Out(sider)
Preservation
Initiative
Commemorating Black Freedom-Seeking, Placemaking, & Migration in America and Canada
WHO WE ARE
The Out(sider) Preservation Initiative supports descendant community members who seek ways to preserve Black placemaking, freedom-seeking, migration, and placekeeping heritage through creative storytelling.
The Initiative (OPI) commemorates Black preservation and persistence across places and time, focusing on the creation of Black settlements and towns. OPI activities, research, and grantmaking highlight the roles culture, performance, storytelling, and heritage play in descendants' approaches to preserving, revitalizing, remembering, and protecting freedmen’s settlements (also known as Freedom Colonies, Black Settlements, Black Colonies, Black Towns, and Freedom Communities.)
Housed at the University of Virginia (UVA-IRB Protocol #5460), the OPI team partners with members of its advisory board, scholars, nonprofits, consultants, artists, agencies, and descendants.
moving
forward
The Out(sider) Preservation Initiative will tell a new foundational story of the United States that commemorates Black place preservation in four ways:
Provide grants
To descendant and artist teams to create generative events and performances commemorating Freedom Colony founders
Through its regranting program, the Initiative will sustain current and new commemorative practices and art installations, plays, public art, kiosks, performances, and wayfinding in settlements or areas where the descendants live.
create a portal
A “virtual” commemorative landscape to foster connection
A new online portal will make visible and accessible the commemorative landscape of freedom colonies, including voluntary and involuntary migration and displacement stories of return.
This portal will announce/ describe grantee events, offer a platform for multimedia storytelling, and share active participation opportunities, expanding The Texas Freedom Colonies Project’s Atlas reach to the Upper South, Western United States, and Canada.
Descendants will have separate secure access to the platform, enabling them to plan new commemorative events and add to an interactive map at the museum and online.
Develop
“presevation”
pedagogy
That centers descendant voices and project-based learning
Participants and students will be engaged in non-traditional approaches to place creation, stewardship, and historic preservation outside the confines or auspices of traditional historic preservation.
The Initiative will create preservation education and tools for and by descendants, exposing UVA students to work in public history, preservation, planning and preservation careers, and ethical community engagement.
create
communities
of practice
Through symposia, workshops, pilot projects, and other participatory activities addressing challenges to descendant-led preservation
Descendant community members and scholars will come together to co-create solutions and foster the development of the online portal and engagement strategies.
The Initiative will create opportunities for UVA students to engage in service and project-based learning through courses co-created by community members.