Featured Work
Elma Lewis Living Stories Project
Calling artists of all ages to honor a legacy
Together, we are building a living archive to document the ongoing legacy of one of Boston’s most important civil rights luminaries, Miss Elma Lewis. We invite you to learn more about this call to artists and other ways you can share your story about “What Miss Lewis Taught Me.”
Solidarity Circles
An opportunity for students to build solidarity practices through engagement with community leaders and organizers, reflection and dialogue, and creative expression. This program includes a stipend. Solidarity is a commitment, not a destination.
Our work at the ELC is all about what stories can do. We believe stories have the potential to create change in the world around us. We all make decisions, policies, and practices based on stories we know and hear. Stories are portals to access, education, historical truth, and visibility. Stories are a marker of existence.
Stories are roots. Stories are hope and necessary dreams. Stories can transform borders into bridges. Stories help us remember that we belong. Stories can seed and sustain our understanding of ways we are connected.
Stories are oxygen.
At the Elma Lewis Center, we practice community-centered storytelling and radical listening. We collaborate with communities and people of all ages who have the least access to craft and circulate their stories and self-representation. We work with community leaders to hold space for authentic story sharing, community centered archiving, and intentional circulation practices so the memory of people’s work—as shared in their own words, images, tone and vibe—is not dimmed or erased. Sometimes this means written or spoken words. Sometimes this means sculpture, a painting, a play, a zine, a website, a film, a poem. Sometimes this means playing music, singing and dancing.
There are three stars at the center of the constellation of stories: the storytellers, the stories, and the listeners. We collaborate to hold spaces where people can meaningfully engage with stories and those telling them. We intend for these storytelling constellations to be a force for co-creating material change.
The Elma Lewis Center is part of the Division of Community, Culture, & Belonging (CCB) at Emerson College. The ELC is named in honor of Elma Lewis ('43), one of Boston’s most important Black female luminaries in the arts, education, and civil rights work.
The Elma Lewis Center team works to develop and strengthen authentic relationships with community-based organizations and movements that center community voices and organize at the grassroots for transformational healing and change.
What do we need to remember? What do we need to know about what is happening right now?
What are the futures that you imagine? Who do you need to listen?
What do you want your stories to do?
