cares.  Anytime we gather to reconnect and reassemble the members -- and the memories -- of a community, amazing things happen.