Save Your Spaces

Save Your Spaces 2025 — a recap.

I returned to Save Your Spaces with that steadier voice I spoke of in 2023. This year I led a workshop on documenting local history. If you’re called to this work, you don’t need to be a professional historian or archaeologist or anthropologist or librarian or anything. Curiosity, open-mindedness, creativity, and discipline are more important than formal training. I spoke of the general “why” such documentation is important, the “why” for me, and, finally, using Black Wide-Awake as an example, the “how” of choosing a subject, picking a platform on which to share, establishing a format for your posts or episodes, and basic research.

I met some dope young historic preservation students and the amazing Latine and Indigenous photographers of Captura collective and learned the latest about the community collaboration space Create ATL, which hosted the event. 

Founder Nedra Deadwyler describes Save Your Spaces as “a skillshare to equip, inspire, and activate the everyday person to preserve culture, history, and narratives — grounding in a place embodied experiences and practices and extending care towards our kinfolk.” I’m grateful for her vision and for the opportunity to contribute!

Save Your Spaces 2025.

I’m honored to be back at Save Your Spaces Festival this weekend, presenting a workshop on Day 2.

Create ATL, 900 Murphy Avenue SW, Atlanta, is hosting the festival, and the schedule for Saturday, May 17, is:

10:oo A.M. – Bring a mat for Community Preservation Meet-up & Morning Wellness/Community Yoga with Civil Bikes and Save Your Spaces founder Nedra Deadwyler.

11:00 A.M. – “We’ll Get There No Matter What”: Collective Visual Storytelling, a workshop with Captura ATL, @captura.atl

12:oo noon – Standing in the Gap for the Ancestors: The Why and How of Documenting Local History, Lisa Y. Henderson, @BlackWideAwake

2:00 P.M. – Community Grant Recipient Presentation to Kennedi Malone,  @kennedi_malone

3:00 P.M. – Community Grant Recipient Presentation to Anthony Jasso, @loser.ant

4:00 P.M. – Honoring Tanya Debose, @tanyadebose, a preservation icon who passed earlier this year, leaving an indelible legacy in her work on behalf of Independence Heights, Texas.

A food truck, @adamjsatl, will be onsite offering gluten-free and vegan options.

Saving spaces (and myself.)

I repped hard for Wide-Awake yesterday at Save Your Spaces Festival, talking about Lane Street Project and the challenges and rewards of African-American cemetery preservation, as well as learning about amazing local projects here in Atlanta from public historians, artists, preservationists, and others of my new “tribe.” 

Shouts out to moderator Dr. Shari L. Williams, who spearheads Macon County, Alabama’s The Ridge Archaeological Project, and co-panelist Debra Taylor Gonzalez of Friends of Geer Cemetery, which offers a model for how Lane Street Project might grow and what we might achieve.

Deep appreciation to the visionary Nedra Deadwyler, founder of Civil Bikes and Save Your Spaces, for pulling me into this conversation with gentle prods and encouragement over the past year or so. My acute awareness that I am neither a public historian nor preservationist by training has had me hiding my light, but this experience reassured me of the value I bring to the work. I’ll move forward with a steadier voice and better tools to help save the historic spaces that mean most to me.

Save Your Spaces.

I’m honored to join these amazing women at Save Your Spaces Cultural Heritage and Historic Preservation Festival to talk about successes and challenges in the critical work of preserving African-American cemeteries.

If you’re intrigued by local history, have stories to tell or histories to preserve, are curious and want to learn more about cultural heritage and create ways to preserve it, please join us March 4 at Create ATL, 900 Murphy Avenue SW, Atlanta.