TEAM EQUITY BUDGETING
JESS LAMAR REECE HOLLER — Equity Budgeting Founder & Co-Lead; Principal, Caledonia Northern Folk Studios, & Co-Founder/Director, Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History || Caledonia, Ohio (Lenape, Shawnee, & Wyandotte Lands)
Jess Lamar Reece Holler is a community-based cultural worker, embarrassed public folklorist, critical oral historian, historic preservationist, documentary artist, & non-profit consultant living & working in North-Central Ohio. Jess is Co-Founder & Director of Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History -- Marion County, Ohio's countywide folklife & cultural arts for social justice program -- and is Principal at Caledonia Northern Folk Studios: a social justice, cultural work & historic preservation capacity-building consultancy serving non-profits & grassroots movements in North-Central Ohio & beyond. Jess is active in labor organizing in the cultural work sphere -- including service, along with Sarah Dziedzic, as co-chair of the Oral History Association's Independent Practitioner Task Force: a coalition building resources & advocacy tools for freelance & independent cultural workers around just compensation, intellectual property, sustainability, & co-advocacy for communities -- & consults across the country on equity budgeting: a full-ecology model for reparative budgeting rooted in Marion Voices' work that helps translate organizational justice vision to material line-items. Jess's consultancy helps support the preservation of the Masonic & Temple Block buildings in Caledonia, Ohio — the historic home of Jess's family’s Reece’s Market grocery store (1955-2010) — & their rehabilitation as a cultural work & social justice capacity-building center for the North-Central Ohio region. Jess is active in the Caledonia community -- find Jess, partner Jeff, & border collie Isaly as Evergreen Coffee at the Caledonia Farmers' Market on Saturday AM's June thru September! -- & serves on the board of Terradise Nature Center on the Whetstone (Olentangy) River, where Jess coordinates the Terradise Environmental Arts Residency: the first-of-its-kind paid environmental arts residency in North-Central Ohio. Jess writes on equity budgeting, cultural work social justice praxis, & against the extractive impulse in community collaboration at Medium.
Visit Jess & learn more at caledonianorthern.org and marionvoices.org
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Nagle // MESSIER OBJECT, (c) 2019+
SARA
H DZIEDZIC — Equity Budgeting Co-Lead; Oral Historian & Project Designer || NYC (Lenapehoking on Munsee Lenape and Canarsie land)
Sarah Dziedzic is an oral historian, project consultant, grant advisor, researcher, and workshop facilitator based in New York City. She has produced oral history projects with Storm King Art Center, New York Preservation Archive Project, Greenwich Village Preservation, Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center, and the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, among others. She has supported archival projects at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Lunder Institute for Contemporary Art, the Estate of Félix González-Torres, and the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. Alongside community-based cultural worker, Jess Lamar Reece Holler, she co-develops Equity Budgeting, an approach to creating budgets for cultural projects, and was co-chair of the Independent Practitioner Task Force of the Oral History Association, where she worked to establish fair labor standards and build solidarity among oral historians and other cultural workers. She has written about conducting oral histories with visual artists for the Brooklyn Rail, and advocated for remote interviewing in oral history, citing demands from the disability justice movement. She has also produced literary memoirs with Seven Stories Press and Autonomedia, and was a founding board member of Word Up Community Bookshop, a volunteer-run, multilingual bookstore and cultural space. She graduated from Columbia University’s Oral History MA program in 2011, and lives in Queens with her partner and their many houseplants.
Visit Sarah & learn more at sarahdziedzic.com
PHOTO CREDIT: Brandon Perdomo, (c) 2021+