Some notes from the Oral History and Community Building Symposium
On May 15, 2026 we gathered at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge. We met at round tables, shared coffee and lunch, and listened to three presentations,. First, Threshold Collaborative director Alisa Del Tufo, who told us about her projects of storytelling and oral history for community building and social change. One of the compelling projects she discussed was a stoop project in Brooklyn, where people interviewed each other about domestic violence.
The street was closed, and up and down it were tellers and listeners, and policy makers. In another project in Pennsylvania, in a formerly industrial city that had fallen on hard times, high school students told stories about their favorite places around town. They were recorded, and across town, large outdoor posters with QR codes and portraits of narrators attracted people who could listen to stories about these places.
We heard powerful stories from Manos Unidas in Pittsfield, and learned how, as a collaborative, they were able to deeply engage their communities in a recent project. That project was funded by Mass Humanities.
And Sarah-Jane Poindexter, Roving Archivist for the Massachusetts State Historical Records Advisory Board, stressed the importance of reaching out to an archive early in project planning, and working with that archive to assure success in that final (and elusive for most of us) step: safely archiving our work.
Each session ended with an engaging Q&A. One symposium participant told us of a regional archives network and resource–in progress. This is great news.
Many of the questions at the end of the day had to do with archives, with what we might call nuts-and-bolts oral history practice: Interviewing; technology/equipment for interviewing; and archives. How do we safely preserve these stories so that they were be available far into the future. These sticky notes tell some of the story.
And we decided to return to these topics in the fall.
Keep an eye out for our posts, for information on fall online workshops.