Dear Friends,

Our transition into fall begins a new programming season at Window Seat. It also marks the beginning of a new decade (we were founded in 2016) of documenting and sharing the history, traditions, and stories of the South Sound. The new year and new decade presents us with an opportunity to both reflect on past seasons and explore future possibilities for where our work can take root.

The 12 thematic projects we've facilitated over the past 10 years reflect an ongoing commitment to documenting, celebrating, and learning from our community’s roots as artists, visionaries, and organizers. Over this time we've worked in partnership with a wide variety of communities, organizations, and artistic collaborators to record close to 100 full-length oral history interviews. Whether focusing on domestic violence, housing insecurity, end-of-life care, immigration or farmland preservation, the stories connect us across issue and community to share our community’s rich history and tradition of creativity and innovation, collective care and activism.

Our goal for this year is to expand access to our full collection by cataloging, archiving, and curating the collection. We will organize these stories under one umbrella, Community Roots, with the intention to grow collection as its own community archive. Our first three steps include:

Step #1: Archiving our collection at The Evergreen State College Archives.

The Evergreen State College Archives will steward the full length recordings and transcriptions for long-term preservation and public access through its new digital repository (https://www.jstor.org/site/evergreen/). Our partnership will support teaching, research, and broader engagement goals. If you've been involved in a project as an organization or individual we'll be in touch to invite you into this process!

Step #2: Designing a community-curated, public-facing Community Roots website.

While our partnership with Evergreen will ensure long-term preservation and access to full interviews, we plan to produce new short excerpts (audio, video, animation) and revamp previous excerpts from our collection. Our intention is for these shorter stories to be accessible as teaching and learning tools for the community and educators.

Step #3: Curating a multimedia exhibit.

We plan to curate a multimedia exhibit that will be on display at the Olympia Arts and Heritage Alliance Museum. This year we will focus on the planning phase, including community input on how to engage 6-12 grade students through field trips, related programming, and curriculum.

We invite you to please join us in this process!

We'll be hosting listening sessions this fall and invite you to participate in this community curation process. Your ideas help us vision our next chapter at Window Seat. I've included details on how to get involved below. We also encourage you to give generously to support this work during Give Local this November. Stay tuned for more about Give Local soon!

Thank you for being a part of our Window Seat community.

Elaine Vradenburgh
Director

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