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Dear Friends,

We're grateful to have closed our 2025-26 programming year on such a celebratory note. In May we had the honor of receiving the 2026 Ken Balsley Lacey Historian of the Year Award. As I've shared in recent newsletters, we've have been partnering this past year with the Lacey Museum and Cultural Center on a series of exhibits, with our most recent, The Third Thirty, on display through September. It has been wonderful to connect with the Lacey community and to find ways to collaborate that uplifts more local stories. You can read more about our collaboration in The Jolt and our upcoming exhibit below.

Rainbow Reminiscing, the Pride Storytelling Project's celebration of community research and learning, was a joyful way to participate in Pride Month. We loved seeing so many familiar and new faces join us at the Capitol Theater for an afternoon of storytelling and connection. I've shared some images from the event below, thanks to our student photographer, Stella Lindeman-Sparhawk.

We'll be working with Capital City Pride this summer to transition the next phase of the project. Window Seat will support the long term preservation of the collection we've built these past two years and Capital City Pride will steward the project into the future with new opportunities to access, engage with, and grow the collection. Stay tuned for more details later this summer!

This summer we'll be starting two new documentation projects. We'll be partnering with SafePlace to document some of their early history as they get ready to celebrate their 45th anniversary in October. We will also reengage with the Community Farmland Trust on a storytelling project that highlights their work to preserve Fido's Farm in the Evergreen Valley.

We're excited to announce that we received funding from Inspire Olympia to being a year-long archival project. Our primary work for our 2026-27 program year will focus on expanding access to our collection of close to 100 oral history interviews by reviewing, cataloging, archiving, and curating materials for future generations of researchers, community members, students, and educators. We'll be carrying out this work in partnership with The Evergreen State College Archive. Keep your eyes out for opportunities to participate in a community curation process.

As you can see, there's lots of exciting work ahead and we look forward to sharing more with you throughout the summer. As always, feel free to reach out with questions, thoughts, or just to say hi. I hope you all enjoy what the summertime has to offer!

Until soon,

Elaine Vradenburgh

Director

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