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Tashia Thomas Neal was born and raised in Syracuse. But despite supporting the city’s South Side for years, it wasn’t until she set foot on the soil at  to take pictures as part of the Southside Stories project that she learned about the urban farm tucked in the neighborhood.

She says that moment of community discovery is one of the key strengths of the Southside Stories, a community storytelling initiative that pairs Syracuse residents with professional photojournalists to document the people, places and programs enriching the neighborhood. The stories and images produced are then published on ,���ٳ��������Dz�������’���� and website.

The program launched in spring 2025, emerging from Southside Connections, a collaboration between Syracuse University’s  and 30 organizations across the city’s South Side. Residents are given the technical skills to document and celebrate the community, and give greater visibility to the mutual aid and everyday resilience happening in the neighborhood, which includes the historic 15th Ward.

For Thomas Neal, who was part of a recent cohort of residents trained through the project, the experience 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

, co-founder of Southside Stories, director of the Engaged Humanities Network and associate professor and Dean’s Professor of Community Engagement in the College of Arts and Sciences, says building up the capacity for residents to tell the stories of their own neighborhood is incredibly important. Not just for communicating to audiences outside the neighborhood but for “telling the story of the community to the community itself” as a way of building pride of place and recognizing the values and skills present.

Nordquist co-directs Southside Stories alongside co-founders Amy Toensing and Matt Moyer ’94, longtime photojournalists and documentary filmmakers who have worked for National Geographic for decades. Toensing previously was a faculty member at the , while Moyer is currently an adjunct professor. Together they run , working with Newhouse graduate Kayla Breen G’24.

Toensing and Moyer originally connected with Nordquist through a different Engaged Humanities Network collaboration with Syracuse University Art Museum, theprogram. Together, the three came up with the model of training community members for the Southside Stories project, which invites cohorts of participants—from high school-age students to older adults—to learn the basics of photography and visual storytelling.

The cohorts then pair with the photojournalists for field experiences to cover different stories in the neighborhood. Afterward, they review their work, critiquing it alongside the facilitators, and return to the field to get more images.

“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 an important part of the program as the cohort highlights the stories in the community.

“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, the program has aligned with her professional work, but she says the storytelling project has helped her meet people who are doing work outside of her field 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 students have been involved in projects associated with Southside Connections over the past two and a half years, and two—Destinyi Fernandez ’27 and Sandra Oduro G’28—have played significant roles in shaping the Southside Stories project as research assistants.

Fernandez is studying art photography in the  and serving as the undergraduate research assistant on the project. She participated in the Photography and Literacy program in high school, learning from Moyer and Nordquist before she arrived at the University. She says the experience with Southside Stories challenged her in new ways and helped her gain valuable skills for her photography, pointing to when she took photos at Ze Mart and had to approach and interview people.

“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 experience has underscored that she doesn’t want to just 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, the program has published five stories on Salt, with half a dozen still in progress. Nordquist says as the program grows, he hopes different forms of storytelling will ultimately join the visual, documentary stories.

“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 the program can become a self-sustaining, neighborhood-run network 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.”