Humanities Truck Community Archive

Faculty Fellow Laura Waters Hinson used the Humanities Truck to run a community engagement project to take the 2019 Community Voice Project (an organization that produces short documentaries and digital stories that capture the voices of DC community storytellers too often unseen and unheard) Film Series to non-profits across the city. The aim was to honor each specific community and to promote critical dialogue among these DC storytellers, their communities, and our students, arriving at a community interpretation of what these stories mean on a collective level. This collection contains documentation and photographs from three individual events and film screenings. 

On October 23, 2019, graduate fellows Eman Dakhil and Grace Eggleston working with Professor Hinson, brought the Truck to Next Step Charter School in Columbia Heights. They screened a few Community Voice Lab films for a group of high school students, then broke into small groups to discuss the documentaries. 

On November 19, 2019, Professor Hinson and graduate fellows Amelia Tyson, Grace Eggleston, and Eman Alghamdi took the Humanities Truck to the Building Black Equity Community Fest in Anacostia. This event was planned by the Greater Washington Urban League Young Professionals at the Union Temple Baptist Church, and was focused on supporting small businesses. The team presented three Community Voice Lab films, each about Black entrepreneurship in Washington DC. 

Told over the course of a year, "Street Reporter," is a deeply intimate journey into reporter Sheila White’s life as she refuses to allow housing insecurity to define her future. The documentary film is decidedly participatory, incorporating the subjects’ self-filmed footage and involving the subjects throughout the planning, production and outreach phases for the film. The goal of the film makers was to inspire broad conversations on the intersection of COVID-19, homelessness and race while highlighting the power of community journalism in America today. Photographs, the screening guide, and trailer for the documentary, "Street Reporter," directed by Truck project fellow Laura Waters Hinson, are included in this collection.