Everyone, regardless of background, has a story worth sharing. But as community elders pass away, their individual experiences and perspectives pass with them. Our mission is to preserve their stories and, in the process, remind ourselves that our seniors are cherished sources of cultural wisdom and first-hand witnesses to history.
To collect elders' stories, the Legacies Project brings together two groups that don’t often interact: teenagers and senior citizens. High school and college students are trained to work with community elders to videotape their personal histories over multiple visits. The students then data tag the stories to make them keyword searchable when the raw videos are posted in our online archive.
The Legacies Project's constantly expanding, publicly-accessible online video archive provides an engaging way to teach and learn history. But the greater benefits are far more personal -- communities come closer together, elders' stories are captured, students find new mentors and friends, parents of students and children of elders see new sides of their family members, and public screenings cap off the experience around the Project's essential core: the sharing of stories.