Community Archival Resilience and Engagement (CARE): Voices of AA elders in the San Francisco Bay Area

FAIN: PN-295857-24

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Lok Siu (Project Director: May 2023 to present)
Loan Thi Dao (Co Project Director: January 2024 to present)

The collection of 40 photovoice oral history interviews and archival materials documenting elderly Asian American community members’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project would train community interviewers and deliver a five-minute documentary video, an open-access digital archive, and academic publications.

CARE is photovoice oral history and community archival project about elderly Asian Americans (AA) in San Francisco during COVID-19 and anti-Asian hate pandemics. We support preservation practices with community-based co-creation of knowledge through partnerships with two local groups that serve low-income, elder Filipino, Laotian, and Thai. CARE trains young community interviewers to conduct photovoice oral histories of elders and offers community archival workshops for elders. We consider how the survival mechanisms from past collective traumas of migration or world events and cultural practices help elders during the pandemics through the exploration of the humanities themes of impact, survival, community, and resilience. The stories will be accessible via the CARE collection in the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library’s open access public search engine in order to reach a broad audience.