Storytelling & Culture Keeping

Opportunities to nourish and showcase our creative roots and spark illuminating visions expressed through word, song, film, art installations, mixed media and all forms of expression. Culture is how we create change. One of the dangers of losing our city is the erasure and whitewashing of our cultural legacy through the displacement of our people. We use cultural strategy to protect and grow our cultural sovereignty as a way to deepen our relationship to home and each other.  

Richmond LAND develops creative content, storytelling materials, and visuals to change the narrative around land and housing issues in our city. We believe that through arts and culture, we can capture people’s imagination, build knowledge, bridge experiences, and generate cultural power.

Public Events & Workshops

Richmond LAND hosts and leads events, workshops, presentations, public demonstrations, and deploys other community activation strategies to increase residents' leadership around neighborhood stabilization and community development efforts. Past offerings include:

• A public screening and discussion with the filmmakers of Decade of Fire

• A workshop on Black Wellness featuring local practitioners

• A site design workshop for the North Richmond Eco Village

Project Overview

Southside Talks is a cross-cultural conversation and storytelling series that focuses on the community of Southside Richmond. This project was launched in January 2021 out of the desire to honor and uplift the stories of home and migration to the Southside of people of color, paying special homage to Black and Latinx communities. The Southside is home to culture, creativity, music, laughter, as well as stories of grief, despair, and tragedy. Within these conversations we touch on defining home and community, all while tackling issues around housing and injustice in Richmond. 

This project consisted of a three part series of conversations that began with a 1:1 conversation with Richmond LAND's Artist in Residence, Ciera “Cici” Jevae, a multi-generational Southside resident. The second round of conversations were cultural group discussions for both Black and Brown community. 

The last round was a collective community dialogue across generations and cultures which was hosted in person at Nichol Park in Richmond. What followed was a FaceBook Live event where we invited the larger community into the conversation as a means to center healing, and build towards collective unity as we name bias, prejudice, and anti-Blackness as it has shown up within our community. 

All of this culminated into Black Out poems, which is a poetry format that takes text from an interview, a book, a description etc. and blacks out words in order to ground the reader in the power of the message. These Black out poems are from virtual and in-person interviews done over the past year rooted in vulnerability, love, truth, and the stories of home-grown Richmond residents. The overarching themes captured in the Black out poems below are: Resilience, Housing Security, Belonging & Diversity, and Roots.