Report: Moving Beyond Surviving to Thriving
was created by Vizual Remedy, a visual artist guild. PHOTO BY BERNIE SAUL
This report describes a three-day event hosted in New Orleans by Shift Collective in November 2023, called Architecting Sustainable Futures at Five Years (ASF@5): A Celebration, Assessment, and Agenda Setting Convening for Community-Based Archives. The report describes our time together and outlines some of the recommendations developed by the participants. ASF@5 was held five years after we hosted the first Architecting Sustainable Futures meeting in 2018 and both meetings were made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation.
Because Shift Collective is committed to ensuring the record of our shared cultural memory becomes more inclusive, the organizations selected for participation in ASF@5 included community-based archives that primarily serve or document marginalized people and communities, including LGBTQIA people, Indigenous people, African Americans, Latinx people, immigrants, and victims of police violence and mass incarceration. The audience for ASF@5 also included people who work in cultural memory funding organizations, academic libraries, museums, and public libraries.
We hope you enjoy reading through the report and find the information useful whether you are a someone working in community-based archives, a funder, memory worker, or community member. Please reach out to us if you have any questions.
