Community Needs and Assets Assessment

Do you want to help preserve and share the history of Black communities in Chicago? Black stories are often overlooked by institutions that collect historical materials. In line with our mission of helping Black Chicagoland communities preserve their legacies, we are conducting a Community Needs and Assets Assessment (CNAA)! We want to understand the general knowledge and resources needed for the Black Chicagoans to preserve their histories.  Based on what we learn about the current needs of legacy management for Black Chicagoans the BMRC will host 6 virtual community workshops in 2021, including a discussion about the CNAA results in April. You can help us by taking the survey yourself or by sharing this survey with any Black Chicagoland community members that you know!

Community Needs and Assets Assessment: http://bit.ly/BMRCCNAA

To move forward our mission of promoting the preservation of Black Chicagoland’s histories, the BMRC is happy to offer each of our survey participants entry to our Archival Toolkit Raffle! Ten participants will receive:

• an acid-free box filled with
• acid-free folders,
• photo and document sleeves,
• a USB drive,
• a notebook,
• pencils,
• a tip sheet about how to archive your historical materials,
• a list of apps you can use to archive and conduct oral histories,
• and a brochure with information from our Legacy Management Resource Portal, a resource about archiving personal or organizational collections, or donating materials to a museum, library, or archive.

The supplies in this Archival Toolkit are important for everyone to have – not just archivists! The winners can use these materials to preserve their personal or community photos, documents, digital materials, and more. Community members can enter the raffle at the end of the survey.

We are also hosting a social media campaign highlighting member collections on our Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook pages, so look out for new posts every Monday morning of February!

This survey is completely anonymous as all the contact information for entering the Raffle or requesting more information will be separated from the responses. You can request more information about the CNAA and the community workshops by contacting the BMRC’s Community Engagement Archivist Tanya Calvin at tcalvin@uchicago.edu or 773-702-2388.