Project Spotlight: Marin City Oral History Collection with Desire to Inspire Studio
In Fall 2022, Desire to Inspire Studio Foundation (DTISF) reached out to the Center for Community Engagement eager to create a partnership. After much dialogue and brainstorming about shared interests, what emerged this spring semester 2023, was a dynamic a collaboration between DTISF, Bridge the Gap (BtG), and Dominican Service-Learning program. The resulting project is part of a larger Center for Engagement initiative to collect oral histories from the BIPOC and other marginalized residents of Marin County as an approach to uplift and prioritize their voices and knowledge.
With the goal learn more about the history of Marin City from the life experiences of the Marin City residents. we invited BtG high school students from Marin City to recommend people they wanted to interview in the Marin City community–their own family members, neighbors, friends and others. DTISF, a subsidiary non- profit of a professional video studio, provided training and guidance in interview preparation, recording, and production of the interviews.
Three service-learners participated in this project in the Spring 2023 semester. Mia Contreras (Communications & Media ’26) and Hailey Stewart (Nursing ‘24) were from Dr. Emily Wu’s class The Power of Words: Culture & Conditioning, and Deyne Juri (Global Public Health, ’23) was part of Dr. Emily Wu’s class Religion & Globalization. They interviewed three elders from the Marin City community. Click on the community members names to watch the produced videos: Jesse Polk and Betty Price & Doris Gray.
During the S23 Service-Learning symposium, Deyne shared:
“You hear about segregation and racism in books, in movies, and social media, but for my personally I’ve never heard [an experience being held at gun-point and being wrongfully arrested] told to me face-to-face. That’s something I felt was very raw, that speaks to the vulnerability…I’m glad the person was able to speak about that, which was not something easy to talk about in general.”
Watch Deyne’s insightful presentation below :
