BMRC Receives Mellon Grant to Support Community Archives Documenting Black Chicago

Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS),a collaborative of faculty from nine universities in the U.S. and Canada, has been awarded $6,150,000 USD to support paid internships at community archives. The three-year program, funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge program, will see archival studies students placed in over 40 archives. The project will also support curricular development, directly fund community archives for their services and expertise, and fund student participation in conferences and professional associations.

As part of this grant, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) at the University of Chicago will receive $590,000 to support internships at four community archives that are important for Black Chicago history: Shorefront Legacy Center, Rebuild Foundation, The National Public Housing Museum, and Movin’ Legacy. Sumayya Ahmed, co-PI for the BMRC, commented: “This funding allows us the unique opportunity to further the work of the BMRC by enabling us to support Black centered community archives, emerging archivists from marginalized backgrounds, and the processing of and increasing access to Black archival collections, all at the same time. We are very grateful.”

In 2022, FOCAS was formed of faculty from University of California, Los Angeles (Michelle Caswell, Thuy Vo Dang, Tonia Sutherland), the University of Washington (Marika Cifor), the University of Arizona (Jamie A. Lee, Berlin Loa), City University of New York (James Lowry), McGill University (Gracen Brilmyer), the University of British Columbia (Jennifer Douglas), Dominican University (Cecilia Salvatore), East Carolina University (Vanessa Reyes, Lindsay Mattock, Vanessa Irvin) and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago (Sumayya Ahmed), which will be working with students from Chicago State University and the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

The FOCAS project builds on the success of the UCLA Community Archives Lab’s paid internship program, which has placed 42 second-year MLIS students at community archives across Southern California over the last six years for paid internships that have transformed both the participating students and sites. There is now a pipeline of former interns who have been hired as professional archivists at several participating sites, revealing both the value organizations place on the expertise of their interns and the increasing fiscal capacity of independent community archives.

The project responds to several key needs:

1. the need for MLIS students from historically underrepresented communities to get professional experience that reflects their own communities’ values and practices;
2. the need for students to get paid for their labor;
3. the need for MLIS programs to diversify and pluralize their curriculum;
4. the need for community archives to have labor to support their vital work.