Assessing the Affective Impact of Community Archives: A Toolkit
All community-based archivists have stories that demonstrate the importance of their work to the communities they serve. Yet these stories of impact can be difficult to systemically track and use for the organization’s benefit. This toolkit provides community archives with the tools to collect, analyze, and leverage stories about the emotional or affective impact of their organizations on the communities they serve and represent. By systematically interviewing stakeholders to find out how community archives are life-changing, organizations can collect useful data that can help articulate their value to potential funders and make stronger cases for support, ultimately leading to increased budgets and capacity.
VIRTUAL BELONGING
Starting a Peer-to-Peer Oral History Project for Community Groups: A Toolkit
This toolkit is a practical guide for community groups that want to start their own peer-to-peer oral history project, where members of a community interview one another about their own experiences. It draws on lessons from the Virtual Belonging project (described below) and was published on the After Violence Project website in October 2025.
Virtual Belonging: Assessing the Affective Impact of Digital Records Creation in Community Archives, is a three-year participatory action research project led by the After Violence Project (AVP) and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) in collaboration with the UCLA Community Archives Lab.
During this project, fellows from AVP and SAADA designed and conducted oral history interviews in their communities and shared the interviews through public events and artistic activation.
The toolkit was co-authored by Dr. Michelle Caswell and Anna Robinson-Sweet of the UCLA Community Archives Lab.