Thuy Vo Dang, Tonia Sutherland, and Michelle Caswell lead collaborative to support paid internships at community archives.
UCLA IS professors Michelle Caswell, Tonia Sutherland, and Thuy Vo Dang have coordinated a Mellon Foundation grant for Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS), a collaborative of faculty from nine universities in the U.S. and Canada.
The grant awards $6,150,000 USD to nine universities in the U.S. and Canada to support a three-year program providing paid internships at community archives, funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge program. FOCAS will place archival studies students in more than 40 archives, as well as provide support for 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, UCLA will receive $750,000 to support paid student internships at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, the June Mazer Lesbian Archives, La Historia Historical Society and Museum, the Skid Row History Museum, and Visual Communications. Each of the five participating sites receive financial support for their involvement in the supervision of UCLA interns.
“I am so excited that the Mellon Foundation is continuing to recognize the vital work our MLIS students are doing in close collaboration with local community archives in the Los Angeles area to preserve the histories of BIPOC and/or LGBTQ communities,” says Professor Caswell, who serves UCLA as the inaugural special advisor to Executive Vice Chancellor, Provost, and Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt on community-engaged scholarship. “Our student interns learn so much from the communities they work with. They then bring these skills with them to their careers after graduation, catalyzing change in the field.”
Vo Dang, who serves as principal investigator, is a founding member of FOCAS with co-PIs Sutherland and Caswell. The collaborative includes faculty members from across the nation and Canada, including UCLA alumni Marika Cifor at the University of Washington; Gracen Brilmyer at McGill University; and Tony Dunbar at Dominican University.
“For MLIS educators to make an impact in transforming our field, we need to recognize the value of lived experience and grounded knowledge from community organizations/archives,”says Professor Vo Dang. “Bringing in material support for these community partners through advocating for larger stipends and our interns’ paid work are crucial ways for UCLA to engage our nearby communities.”
The FOCAS project builds on the success of the paid internship program of the UCLA Community Archives Lab, which is co-directed by Caswell, Sutherland, and Vo Dang. The program 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.
“This project both aligns with and helps expand our curriculum in terms of community archives, and also our broader commitment to community engagement,” says Professor Sutherland. “It’s not only our students that are benefiting from this expansion that’s being supported by Mellon, but also the the greater Los Angeles community that is benefiting. As faculty and instructors, we are really fortunate to have this opportunity to think about the ways that community archives both support our curriculum and are interwoven into the curriculum in ways that lift up everything that we that we do as a department. It keeps us in conversation with the broader Los Angeles community.”
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 key needs for community archives, including the need for MLIS students from historically underrepresented communities to gain professional experience reflecting their own communities’ values and practices; the need for students to get paid for their labor; the need for MLIS programs to diversify and pluralize their curriculum; and the need for community archives to have labor to support vital work.
For more information, visit these links.
“Envisioning a Paid Community Archives Internship Program: Challenges and Opportunities”
Above: UCLA MLIS student Samantha Abbott served an internship at La Historia Society and Museum in El Monte, California. Courtesy of the UCLA Community Archives Lab
Color slide and black and white kodaliths from the Visual Communications Archive. Photo by Chloe Reyes