As part of the Humanities for All Quick Grant program the Norco Library is currently presenting “We Out Here: Diversity Summit and Film Festival,” a free month-long virtual series that launched in spring 2022. “We Out Here,” seeks to empower and celebrate diversity in Norco’s unacknowledged and underrepresented BIPOC+ (Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and LGBTQ+) communities. In addition to the film festival, “We Out Here” will include a diversity summit with various BIPOC+ led workshops and panels that speak on themes of diversity, equity, inclusion, and the importance of archiving local BIPOC+ history.
Norco Library just wrapped up the diversity film festival and virtual speaker portion of the “We Out Here” project. The final phase of the project will conclude with archiving the film festival and summit as the foundation for Norco’s Local BIPOC+ History Archive. With the new archive Norco Library will begin to amass local BIPOC+ history that has gone unaccounted for in Norco’s near 100-year-old local historical canon.
Also presented in the Inland Empire starting in January 2022 was the University of Redland’s project “Plague Stories,” which consisted of a community-wide event gathering humanities scholars from the University of Redlands and Redlands public high schools and middle schools to discuss how literature and film can give us insights into the catastrophic events of the COVID pandemic. Over four public discussion sessions and two One City One Book events for adults and young readers, professors and teachers led conversations about how the humanities can help us connect present reality and past events. Through an ongoing video archive, the project sought to give community members a way to share their own stories and hear those of others.
