Memories of Migration

Helping take an innovative teen-led community memory initiative to a national scale

The Challenge

Santa Ana Public Library sought to expand their “teen historians” program and expand digital education and programming, while also shifting the national narrative on immigration to celebrate the many cultures that live together in American communities today.

Our Approach

We worked with the Santa Ana Public Library team to design a project that would expand their programming and create tools to allow the methodologies to be adapted at other libraries nationwide. The project was awarded a three-year, $495,000 National Leadership Demonstration Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services in 2015. This collaborative cultural program was designed to increase social cohesion and civic participation, provide technical training opportunities for teens and young adults, and enrich and diversify local historical archives that vastly underrepresent communities of color. The project helped take four existing early pilots to scale with partners including Queens Library in New York, West Hartford Public Library in Connecticut, a statewide initiative with the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs and New Mexico Highland University in local and tribal libraries in New Mexico, in addition to the Santa Ana Public Library.

Stats and Impact

The program created hundreds of community memory events across the four partner sites over three years, and mapped over 500 photographic, audio and video assets to Historypin.
Provide new immigrant communities a participatory voice in library collections and events (supporting IMLS Strategic Goal 1, “preparing people to be full participants in their local communities and our global society”).
Increased digital literacy and provided learning in Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) to new immigrant teens and young adults through digital training in new media and digitization technologies (supporting IMLS Strategic Goal #3, “promoting the use of technology to facilitate discovery of knowledge and cultural heritage”).
Helped make libraries an anchor of intergenerational and intercultural dialogue on both a local and national level (supporting IMLS Strategic Goal #2, “promoting libraries as strong community anchors that enhance civic engagement and cultural opportunities”).