Join Voice of Witness and editor Audrey Petty in San Francisco to celebrate our latest book release! In the gripping first-person accounts of High Rise Stories, former residents of Chicago’s iconic public housing projects describe life in the now-demolished high rises. These stories of community, displacement, and poverty in the wake of gentrification give voice to those who have long been ignored, but whose hopes and struggles exist firmly at the heart of our national identity.
Thursday, December 5th, 2013
Voice of Witness in Conversation with Mother Jones
Editor Audrey Petty discusses the latest VOW release High Rise Stories with Mother Jones Research Editor, Maddie Oatman
8:00 pm. 826 Valencia
826 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Free and open to the public
Friday, December 6th, 2013
Editor Audrey Petty discusses High Rise Stories at SPUR
Please join VOW and SPUR members …
We are so excited to announce that Voice of Witness just received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress last night in DC!
Smithsonian magazine editor-in-chief Michael Caruso wrote in the official announcement: “We’ve polled the directors, curators and staffers at the Smithsonian Institution to find those innovators who are revolutionizing their fields with recent, high-impact achievements. While their work is different in objective, each winner is embracing the Smithsonian’s mission to increase knowledge and shape the world of tomorrow. We are delighted to showcase their work across all platforms.” Read the full feature here.
Thank you Smithsonian and all our supporters!
Dave Eggers (VoW Cofounder) and mimi lok (VoW Executive Director) receiving the Smithsonian …
Make a tax-deductible donation by December 31st, 2013 to help Voice of Witness continue our work in Haiti and further our Education Program.
We hope to raise $10,000 by Dec. 31st, 2013 and need your help to make this happen!
Your support will help us achieve these 2 main goals:
HAITI – complete an interview mission in January to conduct follow-ups and additional research for our book Hunger of the Soul.
EDUCATION – develop a resource guide for starting your own community-based oral history projects.
Your contribution, no matter what amount, makes this work possible.
Supporters who donate:
$25 or more will be automatically entered into a raffle for a chance to win the complete Voice of Witness book series, signed by cofounder Dave Eggers. The raffle will run for the first three weeks of December, …
Voice of Witness is excited to offer two new resources for educators:
Book Pairings for Educators
We’ve developed a list of suggested book pairings for the Voice of Witness titles you may be using in the classroom. You can download it here. Our book pairings are always works in progress, so don’t hesitate to let us know if you have great suggestions for other books to pair with any titles in the Voice of Witness series!
Three Tiered Curriculum
The Voice of Witness Education Program has developed a curriculum that offers three different levels of involvement. This new, tiered approach allows teachers to determine the depth to which they want to incorporate oral history into their curriculum. Using the Common Core curricular standards for high school students, we have created three rigorous approaches. …
This summer, Voice of Witness intern Valerie Snow participated in ‘Amplifying Unheard Voices,’ our third annual training for educators. After the training, Valerie recorded her reflections in an insightful essay. We hope you enjoy it!
Oral History Inside Out
A Perspective on the Amplifying Unheard Voices Workshop
In late June, recently vacated classroom seats at Immaculate Conception Academy in San Francisco were filled once again with participants in the third annual Voice of Witness ‘Amplifying Unheard Voices’ workshop. The professional development program, which took place over four days, was designed to highlight the power of personal narrative while providing educators with the tools to conduct oral history projects in their classrooms and communities.
“When I was a kid on the south side of Chicago I’d drive by the Taylor Homes or Cabrini Green and, equipped with a head full of bleak legends, wonder: “What’s going on in there?” Now I know. This astonishing book tells us that what was going on in there was…life. Loving, fighting, kindness, insanity, addiction, aspiration, terror, redemption—everything that goes on in any human community but with the dual compressions of poverty and neglect. Audrey Petty and her team have recorded and edited these stories in a way that is joyful, novelistic, and deeply moving. High Rise Stories radically expanded my understanding of human beings.”
—George Saunders, Tenth of December
We’re thrilled to share words of praise for our forthcoming title, High Rise Stories, from bestselling author George Saunders. In the gripping first-person accounts of High Rise Stories, former residents of Chicago’s iconic public housing projects describe life in the now-demolished high rises. These stories of community, displacement, and poverty in the wake of gentrification give voice to those who have long been ignored, but whose hopes and struggles exist firmly at the heart of our national identity.
High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing will be in bookstores this September. To learn more, click here.
What human rights/social justice issues do you care about, and that you feel aren’t getting the attention they deserve?
What kind of voices and stories do you want to hear more of?
Could your passion project become the next Voice of Witness book?
Post your ideas on our Facebook page—we’d love to hear from you!
This summer, Voice of Witness Education Program Director Cliff Mayotte sat down for a brief oral history of his own—discussing some of the key issues in our work with teachers and students. Voice of Witness intern Valerie Snow took Cliff’s interview and crafted a wonderful glimpse into our work. Read on to learn more about what’s on our minds, in our hearts, and on the agenda for the Voice of Witness Education Program.
Taking History Personally: Voice of Witness in the Classroom
Adapted from an interview with Cliff Mayotte, by Valerie Snow
Educational outreach is an integral part of our mission at Voice of Witness. Introducing educators and students to the stories in our book series can facilitate learning on many levels and build community in the classroom and beyond. Our resources help teachers add a rich layer of engagement to standard history curricula while students realize that they are participants in history – not just bystanders. Cliff Mayotte, Education Program Director at Voice of Witness, elaborates: “Our education resources support the idea that it’s impossible to read history or to understand or to engage in history without empathy – without looking at the complexity of human communication and having our thinking complicated by a story.”
In light of the recent rulings on the Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander cases, this 2012 article from the Center for American Progress offers some sobering statistics on racial disparity in the U.S. criminal justice system. These issues are poignantly explored in narrators’ stories from Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives From Women’s Prisons.
Voice of Witness is a non-profit organization that uses oral history to illuminate contemporary human rights crises in the U.S. and around the world. Founded by author Dave Eggers and physician/human rights scholar Lola Vollen, Voice of Witness publishes a book series that depicts human rights injustices through the stories of the men and women who experience them. The Voice of Witness Education Program brings these stories, and the issues they reflect, into high schools and impacted communities through oral history-based curricula and holistic educator support.
