January 2026 e-news
Happy New Year Friends!
January is a significant month at Window Seat. We became an "official" organization after registering with the Office of the Secretary of State on January 25, 2016. That makes this our 10 year anniversary as a nonprofit!
But anniversary dates can be hard to pin down for community organizations. Do we celebrate our anniversary on our incorporation year? Or is there some other, more informal moment that marks when an effort takes root that we should celebrate? Our years of listening to the stories of others who have been a part of movements and started organizations and collaborative projects reveals that moments of inspiration–when ideas and needs and people come together to form something new–most often happen organically around kitchen tables, at potlucks, in church basements, and in backyards. The story we produced from Kris Tucker's interview with Tom Anderson is so rich with examples of how the seeds of ideas take root, and our archive is full of these stories.
June of 2015 feels like such an anniversary for us. It was the first time I brought together a group to share the idea of a storytelling organization and to see how it resonated. We ate. We shared stories. We imagined together. Our work over the past ten years–whether focusing on queer history or housing insecurity or elders stories or or death and dying or farmland preservation or Olympia's music history–leads back to that early conversation. Our archive reflects an ongoing commitment to documenting our community's roots as artists and activists and visionaries and organizers. Our history and tradition of creativity, innovation, and collectivism is rich and and runs deep!
Perhaps incorporation years can be celebrated as a moment when a group chooses to make a deeper commitment to nurture and grow an idea and to all the hard work that cultivation requires. Filing the paperwork with the Secretary of State 10 years ago felt like an important moment, even though it was a bureaucratic process that was tedious and not particularly celebratory. But it did represent that we were all in.
During this anniversary year, we’ll be supporting the Pride Storytelling Project as it gets ready to share stories from its beautiful and rich archive of 20+ interviews through creative projects this June! More updates from that project below. We'll also be digging deep into our 10 years of stories. We're working on making our collections more accessible to the community and future researchers and will bring stories out from the archive and into the community throughout the year. Stay tuned for upcoming opportunities to listen, learn, and explore with us!
We hope you'll join in!
Until soon,
Elaine Vradenburgh
Memory Activist
