Humanities Place-Making for a Thriving Community: The Parks-Lynn Community Archive and Reading Room
This project will support new, community-focused programming that expands our current work, and explores community desire for a future gathering space magnetized around the humanities. We're calling our project The Park-Lynn Community Archive and Reading Room,Parks-Lynn for short.
2022-2023 Cultural Heritage and Community Identity Grants - Spring 2022
Archiving:
The Parks-Lynn project will direct archiving energy back toward community members, inviting small gatherings to share personal archives - photos, memories, stories - that tell multiple histories that connect Rondo through the generations. We will hold four afternoon open house sessions to collect photos and other artifacts, record memory stories, and share space that will pass our stories forward to the next generation. Each collection will be developed with portable story banners that provide an overview of the collection, and will be documented in a catalogue for visitors to view. During the process, materials will be displayed in the Parks-Lynn space for inspiration and enjoyment.
To sustain this important work into the future, our request includes funding to add a half time Researcher to our team, to help with validating and document histories around information gathered from the community.
- Hold 4 archive collection/storytelling sessions in the house
- Engage at least 10 participants in sharing archival materials and stories
- Engage a half-time Archiving Assistant to validate and document archives
- Produce collections for each family/person/group whose archives were shared
Intergenerational Inspiration:
The Parks-Lynn project will use that model to create a series of Night at the Moviesevents in the house that will show video clips and share readings from migration stories that have been collected in Elder Story Circle Conversations over the past year. We plan to gather small groups for six events, with the featured Elder present for conversation on the times in which they lived.
- Offer six Night at the Moviesevents to share videos of Elder Stories
- Engage 6 featured Elders to tell their stories
Community Listening/Learning Sessions:
We will program a series of four listening/learning sessions, inviting all community members who want to participate.
We want to learn what they like about having a community-based center for literary arts, what their concerns are, how they might see themselves participating, what they would like to see included, and whether they see themselves in a leadership role in sustaining long-term Humanities Place-Making for a Thriving Community.
To create the full feeling of how Place-Making means your place,and not just some place,we envision these gatherings using the nature of the space: dining room teas, coffee and desserts in the living room, or gatherings on the front porch or around the backyard grill - always with a walk through the entire facility to see work in process.
- Schedule 4 Listening/Learning Sessions,
- Record data from all sessions - electronically and/or in writing
- Work with GrayHall Consultants to develop effective evaluation
- Provide results to IBI leadership, Project Leadership team, and MN Humanities Center.
- Use results to plan next steps.
MN Humanities Center support for In Black Ink's vision to create a Black humanities hub in the Rondo neighborhood is enabling us to explore transformational ideas for the community. Our vision is centered around the Parks-Lynn House, a historically Black owned private home that was passed on to In Black Ink when the owners of over 60 years decided to lend the space to the creation of a community literary hub. The dream is to create a Black humanities hub in the Rondo neighborhood that will be a destination for sharing and collecting stories, archiving community-based family histories, encouraging writing and reading, and hosting gatherings to connect Rondo's Black history through the generations and into the future.
We launched our project with two listening sessions with a focused group of close neighbors and long-time community residents. An overview of the proposed vision and idea was shared with invited guests, who also shared their own ideas and dreams. Both sessions occurred in March, with conversations facilitated by GrayHall LLP consultants. Altogether, sixteen people attended to listen, learn, and share their own visions.
We learned that many of the older residents prefer to meet at their own homes to listen and offer feedback, thus a learning from these sessions includes plans to build in several individual house callsto sit with residents to share and explore the idea of the Parks-Lynn literary space and to hear some of their dreams.
The response was overwhelmingly positive and encouraging!
Participants were very eager to see a humanities presence in the community. Conversations revolved around ideas like:
* Slowing gentrification by maintaining Black spaces (property ownership).
* Celebrating the community's Black legacy and visions for a vibrant future.
* Identifying organizations and projects the Parks-Lynn House could partner with to amplify recognition of Black legacies/stories, and a continuing Black arts future.
* Examples of cities, such as in Georgia, Oakland, San Francisco, and other cities where Black spaces are created to address accessible arts and other resources, and create programing that is right in the immediate neighborhoods
* The presence of such a hub in Rondo was thought to be a great way to foster Intergenerational work with students in the schools in the area that could connect and partner with the Parks-Lynn House to offer a variety of programing, and make rich community historical and current stories, experiences, and histories accessible.
* Sustaining an intergenerational approach to teaching the next generation.
A central vision for the Park-Lynn House is to create a living, interactive archive of histories of Black families and community members that will be accessible to the community as inspiration and learning. We already house three archives:
* Writings and artifacts of Dr. Mahmoud El Kati, civil right leader and Macalester College professor emeritus
* Duluth activist Henry Banks' collection related to the Duluth Lynching Memorial
* And the boxes and trunks of family materials that came with the Park-Lynn House when In Black Ink assumed leadership for restoring and reclaiming this Rondo history asset.
In the next two months, we will host two cohorts of several families who will learn of the importance of archiving through introductory workshops where each family will bring a collection of items to build their own family story. We have honed in on making this special process available for 8 families who, over the next two months, will share personal archives - photos, memorabilia, stories, collectibles - that tell multiple histories that connect Rondo generations. Stories will be captured on a vertical banner for each family, including a banner that will be created to document and share some of the archival gems from the Parks-Lynn family.
We are so grateful for your belief in our vision, and your willingness to invest to help us explore this new future for humanities in the Rondo community!; MN Humanities Center support for In Black Ink's vision to create a Black humanities hub in the Rondo neighborhood enabled us to explore transformational ideas for the community. Our vision is centered around the Parks-Lynn House, a historically Black owned private home that was passed on to In Black Ink when the owners of over 60 years decided to lend the space to the creation of a community literary hub. The dream is to create a Black humanities hub in the Rondo neighborhood that will be a destination for sharing and collecting stories, archiving community-based family histories, encouraging writing and reading, and hosting gatherings to connect Rondo's Black history through the generations and into the future.
We launched our project with two listening sessions with a focused group of close neighbors and long-time community residents. An overview of the proposed vision and idea was shared with invited guests, who also shared their own ideas and dreams. Both sessions occurred in March, with conversations facilitated by GrayHall LLP consultants. Altogether, sixteen people attended to listen, learn, and share their own visions.
We learned that many of the older residents prefer to meet at their own homes to listen and offer feedback, thus a learning from these sessions includes plans to build in several individual house callsto sit with residents to share and explore the idea of the Parks-Lynn literary space and to hear some of their dreams.
The response was overwhelmingly positive and encouraging! Participants were very eager to see a humanities presence in the community. Conversations revolved around ideas like:
* Slowing gentrification by maintaining Black spaces (property ownership).
* Celebrating the community's Black legacy and visions for a vibrant future.
* Identifying organizations and projects the Parks-Lynn House could partner with to amplify recognition of Black legacies/stories, and a continuing Black arts future.
* Examples of cities, such as in Georgia, Oakland, San Francisco, and other cities where Black spaces are created to address accessible arts and other resources, and create programing that is right in the immediate neighborhoods
* The presence of such a hub in Rondo was thought to be a great way to foster Intergenerational work with students in the schools in the area that could connect and partner with the Parks-Lynn House to offer a variety of programing, and make rich community historical and current stories, experiences, and histories accessible.
* Sustaining an intergenerational approach to teaching the next generation.
* Writings and artifacts of Dr. Mahmoud El Kati, civil right leader and Macalester College professor emeritus
* Duluth activist Henry Banks' collection related to the Duluth Lynching Memorial
* And the boxes and trunks of family materials that came with the Park-Lynn House when In Black Ink assumed leadership for restoring and reclaiming this Rondo history asset.
When we announced the opportunities to learn how to archive family histories, eleven families signed up for experiential learning and archive production sessions. We hosted four Black Family Archives sessions and a public celebration/presentation. In that process, we worked with families to learn how to catalogue and preserve their family photos and other artifacts, record memory stories, and share space that will pass their stories forward to the next generation. Participants shared stories, photos, and memories that tell multiple histories that connect Black Minnesota history through the generations. We created portable display banners that provide an overview of the collection for each family. It was especially exciting for families to see how all these boxes of papers, coffee stained photos and other memory pieces, when pulled together, were able to tell important parts of their family story and visually display their family legacy. To their surprise, several families were able to identify photos of their own relatives in other participant's displays... learning about links and connections and relationships among families they never knew existed!
GrayHall Consultants attended our events and recorded the community's support for the Parks-Lynn House vision. They commented that maintaining the Parks-Lynn House can help slow gentrification, attract community partnerships, reflect Rondo community history, and help define and preserve these legacies as a part of an amazing Black humanities presence in our local communities.
After this grant period, we hosted a public celebration that exhibited the archives families created, where participants invited their family and friends and were able to share their experience, the process, and dreams for the future of capturing and maintaining their family legacy through archiving. We've attached several sample archival banners with this report.
n/a - We supplemented this project with $1,911.28 from our Saint Paul Foundation operating support award.
Akil Foluke
Tamahkha Usekba
Metric Giles
Shakita Thomas; Board of Directors:
Kwasi Russell, Acting Board Chair, retired educator
Akil Foluke, Treasurer, organic chemist, educator
Sheryl Harris, Secretary, medical records administrator
Tamehkha Usekhab, Member, retired postal buyer
Metric Giles I, community organizer, urban farmer
Advisors/Elders:
Pamela Fletcher Bush, CEO of Saint Paul Almanac, English professor emerita, Saint Catherine's University
Repa Mekha, President and CEO of Nexus Community Partners
Atum Azzahir, CEO Cultural Wellness Center
Mahmoud El-Kati, author, historian, Macalester College professor emeritus.