2.2 Find Initial Partners

Community partnerships are, unsurprisingly, the foundation of a community archive project—you will not be successful if you are not able to develop strong relationships with diverse stakeholders across your community. These organizations will play an important role in providing contributions to your archive, motivating the public to attend archive-related events, and, eventually, bringing users to your finished archive. As some of our collaborators pointed out, creating a community archive is much too big of a task for any one organization to take on alone. The task of a library should be, they argued, to provide a central organizing structure to bring together the many existing—but often siloed—efforts to record and celebrate the histories of their community.

You should start building relationships with community stakeholders as early as possible, and preferably before you start looking for funding or designing the approach for your archive. In many cases you will already have some natural partners, with whom you have built a relationship in the normal course of serving your community. In other cases, you may need to reach out to new organizations or individuals to help you get a broader reach into your community.

For our project, we brought together a group of existing community partners when we started thinking about applying for funding. These were partners that had previously expressed an interest in expanding or supporting our archive. In developing a list of initial partners, we looked to local organizations with which the library already had an existing partnership and who we thought may have a particular interest in the goals of the project. We also considered partners who may be able to help us reach communities who we most needed to develop connections with in order to meet the project’s aim of mitigating archival silences identified in existing local history collections.

Over the course of the project, our partners changed. Some organizations who were active in the application stage were never able to fully participate due to staff changes or competing priorities. Many other organizations, however, became involved as new partners as news of the project began to spread and we developed new methods for collaboration.

There are a couple of important reasons why it is important to engage with partners early. First, these partners will have knowledge about the community that you do not have, which can make planning easier. Second, if you are looking for external funding for your project, it will help your chances if you are able to provide letters of support showing that you have partners willing to help you create your community archive (see Section 2.3). And, third, it will help you to build a stronger relationship to support implementation of the archive later on.

The latter point is particularly relevant for building relationships with organizations that represent historically marginalized members of your community. These organizations are often used to being engaged at the last minute, and often in a shallow or exploitative manner. It is better that you build a relationship with these organizations before you are feeling the time pressures of a grant or need to ask them for a favor.

As you start making more concrete plans for your archive, make sure that your partners are consulted in a genuine way. You should include them in project decisions, engage them in proposal writing processes, and allocate funding to support their continued participation in the project.

Remember that these organizations often face unique barriers to participating in projects, including time and resource constraints, infrastructural constraints (e.g., lack of Internet access to participate in virtual meetings), and even distrust of libraries. Talk with organizations early and often about their constraints, and what sort of resources or support will help them to collaborate with you more fully. These steps will pay off immensely in the long run.