During 2017, Brooklyn Historical Society, Weeksville Heritage Center, and Brooklyn Movement Center each hosted community listening sessions designed as interactive gatherings framed around listening (rather than lecturers or panelists). Each event featured selections from oral histories collected by each partner around a specific theme–education, policing, and gentrification. Facilitators led participants in exercises of deep listening and intergenerational and intercultural discussion.
Education As Community Building
February 11, 2017
Hosted by Weeksville Heritage Center
In this listening session, Voices of Crown Heights Project Director Zaheer Ali and Project Coordinator Amaka Okechukwu presented oral history selections centered on education, collected by Weeksville Heritage Center. These oral history clips chronicle coming of age in Crown Heights from the 1950s to the present, highlighting experiences as students, teachers, and school staff, and the centrality of formal and informal education in the foundation of community.
Stories of Policing in Crown Heights
April 24, 2017
Hosted by Brooklyn Movement Center at Repair the World in Crown Heights
In this listening session, Brooklyn Movement Center’s Mark Winston Griffith and Walis Johnson showcased narratives from Crown Heights residents–all of whom were asked to relate their experiences with the police–as a prompt for community dialogue on the meaning of “public safety.”
Stories of Neighborhood Change
June 12, 2017
Hosted by Brooklyn Historical Society
In this listening session,Voices of Crown Heights Project Director Zaheer Ali and Project Coordinator Amaka Okechukwu shared stories of Crown Heights communities’ resilience in the face of economic, cultural, and spatial change.