Nov. 19, 2000 — "Local Heroes Changing America" (Norton, $29.95) is part of a two-year, $2.4 million multimedia project called "Indivisible: Stories of American Community."

The project includes a traveling exhibition that opened last month in Chicago and is scheduled to be at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art from Oct. 28 to Dec 31, 2002.

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, N.C., collaborated on the project with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The book includes a compact disc packed with interviews and a foreword by Ray Suarez, former host of National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" and now a senior correspondent for "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." He writes that the project is about communities "harnessing the energy and common sense of common people."

Established photographers and interviewers try to capture such disparate worlds as a teen telephone help line in San Francisco, a Haitian street patrol in a crime-plagued Florida town and a Montana timber settlement coping with heightened conservation concerns.

"Indivisible" co-director Tom Rankin traveled to Anchorage and Homer in 1998 to scope out the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, featured in a chapter called "Sea Culture."

"This is not a book about success stories necessarily," he says. "This isn't People magazine—12 greatest civic projects."

Rather, it's about ordinary people trying to bring change at home, he says. Rankin believes the book will appeal mainly to "general readers interested in community issues in America, American culture, photography and the way oral history and photography work together."

Eventually, interview tapes and other materials from the "Indivisible" project will be archived and accessible to the public at an Alaska location still to be determined, Rankin says.

The project Web site is www.indivisible.org.