Our Stories, Our Strengths: Creating Community in Montevallo
Students participating in the Jean O’Connor-Snyder Internship Program (JOIP) at the University of Montevallo gathered on April 15th at the Alan and Lindsay Song Center for the Arts with community partners, students, and local residents to share details from a year of intentional storytelling.
Launched in 2024, Our Stories, Our Strengths, administered by Dr. Kathy King and the Montevallo Legacy Project, explores storytelling as a vehicle for strengthening social bonds and fostering fuller, more inclusive historical community narratives. Through two different pairs of interns, this idea of community was interpreted and framed in their own unique ways.
Damian McCrickard and Bridget McCurrach started as the inaugural cohort in 2024. With backgrounds in history and sociology, they were quickly drawn to Our Stories, Our Strengths’ mission, specifically how they could share the hidden stories of those who have built lives, and sometimes families, outside traditional gender roles and family structures in the Montevallo area. They laid the groundwork for the first year, interviewing community members, both newcomers and longtime residents, researched, and dove into different methods to bridge the gaps in sharing these experiences.
As the first year of their internship came to a close, they realized that their work was just beginning. They wanted to discover how they could better serve this underrepresented community. Based on the concerns and needs they heard in their conversations, they noticed a lack of health resources and, more broadly, feelings of estrangement from the shared history of the rest of the United States. These discussions led to collaboration with the Magic City Acceptance Center and the Invisible Histories Project to facilitate meeting spaces and events for the queer community, where the group could feel seen, heard, supported, and have hope for their shared future.
For their future plans, Damian and Bridget are thinking of innovative ways to continue to build intergenerational connections in the Montevallo area, creating a space for mentorship and support. Additionally, they are in the process of authoring a zine, a small, self-published booklet, to highlight accessible health resources in the Shelby and Jefferson County region.
The 2025 cohort followed a similar path. Hannah Hennessey and Ashley Williams identified a group that they wanted to learn and share more about, leading to the development of the "Disabilities in Harmony” project. They wanted to begin their focus on the University of Montevallo campus to highlight awareness and real-life experiences of a typically overlooked and misunderstood portion of the population.
Their project embraced the ideal that “advocacy starts with active listening,” setting up a meet-and-greet table and creating an Instagram page as spaces for open discussion at UM. Going a step further into the history of disability awareness on campus, Hannah and Ashley met with the maintenance team to discuss renovations that have been made to address these needs in the past 30 years. While they are still in the early stages of their project, they are sure to create something special under the guidance of Dr. King and their fellow JOIPs Damian and Bridget.
At the conclusion of the presentations, Dr. King simply stated: “Courage, grace, humility - I learn this from them.”
Learn more about the Our Stories, Our Strengths program and see the work of the interns at the Montevallo Legacy Project website here.