The history in your archive is only as strong as the research behind it.
Research and Resource partners with cities, universities, colleges, and libraries to uncover, document, and publish the histories their communities are counting on them to get right.
Research built to hold up in a boardroom, a classroom, or an archive.
Every engagement starts the same way: with the documents, the interviews, and the people who remember what the record left out.
Institutional Research & Archives
Deep-dive archival research — board minutes, yearbooks, newspapers, deeds, and primary sources — assembled into a usable, citable record.
Oral History Collection
Locating, interviewing, and accurately transcribing the alumni, elders, and community members whose memory is the archive's missing half.
Community Engagement & Facilitation
Listening sessions, surveys, and public meetings that give a community real input into how its own legacy gets represented.
Publication Writing
Clear, compelling writing for blogs, podcasts, and marketing — grounded in research, not boilerplate.
Race Equity Workshops
Facilitated education on systemic racism and Black history for organizations working to become genuine allies in practice, not just policy.
Family & Legacy Memory Books
Guided memoir and family-history writing retreats, so individual stories don't disappear the way institutional ones so often do.
Preserving Ligon — Wake County Public School System
Preserving a school's legacy before the building comes down
J.W. Ligon Magnet Middle School — once the city's only Black high school — is set for demolition and rebuilding. Research and Resource was brought in to make sure the school's history isn't demolished along with it.
The work: researching decades of school board minutes, yearbooks, and newspaper archives; contacting hundreds of alumni to build oral histories; and partnering with the City of Raleigh Museum and UNC's Southern Oral History Program to track down and correctly transcribe original interview tapes — recovered, in the end, with help from a former Richard B. Harrison Library librarian.
The result so far: a facilities committee presentation naming the community's priorities — educational rigor, arts and culture, and the "collective identity" alumni still feel when they hear the school's name — now shaping how WCPSS designs the new building.
Selected Engagements
Founders' Day Convocation
Keynote speaker for the 157th Founders' Day Convocation at one of North Carolina's founding HBCUs, opening the university's Black History Month programming.
Alumni Association Feature & Engagement
Profiled by NC State Magazine on her research methodology; photographed with NC State Alumni Association at Mount Hope Cemetery for a feature on the histories buried in Raleigh's record.
Roots, Resilience & Reconstruction
A virtual public program tracing the historical forces that shaped Raleigh's Black neighborhoods, drawn directly from primary archival research.
Women's History Month Author Talk
An invited talk on Raleigh's untold history and the research and writing process behind bringing it into the public record.
From scattered records to a usable archive
Locate the record
Board minutes, deeds, yearbooks, newspapers, and whatever else exists — including the sources nobody has digitized yet.
Find who remembers
Alumni, elders, former staff — the oral history that fills in what the paper record leaves out, transcribed accurately, by someone who knows the names and places.
Bring the community in
Listening sessions and surveys that give the people who lived the history real say in how it's represented going forward.
Publish it right
Grant narratives, reports, presentations, or a public-facing story — written clearly, cited correctly, and built to last.
"There was a collective identity. When you say 'Ligon,' people have a feeling."— Carmen Cauthen, on why institutional legacy work matters
If your institution has a history worth getting right, let's talk about it.
For research partnerships, oral history projects, grant writing, or community engagement work with cities, universities, colleges, and libraries.