It Takes A Village to Represent Itself: How Community Centers Can Help Decentralize Cultural Nonprofits

In her new post, "Present Perfect Public History: The Future of Audience-Centered Cultural Organizations," @cheider provides a brief history of settlement houses, their current iterations community centers, and what they can teach cultural nonprofits like museums. These are places located within the communities they serve, and whose services are based on the community’s specific needs. In our talks together, I found myself wondering how by both listening to our communities’ needs and ceding some power to them, cultural institutions could better represent them and their histories.

At PubComm last week (shoutout to @gvgktang and @joyfgn for arranging a fantastic event), the second panel was devoted to activism and what public historians could learn from that. The panel made a particularly powerful argument regarding academic works being done in marginalized community in the name of “greater inclusion in the historical record.” This is of course a noble goal, but they argued that the fruits of this labor never return to the communities we as public historians seek to better represent. This, of course, raised questions for me about how cultural institutions and the public historians within them can give what we learn back to those communities so that it can benefit them.

One way of doing this is by ceding authority. Public Historians tout this phrase all the time, but if the call from PubComm is anything to go by, we’ve fallen short. My own research has depended on the stories of LGBTQ+ Philadelphians, many of them people of color. My goal for that research is to call on historic preservationists to actually engage with, listen to, and utilize the testimonies from communities they want to represent in historic registers to do so in a more responsible way. This way, community members are actually present and engaged in the process and are given a say. Furthermore, them having a say also improves the likelihood that the fruits of their work benefit their communities in ways they might not otherwise. This of course sounds hypothetical because it is, so what’s a more concrete example?

My time working on this thesis is nearly done. After graduation I may very well publish it as a journal article to better engage public historians in my call for the decentralization of historic preservation, but that’s not enough for me. What about the work I’ve done researching and documenting the sites of Philadelphia’s rich LGBTQ+ history? Who will follow it through and actually do it? An historic preservationist? Maybe, but I would much rather see the community itself do that work on their own terms, with maybe the insight of an historic preservationist if only to provide their skills. I am currently in talks with a local LGBTQ+ activist to see what community center could take this research and work with their constituents to actualize the preservation of some of their historic sites. Naturally I considered the William Way Community Center, but for all its incredible work in the community, I would rather give this work to a community center more in tune with the city’s LGBTQ+ people of color whose voices have only recently been properly listened to within the city’s LGBTQ+ community.

I maintain that affording authority over these kinds of projects to the communities they document is critical in both making the work done the best iteration it can be, and in ensuring it benefits those communities, not just the academics and the academic record that benefit from it inherently. What I have laid out here is a fairly broad outline for how this can be done, and so I welcome your comments and questions in considering how in working in public history we can not only educate the public, but engage them in educating others about their own history.

100% of the SBD rewards from this #explore1918 post will support the Philadelphia History initiative @phillyhistory. This crypto-experiment is part of a graduate course at Temple University's Center for Public History and is exploring history and empowering education to endow meaning. To learn more click here.