Community Conversations: Pandemic Perspectives, New Jersey’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project

 

COVID-19 has touched every New Jersey community. From the immediate threat of contracting, spreading, and weathering the virus, through the trauma of social isolation and intersections with poverty, racism and all forms of health and environmental injustice, the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare our deepest vulnerabilities.

Community Conversations: Pandemic Perspectives, NJ’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project is a statewide initiative to gather and transform the personal accounts of New Jersey residents, especially those who have faced increased marginalization or greater risk as a result of the pandemic, into the building blocks of a more resilient, compassionate and Healthy New Jersey.

As a collaboration between the New Jersey YMCA State Alliance, the New Jersey Department of Health, and Healthy NJ 2030, Community Conversations: Pandemic Perspectives, aims to portray COVID’s mostly painful and sometimes hopeful cadences by integrating interviews, focus groups, and a variety of creative artworks, such as journals, essays, poems, paintings, short films, music, and more. This collective storytelling not only can inform how New Jersey responds and meets the needs of its communities moving forward, but memorializes the voices of NJ residents during a critical period of unprecedented change in our state’s history.