Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History (2017-2025) was Marion County, Ohio’s countywide folklife, cultural arts, heritage, & oral history non-profit: amplifying North-Central Ohio’s diverse cultural heritages & growing cultural arts livelihoods for more just, abundant futures for all.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: December 2025
The Board of Directors of Marion Voices Folklife voted to dissolve Marion Voices in December 2025, following unprecedented & devastating losses of Marion Voices‘ regular and sustaining federal and state funding sources, which followed immediately in the wake of DOGE cuts and cancellations to the National Endowments for the Arts & Humanities, and concomitant impacts on state agencies reliant on federal funds, like Ohio Humanities. These agencies were major sources of grant funding for Marion Voices‘ projects and programs.
Marion Voices was particularly vulnerable to 2025’s shifting funding landscape due to being one of 12o organizations nationwide to receive & hold an ArtsHERE grant: a major, two-year sustaining federal grant funded by the NEA and administered by the Regional Arts Organizations (RAOs), which made Marion Voices a part of a cohort of allied transformative arts organizations focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, & justice, in communities not ordinarily well-resourced for experimental community arts programming. Eight months into our ambitious ArtsHERE work — which was supporting our regional Cultural Heritage Assets Mapping project — we received notification of the ArtsHERE program’s cancellation. We had concentrated all of our program efforts and resources on this project for 2025-2026.
Between this loss and two other independent changes — the sunsetting of our K-12 Marion Voices in the Schools residency program (2022-2025), and the switch of the Ohio Arts Council’s ArtsNEXT grant to an every-other-year eligibility model — Marion Voices found itself unable to sustain programming or staffing beyond 2025. The Board of Directors voted to sunset the organization, distribute assets to allied & peer organizations, and to support the spinoff of the major remaining Marion Voices program — Marion Black Joy Summerfest — to an existing community or successor organization.
Marion Voices is dissolved as of December 2025. This website will not be regularly updated, but will be kept online for as long as hosting/domain registration is feasible, as an archive to our eight years of ambitious, justice-focused community folklife, cultural arts, & public history organizing in Marion County. We wish our artists, historians, collaborators, & peer organizations the best of luck in continuing cultural & public history organizing in Marion County. We are grateful to our long-time funders — including the Ohio Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Humanities, United Way of North-Central Ohio, & Marion Community Foundation — for making our eight years of work possible.
Thank you to everyone who was a part of our story. <3, Marion Voices
General operations support for Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History’s arts, culture, & heritage programming in 2025 was made possible in part by a FY2026 Sustainability Grant from the Ohio Arts Council. We are grateful to the Ohio Arts Council for your investment in growing more abundant, more just arts economies for all in North-Central Ohio, & across the state.
ABOUT MARION VOICES
Learn more about the history, mission, and vision of Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History — Marion County’s countywide folklife + cultural arts for justice organization. Through the twinned praxes of equity budgeting, community co-curation, & emergent design, Marion Voices partners directly with community cultural artists & public folklife & history modes like exhibits, festivals, apprenticeship programs, workshops, historical marker nominations, & our beloved K-12 folk arts residency program to grow arts- & heritage-based livelihoods in North-Central Ohio, while nourishing solidarities across lines of cultural, geographic, & racial/ethnic difference.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Here, find updates on upcoming Marion Voices events: including the roll-out of our Marion County Cultural Heritage Assets Mapping Project (CHAMP), Making It: Arts Livelihoods & Arts Economies in North-Central Ohio artists’ survey project, & North-Central Ohio Cultural Heritage Assets Mapping Project in Spring + Summer 2024.
OUR METHODS
Learn more about the practices of oral history, community-based folk arts documentation, and the ethics that shape how & why we do our work. Here, we also share more about what to expect from an oral history interview, and our definition of community-based folk/traditional/cultural arts and folklife traditions. Click here to see if you or someone you know would like to share your family’s histories, memories, or cultural traditions with our project!
PROJECT TEAM // CONTACT US
Learn more about our vibrant & dynamic project team — including our core team, community scholars, & in-house humanities advisors — and our network of visionary community partner organizations.
You’ll also find contact information, ways to reach out to our team, and most important of all, ways to recommend yourself, a friend, neighbor, or family member, to be documented for our project!
Marion Voices seeks to amplify under-heard histories & cultural traditions in Marion County: from our county’s Black, brown, immigrant/newcomer, rural, queer, working-class and disabled communities.
Founded in 2017, when Marion Voices Community Coordinator Johnnie Jackson and Project Director Jess Lamar Reece Holler met at a protest at City Hall in Columbus, Ohio, the Marion Voices project has worked steadily to mobilize the democratizing and power of oral history and folklife documentation to catalyze critical community conversations — about identity, history, culture, difference, and our collective futures — to build new & strengthen old coalitions for racial, economic, educational, & environmental justice in North-Central Ohio.
Originally launched as a project, then program, of the Marion County Historical Society, Marion Voices graduated into our own independent 501(c)(3) non-profit in 2021: becoming Marion County’s only hybrid arts, culture, & public history organization; & North-Central Ohio’s only folklife organization.
For more on our oral history and folklife methods, ethos, and project timeline, see UPCOMING EVENTS.
At Marion Voices, we strive to enact deep diversity & inclusion work and racial justice, in part, through a deep attention to economic justice, equity, & ethics in community-based cultural work. We strive to achieve this work through a unique attention to economic justice, fair compensation, & recognition of the labor of community collaborators that we call the Marion Voices Equity Budgeting Model. Equity Budgeting is both a praxis and a movement; and we offer workshops, tutorials, & consultancies to train other practitioners + organizations in our model. For more on our equity budgeting praxis and our philosophies of community collaboration, see EQUITY BUDGETING: A MANIFESTO.
PROJECT MEDIA
