Introducing the Phillips Community Oral History Project
By PHILLIPS COMMUNITY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT PARTNERS
Alley Communications and the United Phillips Coalition are excited to announce the launch of the Phillips Community Oral History Project!
Three years ago, neighborhood organization staff and members of Alley Communications (publisher of the alley), began discussing ways to collaborate to empower residents to tell their own stories. This discussion resulted in the launch of the Community Journalism Training Program, an 18-month project of Alley Communications, Journalism of Color Training Center, and Phillips West Neighborhood Organization (PWNO).
Around the same time, PWNO also began working collaboratively with Midtown Phillips Neighborhood Association, Inc. (MPNAI) and the East Phillips Improvement Coalition (EPIC) to better serve the whole of Phillips by establishing the United Phillips Coalition. Since then our relationships have grown and the mission to foster community stories has developed into a new initiative—the Phillips Community Oral History Project.
Earlier this year, Alley Communications and United Phillips received funding to facilitate the project through two sources: the City of Minneapolis Partnership Engagement Fund and the University of Minnesota Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Residency program.
Those of us with ties to the four neighborhoods that make up Phillips know our community has a rich history spanning culture, industries, justice movements, and generations. The Phillips Community Oral History Project was born out of a recognition that these histories have rarely been told by the people who lived them. Rather, Phillips is often written about by people who have little to no connection to the Community. While many negative narratives exist about Phillips, the voices of those who call the neighborhoods home have usually been overlooked, and few accounts from within the community have been documented.
The Phillips Community Oral History Project aims to change that by documenting, amplifying, and empowering the multicultural and multi-generational voices of the Phillips Community, creating a space for people to tell their own stories on their own terms.
Beyond publishing and distributing the stories that are gathered, a commitment to ethical research and engagement makes informing and representing it to the Phillips Community an important aspect of the project. In that spirit, a short monthly article giving status updates on the project will be published by project partners in the alley.
The monthly updates will include details both exciting and mundane in an effort to be fully transparent about the operations of the project, and will be written by the project’s University sponsor Michael Hessel-Mial, a faculty member in the Writing Studies department and an East Phillips resident. We invite community members to submit questions about the project that we will try to answer in our monthly articles!
This project introduction will conclude with the following project update: Since the beginning of the year, project partners have taken the following steps: applying for funding; developing interview prompts; sorting through our legal and ethical commitments, including copyright ownership/privileges; and developing an outreach plan to connect with as many neighbors as possible, not just those who interact with the partner organizations.
If you have any questions about the project or are interested in participating/volunteering, please reach out to info@unitedphillips.org. We are ecstatic to get started on this project that was three years in the making and can’t wait to see where it takes us all!
