Community Roots is an oral history initiative about visionaries and change-makers. It explores how people come together to make change and create new possibilities for themselves and their neighbors. It documents important organizing efforts and creative projects from the perspective of people who helped to shape them.

Community RootsMission

We launched Community Roots in 2023 as a way to document and elevate our community's rich history of community organizing that often intersects with local arts/cultural initiatives. The initiative highlights individual contributions toward a collective effort or vision for the future, amplifying the vital and diverse ways we each contribute to our local ecosystem of creativity, mutual aid, and social change.

How it works

As a community-based effort, we invite involvement in all aspects of our projects - from conducting recorded interviews to audio editing and podcast production to the curation of exhibits and public programming. Community members are invited to join a cohort of learners to gain relevant skills to complete aspects of the project, may earn college credit, and are offered a stipend for their time. Oral histories gathered as part of this project engage the community, including event series, artist talks, workshops, performances, exhibits, podcasts, and more. Learn more about Window Seat's ethical community-based oral history process.

2024-26 Project: Pride Storytelling Project

Our 2024-25 cohort is currently documenting stories of local LGBTQIAA2S+ History! 

Capital City Pride has identified a lack of documentation of LGBTQIAA2S+ experience and history in Thurston County. We are excited to partner on the Pride Storytelling Project to support LGBTQIAA2S+ community members to join a cohort of oral historians. This local documentation effort aims to foster a new generation of Queer storytellers equipped with the skills, confidence, and ethical framework necessary to share their own community’s stories and histories.

We welcomed 7 cohort members from an overwhelmingly skillful candidate pool. Cohort members meet monthly between October and June and will visit archives, design projects, and record and transcribe interviews. In year 2, (Oct 2025 - June 2026), we will invite new and continuing cohort members to design a creative project from the materials gathered for public presentation in the spring of 2026. Capital City Pride, our 2024-26 Community Roots project partner, initiated the Pride Storytelling Project with us because they identified a lack of historical accounts of LGBTQIAA2S+ history in local library and archival collections. We look forward to taking steps to address this gap in community partnership.

Read more about our cohort!

2023-24 Project: Third Spaces

A team of community researchers began gathering oral histories in the winter 2023 about three local organizing efforts grounded in specific spaces that are important to our collective history in the South Sound. Research ideas came to us from our community cohort, who had personal interest and connections to these stories.

The Stories

Camp Quixote, 2007

A tent city that emerged in downtown Olympia in February 2007 in response to a city ordinance that restricted use of sidewalk space in downtown Olympia. It was the first visible tent city of its kind locally, although it's part of a much longer unfinished story about who has access to housing in the area and who doesn’t. We were interested in the moment the idea of a tent city first took root, and the alliances and community learning that are at the center of this story.

Driftwood Day Care, 1971

A childcare center at The Evergreen State College. In 1971, Driftwood Daycare was initially conceptualized as faculty support at the College. However, the center opened to student families in response to the shift of women entering the workforce at that time. A small abandoned farmhouse located on Driftwood Road became the grounds for the center up until the mid-’80s.

The Liberation Cafe, 1996

A collectivist space established in the mid-nineties as a hub for activists to work, collaborate, host events, and engage with the community. The cafe occupied the top floor of Bulldog News in downtown Olympia. Over three years and thanks to the efforts of a small core group of organizers, hundreds of people passed through and benefited from this affordable, creative space in myriad ways. The need for affordable space is a theme that comes up repeatedly in conversations with activists and creatives in our town, even as property costs continue to rise exponentially. The Liberation Cafe lost momentum and ended in 1999 when its hosting business Bulldog News closed.

What we are learning

These three very different stories from three different decades hold common wisdom and raised common questions, including: 

• How can we identify and adapt to the needs for physical space? What is the potential to share, repurpose, and co-own space?
• What does it mean to be “educated?” How does learning happen in informal spaces and communities through sharing stories and lived experiences?
• How can we evolve and grow as a community without tokenizing, displacing, or erasing individuals and communities?

We learned about the value of experimenting, making mistakes, and trying again. We heard about how people often learn the most from those who are much older or much younger, and from people who have lived through things we haven’t. We learned that collaboration is hard, and it often generates solutions that ripple throughout our community in beautiful and unexpected ways. These stories also remind us that the questions we continue to grapple with today about who has access to safe, affordable, and accommodating space – to live, play, work, and create – are not new.

Community Engagement

We began engaging the community in these stories in February 2024 with the opening of our exhibit at the Olympia Timberland Regional Library. Public programming has included: 

Exhibitions

• Olympia Timberland Library, February 8 - March 11, 2024
• Olympia Arts Walk, Spring 2024
• Evergreen State College, Sept 20 - Oct 18, 2024

Events

• Documenting Ourselves: an oral history workshop for families and communities - February 17, 2024
• Presentation / Exhibit Viewing Activity for Evergreen State College Program at the Olympia Timberland Library - February 20, 2024
• Places Where I Belong Brave Practice Performance at the Olympia Family Theater - February 29, 2024
• We Need Space Zine Making Workshop at the Olympia Timberland Library - March 2, 2024
• Storytelling circle with 25+ Evergreen students participating in Evergreen’s Civic Engagement Institute that engaged with the Liberation Cafe and Camp Quixote - September 23, 2024.
• Image Theatre performance activating Driftwood Daycare story: That's What Community is All About at The Evergreen State College, Recital Hall serving 50+ students and families in attendance - October 3, 2024.

2023-24 Contributors

Community Oral Historians

‍Photographs / Images

‍Aidyn Dervaes and The Evergreen Children's Center (Driftwood Day Care)
Pat Tassoni (Liberation Cafe)
Courtney Bennett (Liberation Cafe)
Mindy Chambers (Camp Quixote)

Interviews / Narrators

‍Keith Eisner (Driftwood)
Donna Simon (Driftwood)
Igrid Gulden (Driftwood)
Bonnie Coate (Driftwood)
Courtney Bennett (Liberation Cafe)
Peter Bohmer (Liberation Cafe)
Pat Tassoni (Liberation Cafe)
J Mar Hapa (Camp Quixote)
Rob Richards (Camp Quixote)
Selena Kilmoyer (Camp Quixote)

Artist / Map-maker

Aïcha El Beloui

Music composition for audio stories

‍Nick Rawson, Camp Quixote
Aidyn Dervaes, Driftwood Day Care
Steven Suski, Liberation Cafe

2023-24 Community Roots Sponsors

Thank you!

We have received an Inspire Olympia Impact Grant from the City of Olympia for the continuation of this initiative!

Statement of Non-Discrimination

The Olympia City Council has made compliance with the City’s Nondiscrimination in Delivery of City Services or Resources ordinance (OMC 1.24) a high priority. As an InspireOlympia grantee, we agree not to unlawfully discriminate against an employee or client based on any legally protected status, which includes but is not limited to: race, creed, religion, color, national origin, age, sex, marital, status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or the presence of any disability.