Share the love: Go For Broke’s Hanashi Oral History Program
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we at VAOHP would like to share a story about how non-profit organizations share love and help to spread it around. On Saturday, February 11, 2012, Go Fo Broke National Education Center hosted an oral history training through their Hanashi Oral History Program. Hanashi, in case you didn’t know, means “talk story” in Japanese. This project has been running since 1998, when a group of Sansei Japanese Americans got together and decided it was time to start recording stories of WWII veterans of Japanese descent. By now, they have recorded over 1,150 interviews in studio-quality video and they present clips of these on their online archive.
Hanashi is one of the most impressive regional video archives we look to for inspiration, so we seized the opportunity to learn more about their interviewing strategies, production of the oral histories, and training of volunteers. Thuy Vo Dang attended the training and met some dedicated Go For Broke volunteers whose commitment to preserving Japanese American stories became clear through their painstaking attention to interviewing techniques and handling complicated video, audio, and lighting equipment.
What Hanashi has shown us is the importance of community history. This program also asserts that we are the keepers of our community’s past and this means we must put meticulous effort into preserving these stories to the best of our ability. VAOHP is ever grateful for the spirit of sharing that Hanashi has shown through its training program and it has inspired us to think of ways to bring a “talk story” workshop series to the Vietnamese American community. Stay connected to our blog and Facebook to learn more about the development of this community workshop!
