An important component of Indivisible is a funded collaborative project in each community, conceived by local leaders with the help of Indivisible staff members. These twelve distinct projects continue the documentation that started with Indivisible. The Pew Charitable Trusts, which funds Indivisible, provided $10,000 for each culminating local project. These funds are for supplies, consulting expenses, or other resources that community leaders deem necessary to see their project through to fruition. The resources acquired and skills learned during this process will stay with each community long after the project has been completed. As you'll read in the following descriptions, the nature and form of the projects vary greatly according to each community's unique circumstances and interests.

Alaskan Fishing Communities
North Pacific Coast, Alaska
The Alaska Marine Conservation Council (AMCC), a consortium of fishermen, educators, environmentalists, and scientists, collaborates with business, environmental, and regulatory groups and local communities to protect and restore marine habitat. The AMCC is conducting a two-part project. The first component entails collecting personal narratives from several fishermen along the Alaskan coastline and preserving the interviews in four archives around the vast state of Alaska. For the second documentary initiative, AMCC will duplicate materials from the Indivisible archive at the University of Alaska-Anchorage to make slides, tapes, and other materials from Indivisible available to the rest of the state.

Alternatives Federal Credit Union
Ithaca, New York
Alternatives Federal Credit Union (AFCU) in Ithaca, New York, is dedicated to social change and community investment and has served its community in this capacity for twenty years. AFCU is now ready to expand its facilities and, with this expansion, make a stronger commitment to supporting the entrepreneurial work of its members. The credit union is teaming up with Indivisible photographer Bill Burke to create a gallery space for his work and the photography of others in the community who capture the spirit of Alternatives Federal Credit Union. The photo gallery will be a reminder to all credit union members of the diversity and civic involvement that distinguish the Ithaca community.

Communities in Harmony Advocating for Learning and Kids (CHALK)
San Francisco, California
CHALK is a San Francisco-area non-profit organization that uses technology to empower and educate youth. Youthline, CHALK's teen-staffed hotline and confidential peer mediation service for the youth of San Francisco, will document on video some of the issues facing young people today. The documentary video-conceived, written, edited, and produced by youth-will be produced and presented in a way that facilitates discussion and raises awareness about teen issues. The video will be shown in schools and other venues to help publicize Youthline's services.

Diné bí' íína', Inc. (Navajo Lifeways)
Navajo Nation
Building a future on the shoulders of the past is the goal of a group of Navajo herders, weavers, and cultural activists working under the name Diné bí' íína', meaning "Navajo lifeways." This group will team up with Indivisible interviewer Jack Loeffler to teach documentary radio techniques to twelve high school students on Navajo Nation. In an intensive one-week course, students will learn how to record interviews using analog, minidisk, and digital audiotape recorders. In addition to the technical training, students will learn and practice the art of interviewing while conducting aural history interviews with other Navajos. These recordings will be digitally edited by the students and transferred to CD's, which will be distributed to each student and school involved in the project, to the Navajo Nation Museum, and to the archive at Diné bí' íína'.

Eau Claire Community of Shalom
Eau Claire, South Carolina
Eau Claire Community of Shalom is an interracial, cross-denominational network that attempts to revitalize Eau Claire's historic neighborhoods while addressing community problems. Working within the theme "The Faces and Places of Eau Claire," eight local young people will learn interviewing, journalistic writing, and photojournalism skills. In order to cultivate their artistic and literary talents while sparking their interest in documenting the world around them, students will have eight weeks to explore their communities with cameras and tape recorders. These young people will interview older members of the community, take their portraits, and then go out and collect photographs and historic documents to create articles about Eau Claire's history. The students will then share these stories with the wider public by submitting them to a local newspaper and archiving them in the community.

Haitian Citizens Police Academy and Roving Patrol, and MAD DADS Street Patrol
Delray Beach, Florida
In the past two decades, thousands of Haitians in search of greater political freedom fled their homeland and settled in South Florida. Some 17,000 have chosen Delray Beach as their new home; today the Haitian community makes up nearly 33 percent of the city's population. Indivisible interviewer Merle Augustin, a resident of Delray Beach, will produce a digital film and a series of photographs documenting the Haitian community in Delray Beach. Through interviews with a diverse group of residents, mainly of Haitian descent, this documentary project will explore the lives of these immigrants and track their evolution from unwelcome newcomers to full-fledged community members. Copies of the film and photographs will be stored at the Delray Beach Historical Society for research and exhibits, creating the beginning of the city's first historical archive about Haitian immigration. The Delray Beach School Board will also use the materials in new multicultural curricula.

HandMade in America
Western North Carolina
HandMade in America devotes its energy and resources to revitalizing the economies, communities, and heritages of small towns in western North Carolina. HandMade will conduct two documentary projects as part of Indivisible. The first project centers on Marshall, North Carolina, where a downtown revitalization effort is underway. HandMade will collect, preserve, and duplicate historic photographs that show the development of the town through several generations. With these pictures, HandMade will create a slide show and an exhibit to spark interest in and stimulate discussion about the revitalization effort. The second project will be a wider documentation of the people and groups who have contributed their time and energy to community-building and preservation work in eleven small towns across western North Carolina. The staff of HandMade in America will create a video that celebrates their achievements and demonstrates how communities can unite to realize a vision.

Midwifery Practice and Doula Service, University Hospital and Medical Center
Stony Brook, New York
This organizations trains volunteers, called doulas, to offer prenatal and labor support to expectant mothers, followed by emotional and practical assistance through the early postpartum weeks at home. In 2001, Stony Brook University Medical Center will start a new community doula program in Suffolk County based on the principles of open membership, strong training, and continued support. This new doula program will recruit members by providing scholarship money for those who cannot afford to take time from their jobs for training. As part of the documentary initiative, the program will integrate journals and cameras into the training process. The resulting documentary photographs and writings will help publicize doula services through the program's Web site.

Proyecto Azteca
San Juan, Texas
Proyecto Azteca works in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas helping low-income Mexican American families build quality, affordable homes. During the course of a year, Proyecto Azteca will embark on a journey with one migrant family; along the way, the family will create photographs and sound recordings of their daily lives. "The Spirit & Struggle of Familia Gonzales" will be a representative piece of documentary work that illuminates the lives of families living in colonias. The work will ultimately become a community exhibit and a CD-ROM, to be distributed to local, state, and national contacts for education and fundraising purposes.

Southwest Youth Collaborative
Chicago, Illinois
Generation Y of Chicago's Southwest Youth Collaborative is a grassroots youth organizing project focused on improving access to quality education and youth development programs. During the summer of 2001 Generation Y will sponsor an intensive six-week camp for ten youth organizers called the Summer Youth Leadership Institute. Its mission is to educate and invigorate emerging leaders who will publicize the needs of Chicago youth. After an extensive training program in grassroots organizing, documentary methods, and media outreach, these youth will hit the streets of Chicago to learn by doing. The participants will recruit seventy-five of their peers into Generation Y's Right to Learn and Youth First! campaigns, document their summer of organizing with tape recorders and cameras, and locate media outlets to publicize their work.

The Village of Arts and Humanities
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
This inner-city arts and cultural organization works to rebuild community through creativity and education. During the summer of 2001, nine teenagers from the Daniel Boone School in Philadelphia will conceive, shoot, and edit a documentary film on the creation of a community quilt. Armed with training in equipment operation, documentary techniques, and oral history interviewing, these students will meet and document families who are creating historical documents of their own. The families involved in the Talking Cloth Project will be painting, sewing, and appliquéing their personal histories onto large sheets of fabric and then assembling them into a large community quilt and narrative. The culmination of these projects will be a festival that will showcase the quilt and film.

Yaak Valley Forest Community
Yaak Valley, Montana
The Yaak Valley Forest Council, an activist group that supports ecological diversity and forest protection, is partnering with the Troy School District and local community groups to launch a multimedia documentary project. High school and elementary school children from the Yaak Valley and Troy school districts will work together to explore, through the documentary arts, the community around them. Interviews with community members will be crafted into a play/puppet show celebrating the community's diversity. In addition to puppetry, the Forest Council will display journals, artwork, and photography from the documentary project.