By PHILLIPS COMMUNITY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT PARTNERS
Welcome back to the Phillips Community Oral History Project monthly updates. This column is an important part of the project’s outreach to the Phillips community. It is intended to share key progress milestones and to remain accountable to the people of Phillips.
After several months of interviews (which are still ongoing), the Project has taken steps to transcribe many of them, bringing us closer to making these stories public and giving them a permanent home. The process begins with an automated transcription service, but Project staff and volunteers put considerable effort into matching the text with residents’ actual speech, and adding timestamps for future reference.
Along with a more permanent digital home for these oral interviews, we plan to share even more of that content in these Alley updates. As we’ve gotten the interviews and transcription underway, the content we have shared from these interviews has been limited to small excerpts. Starting in February, our updates will include considerably longer extracts from the interviews. We’re especially excited about sharing these extracts, because they fit best into the primary purpose of the Oral History Project: all of us as neighbors sharing our Phillips story with one another.
Several interviews have addressed a rising feeling among neighbors that Phillips has become less safe in recent years. What struck many of us was how community care has come up as part of the response to this rising distrust.
In an interview with Donna Neste and Carrie Day-Aspinwall, they talked about the role of community efforts like Phillips Clean Sweep in building community safety. Day-Aspinwall playfully referred to Clean Sweep as one of the many “weed and seed” programs that have been working “to weed out that crime and seed in the good things.” Neste noted that such community efforts have often benefited from federal funding, and stressed the need to keep such community support alive: “We really made a lot of headway … [W]e lowered crime and all kinds of stuff but it’s got to be a sustained effort.”
Derrick Herod’s interview was a reminder that even if our lives as Phillips residents individually change, many of us continue to feel connected to all of our neighbors. Herod said,
“It made me stay — the people, yeah the people. The homeless — I can relate to them. I was once one of those people and now a lot of my acquaintances are, you know, still in that bind. So I don’t want to make them feel like I’m abandoning them just because I have a place to stay and stuff. So I just come around anyway to help out when I can.”
Luke Gannon of East Phillips Improvement Coalition, who has led and transcribed several interviews, said, “Hearing stories like [Herod’s] reminds me that this neighborhood is a network of care and shared resilience.”
The Phillips Oral History project is funded in part by grants from the City of Minneapolis, and in part by grants from the University of Minnesota Liberal Arts Engagement Hub. We are halfway through the year of funding from the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, which has allowed us to gather so many interviews and begin the work of sharing those interviews with the community.
If you have any questions about the project or are interested in participating/volunteering, please reach out to info@unitedphillips.org. Accountability to our communities is a core commitment of this project, and we will let this column be a place to have that dialogue.
