Community Roots is an ongoing community-based oral history project featuring artists, activists, and organizers who share beauty and belonging during times of turmoil and struggle. These community members help us imagine what is possible in bold and urgent ways. Project participants learn interviewing techniques, gather community stories, and help explore: What threads from the past are woven into how we organize and create, here in the South Sound today?

Contact Memory Activist, Elaine Vradenburgh, elaine@windowseatmedia.org if you are interested in participating or collaborating.

Our Foodways workshop series invites 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 build and deepen relationships with people they love, share their own stories through creative products, and eat delicious food along the way!

Contact Memory Activist, Elaine Vradenburgh, elaine@windowseatmedia.org if you are interested in participating or collaborating.

Brave Practice is a community engagement program of Window Seat, offering theatre and storytelling workshops and performances in partnership with local organizations. We are a collective of theatre artists in the South Sound who use Playback Theatre to foster connection and belonging in our local community. Playback Theatre is an original form of interactive and improvisational theatre where people tell true moments from their lives and performers play them back on the spot using music, conversation, metaphor, and movement.

Contact Community Weaver, Meg Rosenberg, meg@windowseatmedia.org, to invite Brave Practice for a workshop or performance with your organization.

The Third Thirty is a community 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. Participants learned the art and practice of oral history, built their listening and interviewing skills, and considered the ethical issues of gathering and sharing other peoples’ stories. They invited someone they admired to participate in an interview and then we shared edited versions of those interviewed at public readings at the end of the course. The Third Thirty has since evolved into a dynamic community-driven storytelling project that involves many creative collaborators and partners.

Contact Memory Activist, Elaine Vradenburgh, elaine@windowseatmedia.org if you are interested in participating or collaborating.

InhaleExhale is 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. Check back for details or contact Memory Activist, Elaine Vradenburgh, elaine@windowseatmedia.org.

Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary People is an ongoing series where we partner with local artists, activists, and groups in the community to highlight their work and engage in community dialogue inspired by their stories. Featured stories come in many mediums including live performances, short audio stories, poems, podcasts, or other media pieces. Each storytelling circle explores a central question or theme that connects to the featured story. After listening to the storyteller, participants have the opportunity to reflect and share their own stories in facilitated large and small group conversations.

Contact Community Weaver, Meg Rosenberg, meg@windowseatmedia.org with questions or potential collaborations.

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.

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.

We offer multimedia storytelling services to help organizations raise awareness and funds. This collection of stories we 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.

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