July e-news 2024
Sharing our stories. Strengthening our communities.
What's New!
Apply for Fall Community Roots Cohort
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We're partnering with Capital City Pride for a new branch of our Community Roots Oral History Project, the Pride Storytelling Project, to document LGBTQIA2S+ experience and history in Thurston County. Cohort members design a project, visit archives, learn from local scholars, and record interviews with other Queer community members. Join our Fall 2024-25 cohort as we begin to document and share stories of LGBTQIA2S+ Pride!
Summer Events
Summer Oral History Institute
Friday and Saturday, August 16 & 17, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Arbutus Folk School
705 4th Ave E, Olympia, WA 98501
Join our Summer Institute: Oral History for the Classroom and Community and learn how to lead a community-based oral history project in your classroom or community. Participants grow skills in project development, archival research methods, oral history interviewing, audio recording, and ethical best practices for documenting community and family histories. This offering is ideal for middle and high school teachers, librarians, professionals working in arts and culture fields, or anyone interested in facilitating an ethical, community-based research project using oral history methods. 6 educator clock hours provided.Sliding Scale Cost: Full Rate $180 / Supporting Rate $225 / Needing Support Rate $135**Educators may be eligible for funding for this offering through a WEA Community Outreach Grant. Learn more here.Register Now
Annual Gathering Save the Date
We have rescheduled our Community Storytelling Gathering for the evening of Thursday, August 29th. The format will be a bit simpler, but all the important components - food, storytelling, and nature - will be there. We hope you will celebrate with us.RSVP
Ways to Support Our Work
Become a Friend of Community Storytelling
We need community supporters LIKE YOU! Subscribing to our Friends of Community Storytelling program is the easiest way to support the community-based oral history and storytelling programming you love.
This year, we have some cool incentives for subscribers:
- Friends - $5+/ month, $60+/ year: Window Seat Media annual themed pin
- Neighbors - $10+/ month, $120/ year: Community Roots bookmark
- Connectors - $25+/ month, $300/ year: Annual themed tote bag
- Cultivators - $50+/ month, $600/ year: Community Roots letterpress print (design by Aïcha El Beloui)
- Champions - $100+/ month, $1,200+/ year: Group cooking class with Terry Vanderpham and Phamily Cooking aka Nourish Olympia.
If we reach the following new subscriber goals, as a thank you, we will be doing some fun things!
- Tier 1 - 5 new subscribers: Meg draws one person at random to receive a personalized ephemera card with collage materials (you contribute lots of these) and a hand-created main image of your choice.
- Tier 2 - 10 new subscribers: Elaine draws two people at random to receive one loaf of Vetebrod (Swedish coffee bread)
- Tier 3 - 20+ new subscribers: We draw one person at random to receive an hour-long free consultation for your next storytelling or oral history project with Meg and Elaine.
Your contribution pays directly for the community events, exhibits, workshops, and performances you love! Your money supports not just us, but the numerous collaborators and artists we invest in through our work. Donations allow us to be nimble in our community programming and continue to offer large sliding pricing for our events and services. It’s as simple as $5 a month.
We deeply value your reciprocal relationship in fundraising. Thank you for helping us spark conversation, connection, and social change.
Food for Thought
stories, projects, events, and works we love
Interfaith Works 50th Anniversary Celebration
A night to remember! Join Interfaith Works on September 21st for a night of storytelling, hors d'oeuvres, and fun while celebrating IW and its impact on the community over the last 50 years. Do you have an IW story to share? Window Seat and Interfaith Works are collaborating on an oral history exhibit and community engagement that activates 50 years of historical memory for this special event. We want to hear your IW story. What inspired you to become involved? Have you been impacted by an event or an experience? Consider filling out their survey below.Story Survey here
OlyWA Days of Change
The OlyWA Days of Change project offers a collection of memories and images of life in Olympia during an era of significant social change from the 1960s through the 1980s. "These stories are written by and for the people who lived in Olympia during an era of major change. They revolve around the perennial needs of people everywhere — for food, housing, work, the arts, music — and how we experimented on ways to meet those needs with fairness, equity, and creativity." Check out stories such as Fleeing Minnesota and Coming to Olympia – 1950s-1960s – By Pat Holm and Going to the Left Coast – By Anna Schlecht, by two beloved community contributors.Window Seat Media is a community nonprofit whose mission is to use storytelling and oral history to spark conversation, connection, and social change within our local community. We weave the stories that often go unshared into the fabric of our public life. We do this because we believe we write our future with the stories we narrate, and we are committed to co-creating a more inclusive, connected, and just world.
