Your Organization Has a powerful History. Does Anyone Know It?
Every nonprofit, every church, every community organization starts with a moment. Maybe it's a conversation at a kitchen table, or a meeting in someone's living room, or a phone call between two people who looked at a problem in their community and decided they were the ones who were going to do something about it. That moment of conviction is the seed of everything that comes after.
But five years later, ten years later, or a generation later, will anyone in your organization know that story? Not the mission statement version. Not the paragraph on the About page. The real story. Who was there? What they were afraid of? What almost stopped them? And why they did it anyway.
For most small organizations, the honest answer is: not really. There are grant reports and annual reports. Board minutes. Maybe a church bulletin archive going back forty years. The paper (or digital) record exists, but it's incomplete, and it's usually dry. It captures facts, but not feelings and documents actions but not inspirations or doubts.
My mother is a member of the Senior Saints at Cole Mill Road Church of Christ in Durham, North Carolina, a congregation over 80 years old with a concern that a lot of faith communities share. Their rich history was held by a generation of elders who remembered the church's early days, its transitional moments, and the controversies that led some people to branch off, but that generation was aging. And the Senior Saints knew that the window to capture that history was closing.
My mom knew about my work in oral history, so they called me.
We started talking before the pandemic and I led training workshop on oral history methods. We created a plan to get the project moving. but then COVID hit and everything shut down, especially for seniors. Then, in 2023, I sat down with longtime pastor Paul Watson, who is in his eighties, for a recorded interview in my parents’ sunroom. That interview rebooted the project and reenergized the Senior Saints. Fast forward to a few months ago, when the Senior Saints gathered around the long tables of the church fellowship hall with a big urn of coffee and a potluck lunch for their biggest meeting yet. A full house of longtime members and a panel of half a dozen elders at the front, leaning toward the microphone, ready.
What followed was exactly what good oral history looks like when a community is ready for it. Laughter. Shared remembering. Stories that people jumped in to add to, extend, correct, and laugh about. A room full of people who had been carrying these stories for decades were finally being asked to put them down somewhere that would last.
Pastor Watson, in his interview, said something that has stayed with me. We were talking about what makes a good sermon and he said, simply, that people don't dislike preaching. They dislike bad preaching. "Sermons can do all sorts of things," he said, "but they need to do something."
He's right. And the same is true of an organization's story. It can validate, inspire, challenge, and comfort. It can show a funder why your work matters and why it has always mattered. It can help a new staff member understand not just what their job is but how it fits into the organization’s legacy. It can give a congregation a reason to stay and a reason to invite others in. But it needs to do something — and it can only do something if it's been captured, preserved, and made accessible to the people who need it.
This is what separates organizations that know their history from organizations that don't. It's not just about avoiding the mistake your predecessor made fifteen years ago (although that's real). It's about being able to draw on the voices of your founders when you're making a hard decision. It's about having the stories of the people whose lives your work has transformed, ready to share when a funder asks why they should invest. It's about understanding, at a deep level, what makes your organization unique and special, and being able to say that out loud.
The Senior Saints at Cole Mill Road knew all of this intuitively. They didn't wait for a crisis. They didn't wait until the last elder with living memory of the early days was gone. They started slowly and were interrupted by a pandemic, but they understood that their history was worth preserving and that the window for doing it was shorter than it felt. And they acted.
Your organization's history is worth preserving too. The question is when you’re going to start.
At Triangle Story Studio, we work with nonprofits, faith communities, schools, and community organizations to document their histories and make them matter. If you're ready to start, or just want to think through what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.
