Open a closet in almost any congregation or community organization, and you'll probably find them: boxes of old newsletters, meeting minutes, photographs, event flyers, scrapbooks, membership lists, or perhaps a dusty filing cabinet that no one has opened in years.
It's easy to see these materials as clutter. But together, they tell the story of a community—its values, its relationships, its milestones, and the people who shaped it. Those stories matter.
As part of the larger Beyond Belief initiative, the Newberry Library is launching a series of free Community Archival Training Workshops to help religious congregations, activist organizations, and community groups preserve the records that document their histories.
Many organizations don't think of themselves as having an archive. Yet archives are everywhere. They include photographs from neighborhood events, church bulletins, synagogue newsletters, mosque programs, protest signs, oral histories, meeting minutes, digital newsletters, websites, social media posts, and countless other records that capture the life of a community.
These collections are more than historical curiosities. They help communities remember where they have been, celebrate what they have accomplished, and pass their stories on to future generations. They can also document organizational milestones, strengthen community identity, support anniversaries and exhibitions, and provide valuable resources for community and family members, researchers, and students seeking to understand the past.
But preserving these materials can feel overwhelming. What should you keep? What can you safely discard? How do you organize decades of records? What about fragile photographs, aging paper, or digital files stored on old computers or in the cloud? Our workshops are designed to answer exactly these questions.
The series is offered in two parts. Part 1, to be held each fall through 2029, explores the bigger picture of community archives: why they matter, what belongs in them, how to involve community members in documenting your history, and how to make thoughtful decisions about preservation, privacy, and access. Part 2, to be held in the spring, turns to the practical work of stewardship, covering safe handling techniques, affordable preservation strategies, archival storage, digitization, and the growing challenge of caring for born-digital materials such as websites, email newsletters, and social media.
Along the way, participants will see examples from the Newberry's collections that illustrate how today's everyday records become tomorrow's historical evidence.
The Community Archival Training Workshops reflect one of the central goals of Beyond Belief: helping preserve the histories of Chicago's religious communities and movements for social change. Many of the stories that shaped the city were never documented in newspapers or official government records. They survive instead in congregational offices, community centers, neighborhood organizations, and the personal collections of people who participated in these movements.
By helping organizations care for their own records, we hope to ensure that these histories remain accessible—not only for scholars, but for the communities themselves. Because every box on a shelf has the potential to tell a story. The question is whether we'll preserve those stories before it's too late.
Learn More
Workshops are open to representatives or volunteers working with organizations engaged in religious activities, social change activism, or community/historical functions, who have records in need of being organized and secured. Participants may sign up for only Part 1 or Part 2, or for both workshops. Find listings for upcoming workshops here.
In addition to workshops held at the Newberry, a limited number of customized on-site trainings are available for organizations interested in developing archival practices tailored to their own collections and communities. Write to belief@newberry.org to inquire about arranging such a workshop.