Stories have the power to unite us all in our common humanity

When Bobby Taylor started the "Humans of Lorain County" Facebook page, he had an idea what he wanted to do. But he had no idea what to expect. With only two posts online and just a few weeks up and running, the page has already been seen by more than 25,000 people. "It's been just amazing," Taylor said. "The first post we put up got 17,000 hits in the first week. Then the second one, it got 17,000 hits in the first six hours." The idea grew from a challenge sparked by Taylor's recent participation in Neighbor Up, a training program that brings together city residents to discuss critical issues facing Elyria and Lorain. The program is sponsored by the Community Foundation of Lorain County and Neighborhood Connections and is a perfect fit for Taylor, the director of planning and community services for the Lorain County Community Action Agency. Neighbor Up challenges its members to think of projects to uplift and bring people together. He was mulling the idea over in his mind as his wife, Kandis, was telling him about short stories she was reading on the Humans of New York page on Instagram. The HONY site, launched in 2010 by photographer Brandon Stanton, was intended as a photography project to depict 10,000 New Yorkers on the street. Eventually it morphed into a blog, included quotes and eventually short vignettes of their lives. It has now grown to 20 millions followers on social media and has spawned two bestselling books. The Taylors wanted something like that for Lorain County, something that "was a counterweight to the collection of negative stories you read online," he said. Taylor looked at it as his "stone soup" after the popular children's fable of a community bringing together what they have to feed everybody. "I want to see things change here in Elyria, particularly in South Elyria where I'm from." He first approached his fellow trainees, asking them to participate in interviews for the project he had in mind, and when they eagerly volunteered, he realized maybe he was onto something. The Taylors set up a Facebook page and started looking for possible candidates and found their first subject, a man who posts short motivational "wooo" videos, as Taylor calls it, around town. "I saw them and I thought, 'What would motivate a person to do this?' And it turns out it came out of the pain of his dad dying. He said 'one day I screamed out and it made me feel better, and I thought it made me feel better, maybe it will make other people feel better,'" Taylor said. By then, the Taylors weren't looking for people to profile. The second person profiled submitted her 500-word story, a moving post of living with a life-altering medical condition. "Now that they see that these are common folks, they think 'I can be an inspiration. Let's get to know each other as neighbors,'" Taylor said. "There's some amazing stories that can be told here. People are opening up and that's where we are." For now the Taylors are posting a new story every Monday, and scheduling 30-minute audio interviews. They welcome submissions of 500 words HumansofLorainCounty@gmail.com and post some helpful prompts to get started, like what motivates you, what are you most afraid of, what events shaped your life, how would you like to be remembered? They'd like to expand to two a week, but "it's just the two of us. We'd love it if we had people to help do interviews, or find people, or run around and take pictures, but it's just us," he said. "And the stories, they're so amazing. We've got three in the can right now and they're so good." Always, always, the theme is connection. "My hope is that this sort of breaks down barriers. COVID hit and everyone sort of isolated themselves, but even before that I don't know if, as a community, we really were neighborly. My hope is we become more neighborly. More communal. Not so negative. Not feel so alone. The comments are so amazing - 'I went through that. I knew your dad. I'm going through that.' It's amazing how stories like that just connect people to one another," he said. "I believe in the power of stories." Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.