I was reflecting on how irregular our social media and blog posts are. It occurred to me that people might be interested in why that is and what else we are up to at the Iowa Black History Research Collective.
We have families. All of our board members have children in our lives, who we love dearly. They come first!
We have day jobs. Part of being a non-profit is not being able to pay ourselves. There’s a little more nuance to it, but that’s the deal.
We research content. It is important to provide well researched, factually accurate content. We place a strong emphasis upon primary sources and qualified secondary sources. In an age of mis-information and dis-information, we are committed to practicing and modeling information literacy.
We look for money. At this point, it still feels like throwing spaghetti at a wall identifying good funding matches to support our programming (paid student internships) and operational needs. As someone who is relatively new to grant writing, it is pretty overwhelming, but I’m confident that I’ll become more comfortable with practice.
We prepare for our interns. Interns are a key component to our organization. We won’t be able to do what we do without them. We kick off our inaugural summer internship in June. I’m thrilled to welcome two interns from my alma mater, Grinnell College. Ours will be a remote internship. Organization and preparation are critical. I’ve been busy setting up and enriching a Trello board with our work tracks. I’ve been compiling a tool box of resources + admin logins that we will be using in our research.
Thank you for joining me on this journey!
