From neighborhood documentaries and photography to poetry and publications, the Deaconess Foundation’s nine-month Narrative Lab is helping St. Louis artists and storytellers challenge prevailing narratives about Black communities and advance racial equity.
Participants showcased their work Tuesday at the foundation’s headquarters on Vandeventer Avenue, presenting films, visual art, publications and other creative projects offering fresh perspectives on communities across the St. Louis region.
Two years ago, Deaconess narrative strategist Shantell Hinton and Constance Harper, vice president of Strategic Impact & Innovation, posed a public question: “What if philanthropy stopped funding individual stories and instead invested in relationships, creative infrastructure, and cultural archives capable of shifting public imagination for generations?”
The search for an answer fueled the project’s creation. The goal was to create a unique, imaginative collective of leaders empowered to shift away from traditional grantmaking models toward investing deeply in long-term relationships and community power-building.
Trevor Smith of New York’s BLIS Collective created a colorful, multipage publication called The Abundance Zine. The “polyvocal” magazine weaves multiple community voices and images that challenge traditional, single-perspective storytelling. Divided into three sections — “What Was,” “What Is” and “What Could Be” — the publication demonstrates how “narratives of abundance” can be reclaimed, Smith said.
“I got to learn so much about St. Louis and help folk really think about how we can really reclaim narratives and showcase that there really is so much and enough … we just have to deploy the resources in ways that support working class people, Black and Brown people and produce something that is ours,” Smith told The St. Louis American.
Chapters with provocative headlines such as “Michael Brown and the United States’ Structural Violence Epidemic,” by David Ragland, “What My Community Could Be,” by Ke’Miyah Rodgers, and “White Supremacy Won’t Lead Us to an Abundant Life,” by Tef Poe, provided in-your-face prose that demanded truth, justice and honest reflection.
The photo and commentary section of the zine, titled “Humans of St. Louis,” features local figures including Rebeccah Bennett, founder of Emerging Wisdom Inpower Institute; Barbara Levin, a professor at the Brown School of Social Work; Chris Krehmeyer, president of Beyond Housing; and Katherine Simone Reynolds, a multidisciplinary visual artist, scholar and curator.
“We live in a social and economic caste system that taxes those who are perceived to be on the margins,” Bennett wrote. “That tax shows up in decreased longevity and life expectancy.”
Another photo book, This Is Our City, opens with a subtle invitation:
“A city is more than the streets we walk, the buildings we inhabit or the boundaries that define it. Their stories, their struggles, their creativity and the ways they continue to show up for one another … a city is never finished. It is continually becoming, through all of us.”
Local filmmaker and producer Cami Thomas of My Friends and I Cohort created a yet-to-be-named, place-based short film highlighting community wisdom, belonging and collective care in St. Louis-area communities.
“We highlighted Kinloch, Centerville, East St. Louis and North City to show the similarities, the good and vibrant aspects and some of the challenges we have in common,” Thomas explained. “We found in doing that … a lot of the reasons in the struggles that we have are similar across the board.”
Another project, Multi-Genre Magazine & Visual Poetics, led by Stevie Selby and the Warm Cookies of the Revolution cohort, blends visual art, poetry and editorial writing to expand public imagination around racial equity.
Hinton and Harper discussed the broader ambitions of the initiative in August with HPQ, a digital journal dedicated to nonprofit management, philanthropy and social justice.
“Ultimately, the Narrative Network reflects a different theory of philanthropic investment,” the women said. “It requires sustained investment in the cultural capacity of communities to imagine, create, preserve, and pass forward narratives that shape how future generations understand themselves and what they believe is possible.
“If that is true, then the next evolution of philanthropy is not simply to fund stories. It is to help build the conditions from which transformative stories, and transformative futures, can continuously emerge.”
Sylvester Brown Jr. is the Deaconess Foundation Community Advocacy Fellow.