Project C.H.A.N.G.E.

Blog: http://uichangeproject.blogspot.com/2009/11/ui-change-project.html
Email:theuichangeproject@gmail.com

Goals: CHANGE is a collaborative grassroots education program, housed in The University of Iowa’s Women’s Resource and Action Center, that is committed to providing high quality educational arts and humanities experiences to people in community settings within the state of Iowa. Our trained providers work collaboratively to provide meaningful instruction in the arts and humanities to diverse groups of people and gain experience as teachers and facilitators.

Objectives:

CHANGE provides an opportunity for creative scholarship, collaboration, support, training, and service through education and outreach to students, staff, and faculty at the University of Iowa and for community members in the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids area through an ongoing program at the Women’s Resource and Action Center.

CHANGE supports educational programs in the arts and humanities in partnership with programs in Iowa that provide social services, health care, elder care, shelter, foster care, rehabilitation, and correctional rehabilitation to diverse groups of people. These include hospitals, alternative sites of public education, correctional institutions, shelters, counseling centers, drug treatment centers, and facilities dedicated to juvenile justice, Children in Need of Assistance, and people who are differently-abled.

CHANGE trains volunteers to write student centered curricula, seek funding, advocate for special populations and the disenfranchised, create, teach, and facilitate productive, enjoyable, educational experiences for people in community settings.

CHANGE seeks venues where the work of participants can be shared with the larger community through exhibitions, installations, readings, performances, and publications.

Current Project: Women Writing in Exile: The Memoir Project

Project Narrative for Women Writing in Exile: The Memoir Project

Spring 2010

Funded in Part by Humanities Iowa

http://www.uiowa.edu/~humiowa/index.html

Women Writing in Exile: The Memoir Project is the first project undertaken by the CHANGE program through the Women’s Resource and Action Center. CHANGE stands for Collaborative Humanities and Arts Network for Growth and Education. This is a collective of artists and humanities students and scholars who facilitate educational programming in alternative sites across Iowa. This collective is composed of UI faculty and students as well as members of the community.

The purpose of Women Writing in Exile: The Memoir Project is to share the stories of women from Iowa with a larger audience and to shed light on the materials available from the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa. This collaborative approach involves working with a self-selected group of women at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women (ICIW), volunteers from CHANGE, and the inspiring stories of women who have donated their memoirs and personal materials to the Iowa Women’s Archives. First, our group will select and read memoirs from the Iowa Women’s Archives. We will view materials associated with these memoirs and choose key images in each collection to depict as projected images, which will be recorded in paint on a stable surface. These images will be paired with selected passages from the memoirs to become part of a larger exhibition. Next we will work together and construct our own memoirs and images in a similar fashion.

The collection of memoirs we write will be donated and permanently preserved in the Iowa Women’s Archives. The archives staff has expressed a great deal of support for the inclusion of memoirs from women who are incarcerated at ICIW. Incarcerated people are often marginalized and purposefully forgotten or silenced by our society. As a society generally we are only interested in narratives from prisoners filled with salacious or gruesome details, confessions, remorse, or redemption without the possibility for nuance or ambiguity. This collection of memoirs will not only create an important resource for scholars who are interested in incarcerated women in Iowa, but also a way for women at ICIW to polish their writing skills and re-story their lives by constructing and reconstructing their personal narratives to reflect the continuum of their experience before and after the one act or series of poor choices, options, actions, and decisions that landed them in prison. The second part of our workshop will be inspired by a visit from Iowa Poet Laureate, Mary Swander. Swander is the author of numerous books including memoirs and poetry. She has been recognized for her writing by a number of prestigious organizations. She would be an incredible role model for the women at the prison. I have contacted her and she is committed to joining us if we receive funding.
After the 12-week workshop is over we will have a reading at the prison of selections of the memoirs created during the workshop, and selections of the memoirs we read from the Iowa Women’s Archives. The images inspired by these memoirs will be projected behind the readers as a backdrop. We will also have a similar reading open to the public at the UI Old Capitol Museum in April. Women from WRAC will stand in for the incarcerated workshop participants and read selections from their memoirs.
The images and one-page selections from the memoirs will travel to Whispers and Screams, an annual conference sponsored by the Iowa Gender-Specific Services Task Force, the Iowa Juvenile Home, and various learning institutions across Iowa. When the images and one-page selections are returned to the University of Iowa they will permanently reside in the Women’s Resource and Action Center on Campus. The exhibition will highlight the stories of women who are currently incarcerated in our state and the role of the Iowa Women’s Archives in fostering the preservation of this invisible and marginalized aspect of women’s history.