About

The WRI Digital Oral History Project is documenting the Welfare Rights Initiative (WRI), a grassroots student activist and community leadership training organization located at Hunter College. These oral history interviews present social movement activity at the level of a grassroots organization as exemplified by the WRI, which was developed to aid student welfare recipients to become agents of social change and actively involve them with policymaking. An oral narrative of an individual’s experience in a feminist grassroots organization provides us with new insights to the origins of advocacy, documenting the singular historical importance of grassroots organizing and working-class feminist activism. As a result, these narratives help us to better understand what political and social conditions are needed in order for a grassroots community organization to succeed despite race, class, and gender tensions within its ranks. This oral history archive is targeted at researchers, students, activists and historians as a digital tool to enhance research and teaching in social protest movements and feminist activism. Ultimately, this archive gives a platform to those who have had, for the most part, little voice in the public debate on welfare reform: former and/or current welfare recipients. We hope that it provides students and scholars of social movements a positive working example of how women from various backgrounds can band together and enact social change.

Cynthia Tobar (Project Director/Interviewer) is an artist, activist-scholar, and oral historian who is passionate about creating interactive, participatory stories documenting social change. Using video to restore voices of collectivity, she casts a critical lens on political and societal norms surrounding identity, space, and community. Cynthia is a highly skilled and engaged producer, adept in oral history project design, digital project planning and management. Her interests include: producing compelling public history digital projects; merging socially-engaged art practices with participatory action research; community-based archiving and storytelling; and documenting social movements and student activism.

Learn more about Cynthia and her other projects at https://www.cynthiatobar.net/

The WRI Oral History Project is supported by a grant from
The City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the support I received from WRI at the initial stages of this project. Particularly Dee and Mo, thank you for welcoming me back into the fold after all these years away from WRI. Many thanks to Steve Brier, Sady Sullivan, Liza Zapol and Sarah Loose for their generous assistance in sharing their oral history methodologies and best practices with a new initiate. I would like to thank the New Media Lab at the Graduate Center for their technical assistance and feedback throughout the duration of this project, particularly Aaron Knoll for his help with audio editing tools and Andrea Vasquez for her guidance and support. 

Thanks to Perry Garvin for the first site design and to Judy Lerner who provided excellent support with the relaunch the site. I would like to thank Corey Harper for his technical advice and feedback with using Schema.org. I also want to thank Meg Bausman, Iris Finkel, Leigh Hurwitz, Kayla Lawrence, Charles Macquarie, and Chris Mullin for their assistance with carefully summarizing the transcripts and with metadata creation.

DEDICATION

This project is dedicated to Vanessa Lyles (1965 - 2011). Vanessa instilled love and compassion from those around her, and could always be counted on by friends and family for her generosity of spirit and strength. She is greatly missed by all who knew her at WRI. Rest in power Vanessa.