The seed for A-B Tech's Voices & Visions oral history project was planted in early 2025. For years, Fine Arts and Communications Chair Rebekah Handy had dreamed of an intergenerational storytelling project that would highlight the lives of local seniors, while giving her students a chance to practice their interviewing and public speaking skills. One day, Handy voiced her dream to A-B Tech art instructor Ani Volkan, whose sister, Aleen Dailey, works as wellness coordinator at local retirement community Carolina Village. It turned out that Dailey also loves to foster intergenerational projects with the broader community. Handy, Volkan and Dailey put their heads together and created the Voices & Visions project in September 2025.
It has been growing ever since. Nearly 20 Carolina Village residents participated in Voices & Visions in the 2025-26 academic year, sharing their stories with 60 public speaking, fine arts, and videography students. Over the course of the fall semester, the students sprang into action to bring residents' stories to life:
- Public speaking students interviewed residents and created Power Point presentations about their lives;
- Videography students created short films that showed meaningful photos and objects from their lives; and
- 2-Dimensional Design students painted bright patterns for quilt squares based on the residents’ individual life stories.
Communication instructors Martha Gates and Curtis Philon, Fine Arts instructor Derek Rhodarmer and Volkan, an art instructor, have been integral to the project and their students' involvement, Handy said.
The students’ oral presentations were shared during a gathering in A-B Tech’s Ferguson Auditorium in November 2025 that included the residents and their families.
During the spring semester in 2026, the final phase of the project unfolded as a team of Carolina Village residents worked to transform the students’ painted squares into fabric squares stitched together in a quilt. A visual tapestry of the residents’ colorful lives, the quilt will be exhibited, along with their written stories, on A-B Tech’s campus in the Coman Art Gallery from May through July. The project will then move to the Asheville Art Museum in August before returning to its final home at Carolina Village.
The Voices & Visions project was recognized this spring with LeadingAge North Carolina’s 2026 Excellence in Innovation Award. The project also will be showcased by the Carolina Public Humanities Expedition Asheville festival as an intergenerational storytelling panel discussion on March 27 at A-B Tech.
