Ethical Community Stories Stewardship
(Image: Community members looking at Window Seat's Community Roots oral history project Third Spaces cohort exhibit opening at the Olympia Timberland Library, 2024.)
What is Ethical Community History Stewardship?
At Window Seat, we value relationships, transparency, and trust. We consider ourselves stewards of other peoples’ stories - trusted community conveners. We heard a community member refer to us recently as the "local story house," which we love. We never share a story without the person’s feedback and ongoing consent. We do not own the copyright to the stories gathered and consider them on loan to us by project participants.
A community-based process invites public 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. Community members are invited to join a cohort of learners to gain relevant skills to complete aspects of the project. People 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.
Window Seat is investing in continuing our Community Roots oral history project now and into the future to grow many branches and feature many community histories. The project is about people coming together to make change in their communities in both small and large ways. It's about people’s contributions and creativity within a collective effort, demonstrating our vital and differentiated individual contributions within a common social change ecosystem. The oral histories gathered document social problems and collective visions while exploring cooperation, coordination, and community resilience to understand how particular systems produce the conditions that need to be changed.
Ethical Storytelling Principles
We follow our fellow nonprofit colleague Voice of Witness’ Ethical Storytelling Principles*. These 7 principles are informed by years of experience conducting ethics-driven oral history projects and centering the voices of people impacted by - and fighting against - injustice:
- Invest in relationships to build trust, mutual respect, and collaboration.
- Prioritize ongoing informed consent and transparency throughout the process. Ensure narrators have ownership and control over their stories.
- Honor authenticity, complexity, and the whole person, rather than approaching with preconceived expectations or framing narrators as victims or heroes.
- Use a trauma-informed approach.
- Position narrators as the experts.
- Acknowledge and mitigate power dynamics and biases.
- Ensure stories are accessible to narrator communities.
Window Seat, like Voice of Witness, approaches storytelling through an oral history methodology (learn why), these principles are relevant to many forms of community-based storytelling. This framework is grounded in values of respect, dignity, empathy, transparency, collaboration, and equity.
*As oral history practitioners, we use the term “narrator” rather than “interviewee” or “interview subject” to refer to the person sharing their story, as people are narrating their own experiences rather than simply providing answers to questions. Other organizations might use the term “storyteller” instead.
What are the intended impacts of Window Seat's ongoing local community-based oral history work?
Our efforts should create possibilities for…
- Documenting historically underrepresented, at-risk, silenced, and marginalized voices and histories.
- Collective self-reflection, remembering history, connecting through our shared humanity, across differences, and imagining future possibilities for change.
- Engagement with ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
- Arts and humanities activities that center the needs and strengths of the South Sound.
We envision a local community that honors, seeks out, and is shaped by the many histories, identities, and stories that reflect the people we are in this place.
Our work aims to address issues of...
- Society and culture that is increasingly divided, detached, distracted, deeply polarized, less engaged in civic life, and less willing to listen to others’ perspectives.
- Colonizer-written historical narratives that do not capture the full story of our community, specifically the voices of people who have been historically underrepresented, misrepresented, excluded from, and marginalized by the dominant narrative (youth, elders, LGBTQ+ folks, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, disabled folks, and others).
- Community impacts as a result of harmful narratives: biases, stereotypes, discrimination, systemic power, and wealth inequities, mental health problems, feelings of isolation, violence, oppression, scarcity-mindedness, in-fighting, sadness, loss of potential for community strengths, assets, and collective care, and weakened community cultural wealth.
Our goals are to...
Activate Local Public History
We work to build resiliency, strengthen identity, and correct collective amnesia. Elevating real-life historical memories contributes to more complete community narratives and a deeper understanding of who we are, how we got here, and how we can do better moving forward. Our work seeks to highlight underrepresented voices and bring stories from the margins to the center. We aspire to gather and share layered narratives with artistic and ethical integrity. We work alongside artists, activists, and other problem-solvers to tell nuanced and inclusive stories—people’s histories—of who we are together in this homeplace.
Spark Intergenerational & Multicultural Conversations & Community-Building
Through this community-based work, we strengthen networks of care, hope and asset-mindedness, mutual aid, and shared abundance. We believe that people of all backgrounds must actively participate in making a community where everyone belongs and is represented. Our goals are to elevate our community’s cultural wealth, celebrate cultural and individual differences, and gather around our shared humanity through personal storytelling. Our hope is to continue the conversation about shared space in the community and dream up collaborative and innovative solutions.
Offer Access-For-All Arts & Humanities Programming
We’re excited about the success of equity-based pricing for our programs, services, and community-centric fundraising. When folks with an abundance pay a little more on the front end, it opens access for others so everyone can participate without barriers. We are partnering with the Olympia Timberland Library system with an accession plan of our oral histories into the public archive to ensure access to the oral histories gathered. For now, published histories remain on our website.
Contribute Communal Narratives of Success & Social Change to the Local Archive
Community Roots attempts to widen the frame of our local history from personal to communal by adding stories of collectivism to the local historical record. Oral history is by nature an attempt to understand the complexity and nuance of the human experience through a collection of stories. Individualism is among the deepest, most pervasive, and most stubborn cultural models that we hold in the United States, shaping our thinking about a variety of social issues, from aging to housing and public safety. Individualist narratives credit upward mobility to independence, self-reliance, merit, institutional learning, and competition. Yet, the vast majority of the world embraces a collectivist or communal culture and storytelling modes, focusing instead on interdependence and group success, collaboration, relationships, and learning through interaction and dialogue. We feature mosaics of voices contextualized within their rich and complex family, community, institution, or cultural history, rather than stories that feature heroes, villains, and victims who succeed or fail because of their choices.
Check out information about the current Community Roots cohort, in partnership with Capital City Pride.
