Join our 2024-25 Community Roots Cohort

Window Seat Seeks Cohort Members for our 2024-25 Community Roots Oral History Project!

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

Join our 2024-25 cohort as we document and share stories of LGBTQIAA2S+ Pride! 

Capital City Pride has identified a lack of documentation of LGBTQIAA2S+ experience and history in Thurston County. We are excited to collaborate with Capital City Pride on the Pride Storytelling Project through Community Roots to support LGBTQIAA2S+ community members to join our next cohort of community oral historians. Through this local documentation effort, we aim 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.

As a community-based effort, we invite involvement in all aspects of the project - from conducting recorded interviews to audio editing and podcast production to the curation of exhibits and public programming. 

From October 2024 - June 2025 cohort members conduct research, visit archives, design their project, and record interviews with community members. Meetings are a combination of workshops, guest speakers, and group work time. Topics include:

• Introduction to community oral history
• Project development
• Pre-interview planning and research
• Art and practice of oral history interviewing
• Audio recording tips and technology
• Interview transcription and editing

Cohort members may choose to continue on for a second year, beginning in October 2025, to produce creative projects and public programming from the stories.

Schedule

Cohorts meet monthly on the 1st Tuesday of each month, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. beginning October 1, 2024, through June 10, 2025. Additional field trips, book studies, or group work time may be scheduled as opportunity, need, and cohort time allow. Participants should expect to spend 2-4 hours per week on their projects. Cohort members will interview 5-8 people and transcribe those interviews in full in collaboration with their narrators.

Benefits

Cohort members receive professional training as community oral historians. Learning objectives and benefits include:

• Grounding in a framework to engage and learn from lived experience through the practice of community oral history
• Grounding in the components of an ethical storytelling practice that avoids harm and ensures maximum agency for the narrator
• Skill building in primary source and archival research
• Skill building in active listening, oral history question development, and interviewing methods
• Skill building in audio recording and transcription technology and editing
• Opportunities for collaboration and self-reflection in a safe, supportive learning environment
• Cohort members may choose to receive college credit through an internship or ILC
• Cohort members also receive a $400 stipend per quarter (Fall, Winter, Spring) for participating and fulfilling their responsibilities to the project.

Ready to join?

The fall 2024 cohort application period has passed. Please reach out if you are interested in getting involved.

Please contact Elaine Vradenburgh, elaine@windowseatmedia.org, with questions.

Project Partner

Thank You!

We have received an Inspire Olympia Impact Grant from the City of Olympia for the continuation of this project.

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.