We facilitate community-based oral history projects that amplify local knowledge, share powerful stories, & ask what is possible now and in the future.
“To be a storyteller is to recognize, break apart, and critically reshape the stories of our communities and our world.” -Tsering Lama, Storytelling Advisor, Greenpeace International
All stories in our oral history project archive are gathered as part of the Community Roots Oral History Initiative.
Community Roots Mission
The Community Roots Oral History Initiative is about visionaries and change-makers in the South Sound region of Washington State. It explores how people come together to make change and create new possibilities for themselves and their neighbors. It documents important organizing efforts and creative projects from the perspective of people who helped to shape them.
Community Roots elevates our community's rich history of local arts, cultural initiatives, and community organizing. The oral history documentation initiative highlights individual contributions toward a collective effort, amplifying the vital and diverse ways we each contribute to our local ecosystem of creativity, mutual aid, and social change.
How it works
As a community-based effort, we invite involvement in all aspects of our oral history projects - from conducting recorded interviews to audio editing and podcast production to the curation of exhibits and public programming. Community members are invited to join a cohort of learners to gain relevant skills to complete aspects of the project, may earn college credit, and are offered a stipend for their time. Oral histories gathered as part of this project engage the community, including event series, artist talks, workshops, performances, exhibits, podcasts, and more. Projects often grow from a community, organization, or group of people in the South Sound who want to further our shared goal. We teach a community-based oral history process , and serve as the convener, story steward, and project facilitator. Learn more about Window Seat's ethical community-based oral history process.
Community Care & Engagement
We are so grateful for the many relationships we have developed with multimedia storytellers, artists, academics, community organizers, and organizations since we began our work in 2016. We've shared skills and tools, convened conversations, and created opportunities to glean wisdom from the lived experience of our neighbors, colleagues, family members, and friends.
Want to collaborate on a project? Contact Elaine Vradenburgh or Meg Rosenberg.
Current & Past Projects
Pride Storytelling Project
In partnership with Capital City Pride, our current documentation effort is to gather local LGBTQIAA2S+ history. Our cohort of narrative changemakers learn interviewing techniques, gather community stories, and in year 2, activate the stories through public programming.
.png)
Contact Memory Activist, Elaine Vradenburgh, elaine@windowseatmedia.org if you are interested in participating or collaborating.
Third Spaces
A team of community researchers gathering oral histories in the winter 2023 about three local organizing efforts grounded in specific spaces that are important to our collective history in the South Sound: Camp Quixote, 2007, a tent city that emerged in downtown Olympia in February 2007 in response to a city ordinance that restricted use of sidewalk space in downtown Olympia; Driftwood Day Care, 1971, a childcare center at The Evergreen State College. In 1971, Driftwood Daycare was initially conceptualized as faculty support at the College; The Liberation Cafe, 1996, a collectivist space established in the mid-nineties as a hub for activists to work, collaborate, host events, and engage with the community.
Stories of Food, Food as Story
Our Foodways workshop series invited participants to explore their history and cultural heritage through food traditions. When we revisit the past with curiosity, humility, and care, it can create opportunities to listen for new or deeper meaning, even in the most enduring stories and traditions. Through a community-based oral history interviewing process, participants built and deepened relationships with people they love, shared their own stories through creative products, and ate delicious food along the way.
The Third Thirty
The Third Thirty was a community-based oral history project that invites South Sound elders to reflect and share wisdom from a moment in their lives. The project began in 2018 as a community-based learning experience offered in partnership with Senior Services of South Sound Lifelong Learning Program, and planted the seeds for what is now the Community Roots Oral History Initiatieve. Third Thirty participants learned the art and practice of oral history, built listening and interviewing skills, and considered the ethical issues of gathering and sharing other's stories. They invited someone they admired to participate in an interview and then shared edited versions at public readings at the end of the course.
InhaleExhale
InhaleExhale was a multimedia, multidisciplinary conversation series about death and dying curated by Window Seat Media in collaboration with local artists, organizations, and groups. InhaleExhale conversation series began in the fall of 2019 and is currently on pause.
.png)
Voices from the Harbor
The Voices from the Harbor event series was co-produced by Window Seat Media and The Evergreen State College and was funded by Humanities Washington. It took place in 2017 in Grays Harbor County. Relationships, networks, memory, storytelling - all contribute to what makes a community work. The primary goal of Voices from the Harbor was to put the Grays Harbor region’s history to work as a community development tool. Some of the project’s core assumptions are that, if you know what to look for, a walk down the street can reveal the history of a community, a neighbor’s memory can provide insight into the lessons and experiences of a generation of citizens. By creating a space for community conversations about the evolution of the Harbor, we hope to add critical perspective to development efforts intended to solve contemporary issues like affordable housing and homelessness.
Preserving Working Farms
The Preserving Working Farmland collection of stories was produced between 2015-2017 with organizations that are working to preserve working farmland and educate eaters about the challenges farmers face when producing food for local markets.
Voices from the Tidelands
This project was produced in partnership with Northwest Folklife and with funding from the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association. The 4-panel exhibit was on display at Northwest Folklife's Washington Works Exhibit, Olympia Art Walk, and a legislative reception hosted by the Pacific Shellfish Growers Association. Voices from the Tidelands was an exhibit about geoduck farming in the South Puget Sound from the worker’s perspective. This project features three young men who are learning the trade. From the perspective of these newcomers, these panels explore how they find daily meaning in their work, and develop a relationship to our natural environment through working - as opposed to recreating or living - on the water.
