As we gradually emerge from this horrific pandemic, we all have stories to share. What did you do with your time? What objects helped get you through the pandemic? How are you going to remember the pandemic? Did you respond to the pandemic with creativity? What has been your most meaningful reunion post-pandemic? What were your darkest moments? How did you keep in touch across generations? Was there a piece of music that was especially important to you during the pandemic? What conversations lifted you from despair? How did you hold on to your UU ideals and your First Parish connections? The list goes on….
Honoring our COVID Experiences: A First Parish Archives Project is the title of a project intended to gather our collective experiences of the pandemic and preserve them in an archival form for the potential benefit of the congregation. We also hope that it will help introduce newcomers to First Parish. We plan to archive the project so that, down the road, it might be of interest and use to future First Parishioners facing a similar crisis.
This project is still taking shape, but initially we have decided to focus on the stories of families and individuals in a series of video interviews that would be readily available on a password-protected website to members of our congregation. With that in mind, we are looking for:
Families and individuals who are interested in being the subjects of such interviews.
People with experience and/or interest in conducting such interviews.
People with experience and/or interest in editing the video-recordings.
To volunteer for an interview or one of the roles on the production side, please contact one of the organizers or send an email to CovidStories@uuneedham.org. Use that same address if you have questions.
Down the road we hope to expand the scope of the project to include some of the following:
Written pieces ranging from journal entries to poems to essays
Photography, artwork and music
A topic-of-the-week (or month) in the Bell Notes inviting responses to specific questions such as the ones in the first paragraph.
A display of physical objects that took on meaning during the pandemic, such as a keepsake from one of your rare outings during the pandemic or the robe you basically lived in for the duration.