"(Folk)Lore on the Block": A SPARK project

Description

(Folk)Lore on the Block: Intergenerational Stories to Story Our Future is a community-based storytelling and artistic mentorship project rooted in Kingston-Galloway/Orton Park. The project centres youth as caretakers of neighbourhood memory, inviting them to learn from elders, artists, local businesses, and community organizations to collect and share the “lore” of KGO.

The project treats lore not as static history, but as living knowledge—stories shared on sidewalks and storefronts, in kitchens and community spaces, through humour, cautionary tales, migration narratives, music, and everyday recollections that shape how people belong to KGO. By archiving KGO’s present, (Folk)Lore ensures that future generations inherit not just facts, but the spirit, humour, struggle, and care embedded in how KGO tells its own stories.

Through onboarding, intergenerational interviews, creative working sessions, storefront window installations, and digital storytelling, the project will transform everyday neighbourhood stories into public-facing creative expressions that celebrate KGO’s cultural richness, live experiences, and collective memory.

The project will culminate in a free community Q&A event/artist talk, hosted by Shelly Grace. Youth and elder storytellers will reflect on their experiences, share the stories they gathered, and discuss the importance of intergenerational storytelling in KGO. Visual displays of the completed storefront pieces will be showcased, and community members and business owners will be invited to attend.

Objectives

The project aims to celebrate and document neighbourhood lore in ways that honour oral storytelling traditions, collective memory, and cultural specificity. It seeks to re-centre intergenerational storytelling as an accessible and meaningful practice in KGO by bringing youth and elders together to collect, shape, and share local stories.

(Folk)Lore on the Block also builds on findings from the Cultural Hotspot IGNITE project, where community members identified the importance of preserving oral stories, strengthening relationships across generations, and making community knowledge visible in everyday spaces.

Goals

1. Celebrate community and the lore of KGO through communion and art
   • Celebrate and document neighbourhood lore in ways that honour oral practices, collective memory, and cultural specificity. Specifically, to re-centre intergenerational storytelling as a meaningful and accessible practice within KGO. By bringing together youth and the elder storytelling group to collect neighbourhood “lore”.
2. Build upon, re-engage, and knowledge mobilize findings from The KGO "Just Vibes" Archive: An IGNITE Project
   • Support youth as emerging storytellers by providing mentorship, paid honorariums, and hands-on experience in interviewing, storytelling, and creative production. At the same time, the project honours elders as cultural knowledge holders whose lived experiences and wisdom are essential to community history. Local businesses are also engaged as community anchors, with their stories shared through storefront displays that transform everyday spaces into sites of cultural storytelling.
   • Implement public-facing artworks from both IGNITE and SPARK foster pride, intergenerational dialogue, and collective recognition of KGOs cultural richness.
   • From the IGNITE grant, we’ve learned what facilitates good storytelling practices: people, shared space, and sacred space - free from surveillance, time-pressure, and discomforts of extreme weather, hunger, and interpersonal-judgement. At the community level, (Folk)Lore helps ensure that KGO’s present-day stories are not lost.
3. Serve as an upstream approach – focused on root causes, community intervention and impact, and preventative action – to generative, intergenerational community engagement.
   • Foster intergenerational community engagement. For youth, anticipated impacts include paid creative mentorship, strengthened communication skills, and a deeper sense of belonging to place. Toward employability, youth will practice storytelling skills, collaboration and leadership, project and time management, and are able to use this experience toward professional development. Artistically, youth will gain experience in ethical story collection, artistic collaboration, and public dissemination while contributing to meaningful community art.

Proposed outcomes

The project will support 6 youth participants through paid creative mentorship, hands-on experience in interviewing and storytelling, and opportunities to build communication, collaboration, leadership, project management, and creative production skills.

The stories gathered through the project will be shared through storefront window installations, a dedicated Instagram page, and a free community Q&A/artist talk hosted by Shelly Grace. These outcomes are intended to foster local pride, strengthen intergenerational dialogue, honour elders as cultural knowledge holders, and ensure that KGO’s present-day stories are not lost.