Apply for the 2021 Sharing History Initiative to amplify Indigenous voices in your community!
The Sharing History Initiative introduces oral history and social justice storytelling to under-resourced classrooms and communities around the United States by providing educators, organizations, and advocates with free Voice of Witness books and free corresponding curricula. VOW’s Sharing History Initiative is geared toward public schools, community colleges, and universities, as well as arts, advocacy, or community-based nonprofits.
This national book placement program has placed 5,500 copies of our books in almost 200 schools and organizations around the US since 2015, and offers a dynamic approach for teaching and learning about our most pressing human rights issues.
This year, the Sharing History Initiative is offering free sets of VOW’s latest book, How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America, and corresponding teaching resources.
How We Go Home shares contemporary first-person stories in the long and ongoing fight to protect Native land, rights, and life. These powerful narratives from twelve Indigenous individuals in North America are shaped by injustice, resilience, community activism, and the struggle to share space with settler nations.
Many educators and advocates are searching for resources that address issues of ongoing racial injustice and the impacts of colonization. VOW’s corresponding lesson plans for How We Go Home are designed to provide deep historical framework for understanding contemporary Indigenous experiences and the impact of over five hundred years of colonization. They urge students, teachers, and advocates to think critically about colonialism and interrelated issues, including: intergenerational trauma, identity, healthcare, policing, resource extraction, and resistance.
For advocates and organizations, these first-person stories and resources can serve as powerful advocacy tools in your work to advance racial justice and Indigenous rights.
For educators, the book and curriculum can be introduced as a full unit or individual lessons, and can be adapted for English language learners. Each lesson supports Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) competencies related to relationship building and social awareness, both for students with direct experience as well as students encountering these topics for the first time. The in-depth preface for educators offers essential context, strategies, and resources for respectfully engaging in the topics addressed in the book and creating an open learning environment for all students.
Applications open on May 1st! Learn more and apply here.
The Sharing History Initiative is made possible with the generous support of the Germanacos Foundation and the Abundance Foundation.
