How can community-based archives thrive?
Community-based archives hold some of the most valuable materials documenting the lives of marginalized people in the United States, and they mostly reside in spaces outside of traditional academic and government-run cultural heritage institutions. But while community-based archives continue to collect and preserve histories of marginalized people, many of them face difficulties growing their operations, keeping their doors open, and enhancing their programming and collections activities because of a lack of access to funding.
what does equity look like?
Architecting Sustainable Futures helped equip community-based archives with tools to address sustainable funding. The five main objectives of the symposium were to map the broad field of Community-Based Archives, their diversity of scope, intent and capacity; to define current funding models in Community-Based Archive; to map the funding landscape for Community-Based Archives; to identify gaps and opportunities to support and build capacity in Community-Based Archives; and to make recommendations for different ways Community-Based Archives can be funded given their capacity.
voices from the field
Part of the Architecting Sustainable Futures project called for essays from community-based archives participants as a way to guide the conversation at the symposium. We commissioned five essays as part of this process. Because the submissions were so rich in how they demonstrated the value of community-based archives and some of the issues they face, we decided to make them the foundation for a blog. Sustainable Futures is a first of its kind blog where community-based archives founders and practitioners write about the value of their work and the impact of their archives.
Featured
The other stuff we do
ASF Local
Assisting small museums and community-based archives advocate for funding on the local and regional scale by developing dynamic local reports using open-source data. Project led by Ashé Cultural Arts Center, together with Helicon Collaborative, Southern University at New Orleans, and others.
The Blog
The Medium publication channel focused on community-based archives. If you would like to contribute, please contact us.
Culture Lab Cooperative
A weekend-long design-centered peer learning retreat about equitable and community-centered museums, in partnership with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, New Orleans May 17-19.
Reports
The Architecting Sustainable Futures Symposium had an immediate impact on the participants and the work to build capacity and to grow sustainability in community-based archives.
Contact
Architecting Sustainable Futures is a project of Shift Collective, a non-profit consulting and design group that helps organizations better engage, collaborate with, and reflect their local communities. We strive to create measurable and lasting social change by developing inclusive cultural memory experiences that give voice to unheard narratives and perspectives. Want to know more about this work or how we can help your organization? Feel free to email Bergis Jules, Senior Consultant at Shift Collective.