National Public Housing Museum

The National Public Housing Museum will train a diverse group of community-based oral historians and implement plans for an oral history archive of stories of people who lived in public housing. The museum will work with a social justice archivist to develop and present a workshop series with an emphasis on collection, preservation, archiving, and ethics. Participants who complete the training will become part of the Oral History Corps. The project includes developing a finding aid for the archive that shares authority with the narrators in preserving their stories. Museum staff will use the oral histories in a monthly series of programs as a catalyst to inform public policy around housing insecurity. In collaboration with faculty at Roosevelt University, museum staff will develop a class for public policy and library science students about collaborative research and creative scholarship methodologies.