C-CAP TEACH will cultivate commitment among higher education institutions to community-centered archives approaches, simultaneously solidifying the ability and responsibility of academic libraries to engage critically and contribute to social justice-focused scholarship, training, pedagogy, and partnerships in their communities. The 48-month project features several interconnected components:

• Training and compensating students for intensive educational experiences in archival stewardship and working on community-centered archives projects;
• Providing direct payments to community-based organizations in the Orange County, California region that participate in community-centered archives partnerships;
• Implementing two assessment projects to identify actionable strategies to support ethical and responsible representation of marginalized histories in digital collections;
• Redistributing funding to academic libraries to apply Community-Centered Archives Practice (C-CAP) models to collaborative community history work;
• Developing a comprehensive Community-Centered Archives Practice (C-CAP) Hub website; and
• Building a coalition of community-centered archives practitioners in the United States, including a National Summit.

The C-CAP TEACH initiative will elevate these values to a wider network, ensuring broad, community-centered access to and representation of community histories; provide evidentiary models for sustaining infrastructure tied to staffing, budgets, and technology; and ultimately leverage the impact and influence of Foundation funding that makes authentic partnerships an everyday practice. Applying this model and the anticipated recommendations of a national scale initiative, we will ensure an ongoing, operationalized commitment to community-centered archives partnerships.

Led by the UCI Libraries Department of Special Collections & Archives — Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive Center.

This initiative is generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2022-2025.