We’re excited about a new funding program announced by the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration. The Multicultural Community Capacity Grant Program focuses on multicultural communities in Ontario – supporting their events and sharing their stories. Small grants of up to $8,000 can get you started on an event series, digitization project, or collaboration with new partners.
We encourage our member organizations to apply for funding under this program. Lots of communities in Ontario are experiencing influxes of newcomers and refugees, and the VITA digital toolkit offers you tools to collect and share their stories: the user contribution module, virtual exhibits, testimonials, and by starting conversations through the Mystery setting on items.
The funding is available to incorporated and non-incorporated not-for-profits, so if this doesn’t apply to you, you can still partner with community groups who are eligible.
Here are a few project ideas:
- Create a record group for user-contributed materials from newcomers settling in your area
- Hold a scanning party for newcomers or distinct cultural communities to digitize their materials and build a virtual collection for themselves in your VITA platform
- Digitize and upload holdings that pertain to the histories of multicultural groups in Ontario, so more people can learn their stories
- Develop a regional VITA platform aggregating your materials with those of nearby communities, to tell the stories of multicultural communities in your area over time
- Host a night of cultural storytelling that you record and then share in VITA as documentation of community history
- Offer your VITA account as the digital platform for a local group’s archives, projects, and documentation
- Use our transcription crowdsourcing tool to engage the public on handwritten documents such as diaries, scrapbooks, and letters
- Build exhibits featuring the various ethnic groups that have built your municipality
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team if you have an idea for a project involving VITA and OurDigitalWorld’s other tools and collections. We’re happy to offer estimates and help you describe the potential of our tools.