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Elder Community Hero First Person Narrative Interviews

See an Example

The aims of this project are to preserve knowledge; build community; share stories and wisdom across generations; and build content for the People's Archive.
 

OBJECTIVES

  1. Launch a three-year project to attract a team of amateur and professional journalists, podcasters, students, and teachers to capture 100,000 first-person narratives from living elders, targeting people of color who have made significant contributions to the building of American communities during the past century.

  2. Provide easy-to-use features to create and/or collect stories, user-friendly editing, secure storage, and a community that offers a wide range of opportunities to share and listen.

  3. Record video, audio, pictorial, and written interviews and stories, using the latest technologies, to create a unique, searchable archive that will provide a never-before-available account from Americans of color, and eventually everyone.

  4. Build the People’s Archive with all of the content created, including the professionally developed and amateur material, to offer a fully searchable archive of first-hand interviews and stories of everyday people, elders, and leaders.

  5. Present the best interviews and storytelling as podcasts and via a range of broadcasts and publications

RATIONALE

Why 100,000 first-person narratives?

Our elders now have the ability, like no time before in our history, to tell and share our own stories directly to a mass audience. Our first initiative is to provide a searchable archive of stories and first-hand accounts from elders and leaders from communities of color who have lead and helped build the multi-cultural, multi-racial America of the 21st Century. We want to collect these stories from elders while they are alive, rather than having only historians tell their stories.​

FIRST TOPICS

​Stories From the Eastside of Riverside
Stories From Compton
Stories From the Fillmore District of San Francisco
Stories From the First Self-Help Therapeutic Communities
A Long Way From The Block - Anthony Thomas Podcast

PILOT - East Riverside StoriesPILOT - East Riverside Stories

Buddy Jones
Ed Blakely
Alyce Smith Cooper
Dusty Baker
Rosie Bonds
Warren Blakely
Ed Bereal

FIRST TOPICS

  1. To create a unique, multimedia, first-of-its-kind archive that will serve as a resource for families, communities, students of history and future scholars

  2. To give young people a safe vehicle for engaging with and learning from elders

  3. To give elders a platform for sharing their stories and life lessons

  4. To identify unique individuals for further interviewing by podcasters

Building the Archive - Attracting Professional Podcasters

​Our first objective is to build a Professional Podcast Technical Production Team to support podcasters with cutting-edge online technology for recording, editing and producing video and/or audio podcasts. With TOTA’s amateur-built archive, we will attract professional journalists, podcasters and documentary filmmakers to join us by using the content we capture to identify remarkable stories. In phase one, we are focused on American people of color who have thrived in spite of discouragement and discrimination.

Our second objective is to invite/employ 36 professional podcasters, currently producing discussions, interviews, storytelling sessions, music events, etc., to deliver their stories on TOTA as a multimedia platform.

Our third objective is to deliver professionally produced, engaging daily episodic programming (multimedia podcasts) that builds an audience in two years of 9,000 monthly visitors/subscribers.

This project will capitalize on the public move to podcasting from text. We will attract each podcasters' audiences to experience richer, multimedia presentations of their podcasts and build a larger audience via connections with genealogy groups, schools, service organizations and alumni groups.

CURRENT AND PROSPECTIVE PODCASTERS

Anthony Thomas - Along Way From The Block Podcast
James Edwards Mills - Journalist
Dudley Edmondson
Andre James - LSP
Starla Lewis - Mesa College Ethnic Studies
Alyce Smith Cooper - Resident Storyteller
Jayne Joyner - Ed Achievers at RiseUp Academy
Baratunde Thurston - America Outdoors
K. Kamau Bell - United Shades of America
Catherine Gudis - UC Riverside - A People's History of the Inland Empire: Storyscapes of Race, Place, and Queer Space in Southern California,”
Tino Rayos

PILOTS OVER THE LAST TEN MONTHS

a. Stories From the Eastside - Andre James, Buddy Jones and Alyce Smith Cooper: https://www.tota.world/group/stories_from_eastside_riv

b. A Long Way From The Block - Anthony Thomas: https://www.tota.world/group/a_long_way_from_the_block

c. Civil Rights Museum - Partnership with Catherine Gudis - We are working with Catherine to capture first person narratives of African Americans from the Eastside of Riverside, CA 1940's that will be added to the Civil Rights Inland Empire Museum: https://www.inlandcivilrights.org/about/

d. University of California, Riverside – Also a pilot with Catherine Gudis, in her role as a teacher and offering TOTA content as a primary source for student research - About Professor Gudis: https://insideucr.ucr.edu/awards/2022/04/25/ucr-history-professor-wins-grant-digital-humanities-project

DIGITIZING EXISTING CONTENT STORED ON OLD MEDIA FORMATS

We are digitizing past interviews of historical and cultural interest through a variety of partnerships. Our goal is to develop a model that makes it easy for artists, storytellers, and journalists with material from the past to preserve copies of their work in what will be a TOTA searchable archive available to generations to come. Our target audience for broadcast of converted stories and interviews includes American Public Schools, African American Museums, Library of Congress Folk Story Archives, PBS, Ancestry.com, and Family Search.

PILOT PROJECTS

We are featuring remarkable, accomplished American people of color:
Ed Bereal – Conversion Stories from Jazz Musicians of the Early 20th Century (Reel-to-reel, pro-Beta, VHS)
Alyce Smith Cooper – Conversion of San Diego Public Television interviews (Beta and VHS)

KEY RESULTS OF FIRST PERSON NARRATIVE INITIATIVE

a. Submit best productions to American Folk Stories at the Library of Congress
b. Build The People’s Archive of searchable content, available for public and scholarly use
c. Provide search across all available video files
d. Provide access to transcription display to search for specific references

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