 My name is Allison. I'm a multi-disciplinary artist. I work primarily in literature, writing, and performance. I'm also a cultural organizer using arts to forward social justice and community organizing. My name is Sasha. I'm a photographer. I'm interested in what images mean, what they say, and because I've been interested in the language of imagery, I was interested in what happened when people got to tell the stories for themselves and they got to decide what they wanted to look like in their photographs. Oftentimes people talk about the Bronx and they put it in such a negative light and they never talk about the mothers, uncles, the kids who love living in the Bronx, who love their block. So working with Sasha and Allison, when you come together with them, there's this sense of peace and you're always so excited about everybody's points of views and really listening and tuning in. We are continuing the work we began as 2014 Create Change Fellows this year as 2015 commissioned artists with our project StoryBlock. StoryBlock is an audio and visual archive of the stories here on Kelly Street, a community in the Hunts Point and Longwood section of the South Bronx. And these stories we are putting up on an online website that's going to be an archive and we're also working with local businesses to post photos and text answers of these stories so that the block becomes a sort of gallery or museum. A lot of the work is just mundane in the garden but there's an emotional aspect of the work and the sense of building community and bringing people together that Sasha and Allison and the Longer Man Project along with Rosalba especially made happen, working through being able to share through times of struggle and to actually open up doors, lines of communication that didn't really exist before and create a safe space to share those things. Working with the LP shifted how I thought about collaborating with people in community. It was like our duties as artists to help realize the visions that they already have and then use our own artistic input to maybe make it look a certain way aesthetically. Sometimes when we think of art we think of what happens at the end and working with the LP and working with the Kelly Street community, it's really all the time I spend weeding, the time I spend hanging out, the time I spend listening. We heard so many stories and we also saw how well people responded to some work Sasha did around collecting older photographs of the community and most people saw those, they really wanted to continue to tell these stories to remember what the community was and to use those memories to think about what the community is now and the future. The Kelly Street Garden is already a center for things to happen but now it's more like an artistic center. It's not just about what's happening in the garden but there's different arts activities happening here. We've been learning with every step of the way something new about how we want to work as artists with each other and with community.