How We Work

Project Teams in Each Community

Colleges/Universities Issue Organizations

Faculty + issue organization leaders teach a course; students + community members create multi-media stories on their local history with the project issue.

Leaders collaborate on teaching local history with the project issue, mobilize community members to exchange stories, guide how they are produced and shared.

Hosts final trans-local exhibition, featuring stories from their locality and across the country; gathers community for public programs and actions.

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Public Spaces

Local Collaborations

The HAL network identifies an issue of shared concern – where understanding its deep historical roots can help us build a more just future.
In each locality, 3 groups collaborate to form 1 local team: faculty and students from a college or university; leaders and members of community organizations; and staff of public spaces – museums, public libraries, community centers.
Teams explore the deep roots, long legacies, and potential futures of the shared issue in their own communities. through archival research, oral history, mapping, and more. All research and stories are driven by those directly impacted by the project’s focal issue.

Phase 1 of 4

Teams in Different Locations Collaborate on a Project

Trans-Local Collaboration

Working simultaneously across multiple campuses and communities on an issue of shared concern, local teams of scholars, students and stakeholders explore the issue from their different local perspectives
Using frameworks from the HAL Hub, local teams each create one local component of a shared national project. These local components share their community’s stories in a variety of media – from banners to VR to audio testimony.
Along the way, teams exchange ideas, perspectives, and questions with each other, through virtual and in-person meetings – building lasting relationships, gaining new insights, and creating solidarity networks.

Phase 2 of 4

Projects Involve Several Interrelated Components

Faculty and community leaders teach local history with project’s issue.

Students and those directly impacted research local experience
Create multi-media stories

Local stories are compiled into single multi-media exhibit and website
Exhibit travels to participating local communities

Gatherings take place in each community around the exhibit
Story circles, actions, lectures, and more

Virtual and in-person gatherings
Local teams exchange experiences, identify shared issues

Exhibit is modular: new communities start cycle, add their stories

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Interconnected Components Build a Self-Sustaining Cycle

HAL projects are composed of interconnected components that build on each other. They are designed to evolve and change as each community adds their experience. They are also designed to respond and adapt as the shared issues change – and we need new strategies for addressing them.
Courses create local stories; local stories combine into a shared national traveling installation and digital exhibit, which becomes a teaching resource for future curricula.
Exhibits travel for years to each community that created it, with public dialogues and actions at each stop; this builds new audiences and new communities who then start the cycle, adding their local stories
HAL brings together the thousands of participants virtually and in-person, large gatherings and intimate exchanges, to refine shared issues, envision new ways of addressing them, and build new collaborations.
While each component makes an impact, it’s the connections they make that matter most. This participatory public memory process — engaging thousands of people across dozens of cities in confronting their histories and addressing their legacies today — builds collective movements for narrative change that drive historically-informed world building.

Phase 3 of 4

HAL’s Participatory Process Builds Audience and Impact

Building a Movement

Each stage builds both a larger audience and deeper relationships
1000+ direct creators: teams of 20-30 students and other directly impacted community members in 30+ communities create their own local memory projects
5000+ local community members: direct creators engage people they know and trust in their own families and communities
1,000,000+ national audience members: physical exhibitions featuring all local memory projects travel to each of the 30+ communities that created them, raising awareness of project issues among new audiences. Digital exhibitions reach tens of thousands more.
Institutions and Systems: projects build new active and informed constituencies working to change the systems they analyze; participating colleges and universities are changed through new courses, new partnerships, and new programs; public spaces that host the exhibit have built new audiences and community practices.

Phase 4 of 4