Our Founder
Casey Langer Tesfaye, founder of The Community Stories and Conversation Project (TCSCP), is a qualitative public health researcher by trade, a community advocate by nature, and a lover of deep physical and emotional healing by hobby.
Ms. Tesfaye is an established researcher with a BA in Psychology and an MA in Language and Communication, as well as nearly 30 years of experience leading people and projects for government, corporate, academic, and nonprofit clients. She has been an active community leader since the early 90s. Ms. Tesfaye stands out for her insightful and excellent communication skills, and she is an exceptional strategist with solid management capabilities. She is a RIVA-trained focus group moderator and she is highly experienced with in-depth interviews, and cognitive and usability testing. Her areas of focus include public health, community based participatory research, and multilingual and multicultural studies.
The Story Behind The Community Stories and Conversation Project (TCSCP)
In April 2025, Ms. Tesfaye lost her job as a government contractor in an industry that had been deeply affected by dramatic changes to the federal employment and contracting environment. After 30 uninterrupted years of work in a research industry she deeply loved, Ms. Tesfaye began using her research skills, professional networks, and community connections in new ways. She turned her attention to community building and healing, with the goal of fostering resilience, strengthening connections, and developing new tools and systems to help guide us through times of upheaval. Ms. Tesfaye hosted 18 community support events in 2025 through partnerships with community partners. Her community support work centers on the power of meditation and grounding exercises, open conversations about difficult topics, encouraging collective imagination, and applying what she learns from the sessions she facilitates in collaboration with churches, professional organizations, community healing spaces, and more.
During that time, she came across many people starting small businesses, and she wanted to create a network to bring this growing sector together to provide mutual and strategic support, share opportunities and resources, and offer networking and mentorship. As the industry shifts from a federal contracting environment to smaller state and local grants and contracts and the “gig economy” continues to grow, Ms. Tesfaye aims to bring together research talent with opportunity, providing a voice and new skills to community members and community organizations, while putting the deep knowledge of the research industry to use in new ways.
The Community Stories and Conversation Project (TCSCP) and the TCSCP (pronounced “Talk Soup”) network is a resource hub for empowering communities, sharing the power of research, and preserving and honoring a deep professional knowledge base.
The TCSCP (pronounced “Talk Soup”) Network offers a comprehensive and continually expanding range of research-related services. Read more here.
The Community Stories and Conversation Project (TCSCP) also offers several core services directly:
* Qualitative research: Focus groups, in-depth interviews, cognitive and usability (UX) interviews, message evaluation, text analytics, analysis of open-ended questions. Interviewer and moderator training. Distress protocol development and implementation. Environmental scans and literature reviews. Research consulting.
* Facilitation: Meditation, community meetings and events.
* Community-based participatory research (CBPR): Community building and facilitation, research and evaluation services, advisory services, training, and mentorship.
- Create research programs with embedded program and topic experts included throughout the research cycle to ensure good representation, meaningful measures and useful insights and analysis
- Ideal for developing inclusive, bidirectional pipelines for populations to be heard and represented and creating research that is culturally appropriate and beneficial to the participating community
- Pipeline development and training, skill-expansion and community empowerment
* The TCSCP Network (pronounced “Talk Soup”) for the Love of Research
- Provides a high-quality set of research practitioners open to research work and matchmaking services for interested clients
- Acts as a networking and support hub for independent research professionals and small research companies, provides mentorship for newer businesses
- Built to be responsive to the changing research environment
- Offers a wide and expanding array of research services, training, mentoring and consulting for a wide variety of clients
- Leverages the knowledge and experience of research consultants within the network to act as trainers and mentors for community organizations and members looking to enhance research capabilities and skills
The Community Stories and Conversation Project 