THE UNFOLDING STORY OF THE ARCHIVES PROJECT

The Living Archives Project at the ICA is currently being worked on by colleagues who participated in the work of the Order: Ecumenical, Ecumenical Institute, and Institute of Cultural Affairs throughout the past 50 years. ​

Although the foundational archival activity of preserving and cataloguing this history has been going on for decades, today’s constantly improving technologies are allowing colleagues to take the treasures and learnings from the past and make them easily accessible and understandable to new generations.

For ICA’s future vision, the archives team believes it needs a way to grasp the past; not to replicate it, but to draw on its experience and learnings to inform future directions.
The archives team, based out of Chicago with remote team members, has the power to build a bridge from the O:E/EI/ICA history to current ICA-USA and ICA International projects and catapult this knowledge through the world wide web.

The work during the 2013 Fall Archives Sojourn was constantly electrified by the energy created together by singing and sharing of stories as colleagues rediscovered past wisdom, like core strategies of 1) Contextual Re-Education; 2) Structural Reformation; and 3) Spirit Re-Motivation.

"Baby steps” were taken to help colleagues get a handle on how to be WordPress website designer/builders. The published collections to date are only "Starter Collections” which have the promise to synergize collaborations with peoples involved in social change today.

The Global Archives Team is looking for fresh ways to help communicate "the future of our past work” online. The team anticipates being present online and face-to-face in Chicago and Minneapolis for a YouTube channel broadcast. There is still a call for short imaginal stories for new collections like Imaginal Education, Facilitation Methods and Human Development Projects. Inspired by ICA-Ukraine’s broadcasts of two weekly live programs to 8,000 Ukrainian subscribers in Russian and English, there is a plan to produce live on-air prototype programs, like the Imaginal Education Collection broadcast done in September by Elise Packard and KazeGadway.

New partner teams will be created to design and bring online new Collections for the Spring Sojourn 2014. Stay tuned for these program prototypes. The Spring Sojourn is scheduled for April 28 to May 9, 2014.