A project to record 22 oral histories with three community-based organizations to explore community response and resilience after hurricanes and other climate-related disasters in Puerto Rico. 

The project aims to preserve and build access to a collection or oral histories about community responses to climate change in Puerto Rico. Collective Care is a partnership between the UPR-Cayey, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), and community-based organizations in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Through this partnership, the project documents community-led responses to disasters, beginning with hurricanes Irma and María in 2017, the 2020 earthquakes, the covid-19 pandemic, and the underlying economic crisis.

A participatory, community-based study to document and preserve Indigenous reproductive health practices of the Dakhóta and CHamoru. 

This project proposes to engage a participatory, environmental humanities inquiry exploring Indigenous reproductive health and reproductive justice (IRH/RJ) within Dakhóta and CHamoru communities and homelands. Through a series of three phases, this project will utilize conversation and storywork methods to document, identify and protect this unique cultural heritage and its related resources; engage community reproductive health workers and birthkeepers in participatory efforts to safeguard and foster the resurgence of this knowledge; and to appraise the risks of climate change on IRH/RJ and develop strategies that ensure the continuity of this cultural heritage in Indigenous communities facing imminent risk.

The collection of oral histories and scanning of materials from six at-risk communities in Harrison County, Mississippi, located on the Gulf Coast.

This project will retrieve history from six communities at risk of hurricane flooding in Harrison County, Mississippi. These groups have unique culture and history that has already been changed due to Hurricane Katrina. The Local History and Genealogy Department of the Harrison County Library System would collect their history through scanning documents, images, and recording oral histories. These will be collected through community events and programs. Then shared online with a digital copy being preserved in the Local History and Genealogy Department. The Local History and Genealogy Department will also educate these communities on best practice methods to preserve their own histories.

The gathering of 100 oral histories documenting the impact of COVID-19 and climate change within Detroit communities. 

The Detroit Historical Society (DHS) seeks to expand its growing oral history collection by capturing stories from Detroit residents and others, with a particular effort on reaching underserved populations in the region. Entitled Collecting Detroiters’ Stories of Courage, Struggle, Loss and Resili-ence: An Oral History Project, DHS will collect new stories from those that have experienced the impacts of the pandemic for its ongoing Detroit Responds: Stories from the Time of Covid-19 collection, and will create a new project area called The Neighborhoods: Where Climate Change Matters that focuses on the effects of extreme weather events on individuals living in Detroit.

The documentation and preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage resources about Black and African American Appalachians.

A project to identify, preserve and amplify Black Appalachian experiences and voices through cultural mapping, oral historic collection and dissemination, and national cultural exchanges and organizing. This is a cross-programmatic project within the arts and media non-profit organization Appalshop, Inc. It features work by project coordinators in three programs of the organization: Archive, Community Development, and Roadside Theater. We will collect and map Black churches and faith experiences in central Appalachian communities in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, collect oral histories from an integrated community in Knott County, Kentucky, and participate in residencies with other organizations working with historically disadvantaged communities through the Performing our Future program.

The collection of fifty oral history interviews, a full-time oral history storyteller-in-residence program, and the creation of a digital exhibit, social media, and website content. The project would document South Asian American healthcare workers’ experiences of being employed on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

“Communities of Care” is a digital collection of oral histories from South Asian American healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fifty interviews will be conducted by the Healthcare Storyteller-in-Residence: a medical professional who will be trained by professional oral historians. Other products include a digital exhibit interpreting the collection and live broadcasted dialogues. Themes include treating patients with COVID-19, loss of family members, the emotional impact of death and dying, South Asian values, and the privileges and challenges of healthcare work. South Asian Americans have faced increased vulnerability during the pandemic due to a high number of frontline workers, restrictive visa policies, community-specific health risks, and income inequality. Not only will SAADA’s collection amplify voices from a diverse community rarely represented in archives, but it will preserve the lived experiences of a crucial workforce at a time that America needed them most.

The collection of 10 oral histories as well as other documentation about the cultural heritage of Islote, Puerto Rico, a small and historical fishing village on the north coast endangered by climate change.

The Island Resilience Project is a collaboration between the Social Research Observatory of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo and the Luciérnagas Foundation in the Islote community. Our project aims to enhance the cultural and community resilience of Islote Puerto Rico against the impacts of climate change from a decolonial perspective. We will achieve this goal through the collaborative documentation, preservation, and promotion of the unique cultural and natural heritage of the area while empowering community members. To work with the Islote school and community in gathering and disseminating geographical, oral, and historical information about the origins of their community, the natural resources surrounding it, and the strategies developed to survive by their elders.

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.

The collection and curation of 25 oral histories from Apsáalooke elders and tribal members who hold knowledge about the development and governance of a coal economy on the Crow Indian Reservation.

Like many Indigenous nations and communities, the Apsáalooke (Crow) in Montana face two-pronged threats in the form of climate change and COVID-19. In collaboration with community leaders and elders, this project will preserve that knowledge by collecting oral histories from Crow elders. This project will conduct over twenty interviews with elders on the reservation over the course of two years, which will be preserved and hosted at the tribal college—the Little Big Horn College—archives. Climate change is causing chronic and acute shocks to the Crow Reservation, including flooding, water access issues, and extreme weather. These effects fall on vulnerable communities that are ill-prepared to respond due to historic inequalities. COVID-19 directly threatens tribal elders and their role in the community as knowledge-keepers because of disproportionate morbidity and mortality that has radically accelerated the erosion of vital knowledge held by community elders.

The development of a public-facing archive of oral histories from current and former residents of public housing by updating of the National Public Housing Museum’s oral history handbook, updating educational modules and training public housing residents as interviewers, and producing at least 60 new oral histories.

The National Public Housing Museum's(NPHM) project will collect, preserve, and make accessible oral histories of people who have lived in public housing in the United States. These first-voice narratives are vital records of experiences of communities made vulnerable on many fronts. Forced to adapt to changes wrought by housing insecurity, as well as disproportionate impacts of COVID-19, climate change, and environmental harms, public housing culture-bearers bring stories of resilience that are crucial to understanding our nation’s complex history and contemporary challenges. Working collaboratively with current and former residents, the proposed project will enhance our archive and its study, with a focus on narratives from public housing residents who have experienced challenge and change in the face of COVID-19, climate threats, and environmental injustice. A common thread for all of the project’s oral histories is housing precarity, itself a driver of community disruption.

Recording 20 oral history interviews to document the impacts of and adaptations to climate change on cultural heritage and folklife in two desert regions of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

ClimateLore, a program of Southwest Folklife Alliance (SFA) in partnership with Tohono O’odham Young Voices Podcast (Tucson, AZ) and La Semilla Food Center (Anthony, NM), aims to advance cultural and community climate resilience in the US-Mexico borderlands by documenting climate-related impacts on folk, traditional, and Indigenous communities. The project seeks to highlight practices of mitigation and adaptation within these communities, which are vulnerable to losing livelihoods, cultural practices, and spiritual sites due to heat, prolonged drought, invasive species, climate migration and other threats to food security, water availability, plant and animal species, and access to sacred sites, traditional knowledge, and traditional homelands. Documentation will take the form of oral histories to be collected by partner organizations within two specific communities: 1) Members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, living both on and off reservation land in Arizona; and 2) Residents of Pa

Training students, ages 14 to 20, to conduct and record 45 video oral history interviews with elders in Taos, N.M.

With the support of this grant, different groups of young learners (aged 14-20) will, under the guidance and tutelage of TK1 professional staff and a multi-stakeholder Advisory Committee, capture the resilience and cultural grandeur of our region by gathering oral histories. With an innovative, intergenerational knowledge-sharing process at its heart, this project will feature our youth soliciting and receiving the stories and experiences of the elders of their own cultural groups. As exemplars and leaders of our three land-based cultures, what can our elders tell us about cultures navigating and changing in their responses to both climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic? What experience and wisdom do today’s youth need to strengthen their own cultures?