Center for Localism

Houston Institute for Culture Center for Localism will introduce Texas Community Advocate - Positive Action for Texas Communities in November 2006.

The Texas Community Advocate website, texasculture.org, will support several statewide and national campaigns. Educational resources and promotional materials will inform and empower community members to take positive steps to improve the economic and cultural resources of their communities.

Internship: Community Advocacy Media Director
Responsibilities: Develop a strategic network of radio stations in Texas for placement of public service announcements aimed at helping people better understand the economics of their communities. For more information contact mark@houstonculture.org.

Internship: Community Advocacy Education Director
Responsibilities: Develop a strategic network of middle school teachers in Texas for implementation of Kids Community Voices writing exercises for the advocacy campaign Positive Action for Texas Communities. For more information contact mark@houstonculture.org.

Center for Digital Storytelling

Houston Institute for Culture will introduce the Digital Story Resource Center in October 2006. The center promotes community uses of digital technologies to express ideas, explore issues, tell family stories and bridge cultural divides. Youth initiatives through this important center will help children develop their ideas and communication skills.

The Digital Story Resource Center will promote positive uses of computers and software. By offering workshops for people of all ages and backgrounds, the center will collect and display hundreds of informative digital stories. The center will establish effective cross cultural communication as a result of broad interest in this highly accessible art form. Community members will also be able to access thousands of audio and video files representing historic events and diverse cultures, documentary films and photographs, and recorded speeches and forums for educational purposes through the center's archives.

Information about the center's current projects and workshops will be provided through its website, digitalstory.org. The site will introduce the uses of Digital Storytelling, including education, communication and historic preservation. Additional information resources will help people develop digital stories as movies, podcasts, and digital publications. It will present solutions for utilizing and archiving digital photographs, audio and video files, as well as frequently asked questions about digital technology.

Internship: Digital Storytelling Workshop Facilitator
Responsibilities: Present workshops for grade school and middle school children to develop their ideas as digital stories; facilitate the students' work to completion and presentation for peer groups. For more information contact mark@houstonculture.org.

The Folk Arts and Cultural Traditions of
Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston

Since its inception in the very early days of September 2005, the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston project has sought to forefront the importance of storytelling as an expressive and artistic activity that has permeated the experience of the more than 200,000 survivors and evacuees who have found their way to the city. From their first hours in the George R. Brown Convention Center, dislocated Louisianans, East Texans, Mississippians and Alabamans began sharing narratives with each other in intimate settings and private conversation. As time passed, these storytellers found listeners among the massive disaster relief teams and volunteers who took time to attend to their narratives of loss and dislocation, of heroism and strength.

The stories told by survivors and evacuees treat the obvious and compelling disaster scenarios faced by the many individuals who chose to wait out the storm but they also remember the lost Gulf Coast communities that thousands of individuals left behind and the new networks of social cooperation that these individuals are building for themselves in Houston. These stories are an active part of the expressive interactions survivors share with each other daily. Knowing this to be the case, the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston project has undertaken to collect these narratives for the cultural record by training and employing survivors and evacuees to document the stories of their peers. The project intends to field as many as 150 fieldworkers total over the course of 2 years.

As a result, a range of storytellers, oral poets and verbal artists are being identified as part of the fieldwork associated with Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston. In addition to the narrative arts that address the experiences of new and long-lived Houstonians in the face of these calamities, project fieldwork has demonstrated that the musical traditions of the Gulf Coast also play a substantial role in forging connections between survivors and their new neighbors. Likewise, costumery, religious arts, festival traditions, foodways, and even some architectural crafts, are all traditional art forms that have found their way to Houston through the migrations of those displaced by the two hurricanes.

The Houston Institute for Culture, in conjunction with a consortium of Houston cultural organizations, including the Orange Show Foundation for Visionary Art, FotoFest, Project Row Houses and the Vietnamese Studies program at the University of Houston, seeks support for a folk arts specialist to work with the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston project (co-directed by folklorists Pat Jasper and Carl Lindahl) to mount a series of folk arts presentations based on these growing field resources. The presentations will showcase the knowledge, skill and mastery of Houston's many new residents but it will also engage them in intensive and fruitful interactions with their artistic peers from the Houston area and the surrounding region.

It almost goes without saying that the folk arts and their well-known role in creating a cohesive sense of community life can assist hurricane evacuees in re-casting their lives in the city, while simultaneously giving longtime Houstonians an equally productive way to share their own sense of community and identity with their new peers. This creative dialogue about identity, community and especially shared traditions is an essential strategy for building relationships among new Houstonians and old. This project highlights the positive artistic and cultural contributions of evacuees and gives longtime Houstonians a new model for examining their own city's much overlooked but very real cultural richness and diversity.

Topical Events and Community Forums

Houston Institute for Culture is locating an office inside the Havens Center. By partnering with Havens Center to co-sponsor beneficial events and forums for the community, the organization will continue to produce excellent opportunities for public interaction, while it also develops broader community campaigns throughout the state and region.

Grants and In-kind Support

The organization has received substantial community support for its programs. The Folk Arts and Cultural Traditions of Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston received grants from the Miller Theatre Advisory Board and Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County. Camp Dos Cabezas received sponsorship from Literal Magazine. The Camp Dos Cabezas Continuing Education Program received the support of the Houston Young Lawyers Foundation. And donations from Affilitaed Systems and the US Department of Justice have improved facilities and operations of the Camp Dos Cabezas Continuing Education Program, digital storytelling workshops, community forums and film presentations, as well as access to our facilities by many community organizations.

As the organization's track record of providing valuable and impactful programs for the community has grown to an impressive list of more than 200 programs in six years, Houston Institute for Culture is in the process of researching and increasing its requests for public and private support. This will allow the organization to bring larger initiatives to serve more people in underrepresented communities, as well as those that lack in-depth cultural education and experience.