Our Services

Our approach flows from our values. It is people-powered and inspired by principles of community organizing. We start new projects with a careful consideration of place, history, and power. Building trust is at the core of our work. We put care into facilitating generative, forward moving, and inclusive group experiences.

Exhibition Development

  • We Bring Our Team: We will build the perfect team to create an exhibition from start to finish, in collaboration with key stakeholders. Exhibit development contains multiple phases, tailored to meet our client’s timeline and the level of stakeholder and community involvement. These phases generally include: front-end evaluation, general research, mid-point evaluation, additional research, permissions, iterative rounds of design, fabrication, and final evaluation.

  • We Join Your Team: We will work with your institution, company, or organization’s staff, board, and volunteers to plan, manage, and evaluate exhibit development, from start to finish. We can join your team to support overall planning, community participation and input, and any and all phases of the project, based on the needs of our client.

  • We Coach Your Team: We will coach your institution, company, or organization’s staff, board, and volunteers to create a roadmap for all phases of a successful exhibition. This will include an assessment of organizational and community-based requirements for an effective project and a timeline with project phases, featuring key benchmarks and helpful tools.

Community-based Research

 

Learn from members of your community. We will connect with community members through targeted outreach and engagement for civic and humanities projects, exhibitions, public programs, or project evaluation.

Always responsive to the needs of the individual community as well as to the overall goals of the project, our community-based research involves stakeholders as well as key leaders and diverse groups of community members as participants in the research process. Our approach is unique to each project, and often includes surveys, focus groups, and interviews.

This is for projects that aim to create storytelling experiences from the “bottom up,” guided by those who have lived the stories. It is also for projects that aim to engage an entire community to help them contribute to a collective resource or participate in a new public initiative.

Historical Research

 

Find what you are looking for. We will identify archival resources and deliver original research and data analysis for humanities and community-based projects. We’ll find compelling, exhibit-worthy content for your next project or exhibition.

We will locate relevant archival collections and do the work for you to assess compelling content and distill key narratives. Archival sources can include document, image, digital, and object collections as well as data repositories.

In addition to exhibit-worthy content, we can create historical summaries with archival highlights that creatively provide an overview of specific moments or time periods from a diversity of perspectives. We can review census or other relevant data and share key takeaways as written analysis and data visualizations.

Exhibit Label Writing

 

Create a meaningful experience. We will write engaging, well-researched interpretive labels for your exhibition, educational trail, or historic site.

Our labels will match the tone and voice of your exhibition or interpretive project and are uniquely tailored to help you meet your goals for visitor outcomes and experience. They are informed by best practices and innovative ideas in the museum field and by client feedback.

Report Writing

 

Communicate with the public. We will create a visually-compelling report based on our research or yours, to creatively share what you have learned with your audience.

Our reports are dynamic and eye-catching, featuring images, highlighted quotes, data visualizations, and infographics. We can create your report based on qualitative and quantitative research.

Grant Writing

 

Fund your project. We will research and write the grant application for your next humanities-based project. We also like to collaborate on writing grants that include us as part of the project team, but that’s not necessary for us to be of service.

We also offer coaching to groups who are looking for support with identifying grant opportunities in the humanities for a new initiative or one that getting a reboot. We can help you discern which grants are a good match for your group or project’s needs and support your team in creating a roadmap for finding funding. From there, we can write the application for you or simply provide writing and editing support as your team moves forward.

Oral History

 

Hear from community members in their words. We will coordinate, prepare, and transcribe original audio-recorded oral history interviews for your project.

Oral history is a powerful storytelling tradition that preserves the histories of everyday people and those often left out of mainstream narratives. We believe that each of us is the rightful owner of our own story, and we ensure that our documentation and interpretation of oral histories upholds the integrity of each individual story and the intention behind it.