Sharing our stories. Strengthening our communities.

What's New? January 2025

We're grateful to the following community sponsors for supporting our work into 2025

We're starting this calendar year with so much gratitude in our hearts. THANK YOU for your continued investment in our mission. A big shout out to the following sponsors for supporting our local oral history and community storytelling work into 2025:

• Community Sustaining Fund
• Port of Olympia
• True Self Yoga
• @storyolystories
• Olympia Federal Savings
• Phamily Cooking

Your support makes a huge difference and is felt in every way. Is your group or business ready to level up your community contribution? Find out more at: www.windowseatmedia.org/donate.

Sponsor Window Seat

Pride Storytelling Project Monthly Update

ABOUT THE PROJECT. Window Seat is partnering with Capital City Pride to uplift local LGBTQIAA2S+ voices through the Pride Storytelling Project—a part of our Community Roots oral history initiative. Our 2024-25 cohort of Queer narrative changemakers is documenting stories at the heart of local Queer spaces and organizing efforts. We meet at least monthly to learn the ethics and practice of oral history documentation, visit archives, design projects, and interview community narrators. In 2025-26, continuing and new cohort members will design creative projects to amplify what they’ve gathered with the broader community through public presentation and engagement. In January 2025, cohort members begin to conduct oral history interviews that invite opportunities for deep learning, empathy, and connection.

January Cohort Meeting

From left, back: Lucas Claussen, Daniel Garcia, Jonah Barnett, Cameron Combs, Azadi Amaan, and Wild Tiny. Front: Elaine Vradenburgh, Window Seat Memory Activist, Meg Rosenberg, Window Seat Community Weaver, and Francine the pup.

Project Goals & Essential Questions

COMMUNITY ROOTS OVERARCHING QUESTION. How do people come together to make change and create new possibilities for themselves and their neighbors?

OUR PROJECT WILL EXPLORE QUESTIONS LIKE

• How and where do queer folx find stability and belonging in Thurston County?
• How has our local queer community used art (broadly defined) as an act of resistance and resilience?
• How have queer folx of different generations and communities shared cultural knowledge supported each other to strive for collective liberation?
• When do collective struggles turn from fight to celebration? How does looking at history as cyclical (rather than linear) build resilience during times of struggle?
• How can uplifting historical silences within the LGBTQIAA2S+ community strengthen relationships and help us shift collective narratives?

PROJECT SCOPE. We are inviting people in our community to participate in oral history interviews who are current or past residents of Thurston County (due to the geographic confines of InspireOlympia funding) and from various generations (“Silent,” “Baby Boomer,” “Gen X” and "Millennial"). The focus on spanning generational experience, as opposed to focusing on a specific time period, emphasizes our commitment to strengthening intergenerational relationships and understanding, as well as elevating BIPOC and transgender experiences. Oral history interviews will focus on community arts and organizing efforts that are significant to our local Queer community.

PROJECT GOALS

• To document 18+ oral history interviews that elevate historical silences and queer experiences across generations in Thurston County and that will become accessible at the Olympia Timberland Regional Library and through Window Seat’s website.
• To document between 3+ community arts and/or organizing efforts that are underrepresented in local history and that have created stability and belonging for Queer people in Thurston County.
• To develop and deepen relationships across generations and communities within the Queer community in Thurston County.

Welcome, Azadi!

Azadi Amaan (they/them) joined our cohort in January to support a project they are currently working on that aligns with the Pride Storytelling Project. They are a queer, trans, neurodivergent, bi-racial musician, composer, and storyteller whose work embodies the idea of freedom without fear, honoring their East Indian roots. Their work lives at the intersections of social justice, psychology, and music. Azadi's love for the piano journey began early; their vocal cords were damaged in a surgery and they learned to play the piano before they could speak. This transformative language became their medium to translate life experiences into a universal form of expression – sound. In the face of adversity, music has provided Azadi hope. Currently, Azadi has released two full-length albums and is releasing a third album in March 2025. In addition to making music, Azadi enjoys tending to their small homestead farm (with goats and chickens), baking gluten-free treats, and propagating their jungle of houseplants.

Visit to Wing Luke Musem and Wa Na Wari Seattle

Last month, members of our Pride cohort carpooled to Seattle to visit oral history colleagues at the Wing Luke Museum, focused on the culture, art, and history of Asian Pacific Americans in the Chinatown-International District, and Wa Na Wari Seattle focused on Black ownership, possibility, and belonging through art, historic preservation, and connection in the Central District, Seattle's historically Black neighborhood. Our group gleaned so much wisdom from field experts at these two spaces and examples of other community-based documentation efforts grounded in an ethical process of documenting and activating cultural histories and spaces by and for the communities who live there. Thank you for your time Ron Chew, former executive director of the Wing Luke Museum, and Jill Freidberg, Co-Founder and Assistant Culture Keeper at Wa Na Wari. We left inspired and excited to carry these learnings forward. Many gratitudes for generosity, shared knowledge, and honoring those at the center of lived history.

Donate to Support the Pride Storytelling Project

Shared Leadership Model at Window Seat

Window Seat has adopted a model that allows employees to accrue enough time to take a sabbatical. In June 2015, our founder, Elaine Vradenburgh, convened a group to begin visioning the work that is now Window Seat. It's almost our 10-year anniversary, and supporting her to take a well-earned sabbatical has become a number one priority for our organization. At December's Board meeting, Elaine's sabbatical request was approved, and she will be out of the office on sabbatical until between January 21 and March 17. YAY ELAINE!We were inspired by our nonprofit colleagues at GRuB and a recent Lean In Olympia podcast episode reflecting on Meg Martin’s sabbatical and shared leadership model at Interfaith Works. Through our research, we learned sabbaticals:

• Serve as a preventative measure against burnout, often coming as key staff were nearing a breaking point and helping them regain motivation and optimism.
• Restore personal identity through rest and personal pursuits that reconnect people to their humanity and renew a sense of purpose beyond work.
• Led to healthier teams, cultures, and organizations by making room for others within the organization to take on new responsibilities, grow, and gain confidence. This created conditions for greater efficiency, collaboration, empowerment, and growth. Also created opportunities for cross-training, skill development, and practice delegating (and intentionally dropping) tasks and projects out of necessity.
• Cultivate innovation and creativity by interrupting the usual rhythms and pushing people to see things differently as they navigate new constraints.
• Increase loyalty and retention by creating real conditions for work-life balance and healthy workplace culture.
• Strengthen organizational reputation by lining up action with values and demonstrating a commitment to caring for their people.

While there are challenges and trade-offs, especially for an organization of our size and precarious financial situation, the benefits far outweigh the risks.

Please help us welcome some new faces who will be pitching in during Elaine's absence!

Daisha Versaw, Interim Co-Director

Daisha (she/her) has stepped down from our Board to support organizational operations during Elaine's absence. Daisha is a writer, storyteller, strategist, relationship builder, and advocate for equity and justice. She has worked in economic development in the public sector, been an investor and entrepreneur in the private sector, directed philanthropic programs in the nonprofit sector, and spent over sixteen years learning from and contributing to many grassroots and community-based organizations. She currently supports economic justice and strong local communities as the founder and principal consultant at Salmonberry Community Strategies.

Originally from the San Luis Valley, a high desert farming community in southern Colorado, she has early experience in poverty and rural life. From there, she went on to live in various places around the Western United States and globally as my family migrated for work. She returned to Colorado to start a family, earning a B.A. in psychology from the University of Colorado and a graduate degree in management from Regis University while we were there. Her family relocated to Olympia in 2016 and she has loved connecting with this place and the people who live here.

Daisha joined the Window Seat board in 2024 because sharing stories across differences is how communities build the trust and connections needed for a more just and humane world. Her board service will be on pause while she is interim co-director. Daisha believes it’s important to hold each other and our unique stories with thoughtfulness and care, and she loves how Window Seat weaves that into every part of the organization and process.

When she is not fiddling with a system map, investing in local sauerkraut companies, or plotting a mutiny, you’ll find her teaching her three teen boys how to cook, wandering a rainforest, mountain, or beach on the lands of the Coast Salish people with her husband; writing science fiction, or around the fire with friends.

You can reach Daisha at daisha@salmonberrycs.com.

Makaela Kroin, Interim Oral History Project Facilitator

Makaela Kroin (she/her) and Elaine attended the same graduate program in Folklore Studies at the University of Oregon. We're excited for Makaela to bring her deep field knowledge to support our cohort in Elaine's absence. Makaela is the Folk & Traditional Arts Program Coordinator at Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission. She moved to Washington from Oregon in 2018 to begin work as Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission’s Folk & Traditional Arts Program Coordinator. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Smith College, a Master’s Degree in Information and Communication Science from Ball State University, and a Master’s Degree in Public Folklore from the University of Oregon. She began working in public folklore as the program manager at the Oregon Folklife Network. At Washington State Parks, Makaela oversees a statewide Folk and Traditional Arts program and related community partnership development efforts.

You can reach Makaela at makaela.Kroin@parks.wa.gov.

Food for Thought
stories, projects, events, and works we love

After over two years of research, interviewing, editing, and designing, the Olympia Music History project website is now live! Elaine Vradenburgh, Window Seat's Memory Activist, teamed up with Kelsey Smith of Lefty Copywriting and Research LLC to facilitate a community-based research process in 2022-23. Elaine facilitated the oral history interview process of the project and trained and supported a group of 9 local musicians to conduct interviews with 30 musicians in 2023. Kelsey, Markly Morrison, and Mariella Luz along with Danielle Ruse and Mychal Handley of August Creative worked tirelessly throughout 2024 to make the research accessible through this beautiful new site! Check out this trove of interviews: www.olympiamusichistory.org. We're grateful for the opportunity to work alongside so many talented and committed musicians to help document their history for our community. Congratulations to the team at Olympia Music History Project for all your hard work! We can't wait to see grows from this project into the future.

​Window Seat's mission is to spark conversation, connection, and social change through community oral history and storytelling. Our nonprofit aims to weave the stories that often go unshared into the fabric of our public life. 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.