ARCHIVED | Community Conversations: New Jersey’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project
Note: This page has been archived and is no longer being updated. To see the updated Community Conversations page, please click here.
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Thank you for visiting Community Conversations: New Jersey’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project. We are no longer accepting submissions.
Through the honest and earnest contributions of individuals and communities from across our state, we have documented the experiences of over 580 New Jersey residents.
An interim report of the first 500 stories, developed by the Walter Rand Institute, will be available this Spring. The NJ State Library is working diligently to create a public archival for on-demand viewing, and the Healthy NJ 2030 Advisory Council continues to include emerging themes in its Healthy NJ 2030 framework. Please continue to check back for more updates!
In the meantime, we extend our deepest and most heartfelt gratitude to all who shared their time, creativity, experiences, and/or voice in storytelling. Storytelling is a brave act of resilience, and the willingness to share struggles and survival during COVID-19 can support New Jersey’s healing and learning moving forward.
With sincere gratitude,
Marissa Davis, Director, Health Equity & State Initiatives
Yannai Kranzler, Director, Office of Population Health NJ Department of Health
For questions or for more information, please contact Julia.Wieczorek@yalliance.org.
Community Conversations Interim Report - June 2021
Help Us Gather New Jersey’s COVID-19 Community Stories!
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: New Jersey’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project is a statewide collective ethnography 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 aims to portray COVID’s mostly painful and sometimes hopeful cadences by integrating interviews, focus groups, social media dialogues, creative artworks, journaling, participatory observation, or document analysis.
This project will memorialize the voices of New Jersey residents during a critical period of unprecedented change in our state’s history.
With generous support from the Russell Berrie Foundation, all stories will be collected through March 31, 2021, and will be analyzed by the Senator Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs to identify themes and key disparities that will inform actionable recommendations for improving public health in Healthy NJ's 2030 State Health Improvement Plan.
Listen as New Jersey’s First Lady Tammy Murphy shares more about the project below:
Who Can Share Stories
We’re asking New Jersey residents, essential workers, public servants and volunteers to tell us how they’ve struggled, how they’ve survived, and how they believe we should – can – improve the state's healing process.
While everyone has experienced and been deeply affected by the pandemic in our state and has a valuable story to tell, the heart of this project is to elevate the voices of community members who have been historically underrepresented and marginalized, and have been disproportionately impacted by the virus. These are the voices largely left out of the pandemic response and narrative, and are the voices we must hear from if we are to build a just and equitable plan to truly meet all New Jersey residents’ health needs.
All community members, with a focus on the above, including organization staff, volunteers, and public servants (broadly defined), are invited to participate in our Community Conversations platform as both interviewers and interviewees. There are a few different ways to participate in story-gathering and storytelling:
Organizations
Organizations may facilitate interviews, focus groups, and social media dialogues, or collect other storytelling submissions from community members. We encourage organizations to identify 5 to 10 members from the community they serve and either gather stories and submit them online as digital files or connect participants with the NJ YMCA State Alliance to be interviewed. For criteria, guiding questions, and more information, read our organization information sheet here.
Click the button below if you are an organizational facilitator looking to submit interviews or stories on behalf of community members:
New Jersey Residents
New Jersey Residents may interview other members of their communities or share their own story as a creative submission or original research, such as a journal, participant observation, or document analysis. Read our story-gathering guide here. Para la versión en español, haga clic aquí.
New Jersey residents looking to facilitate story gathering or submit their own story, click the button below:
NJ RESIDENTS: GATHER OR SHARE STORIES
Residentes de Nueva Jersey que desean compartir sus propias historias o recopilar historias de otros miembros de su comunidad, haga clic en el enlace de abajo:
RESIDENTES DE NJ: SE REÚNEN O COMPARTE HISTORIAS
New Jersey Residents may share their stories by requesting an interview directly with the NJ YMCA State Alliance. For more information on what to expect, click here.
New Jersey residents interested in being interviewed by the NJ YMCA State Alliance, click the button below:
NJ RESIDENTS: REQUEST INTERVIEW
How To Share Stories?
To learn more about the variety of ways individuals can participate in the COVID-19 Storytelling Project, click on each option below:
If you are interested in facilitating an interview or focus group, please see the video below on best practices and guidelines, with training provided by the Walter Rand Institute:
All stories shared by community members who have consented to make their accounts public will be digitally archived by the New Jersey State Library and the NJ YMCA State Alliance, and a selection of snippets from these stories will be curated and combined into a series of animated shorts produced by Next Day Animations. These visualizations of our collective storytelling will help to honor the diverse themes and impacts we are still uncovering, and will be accessible to the public for future generations to come.
Important Information on Consent
To ensure that the participant sharing their story – or yourself if you are sharing your own story – has provided appropriate consent to share their narrative, photo, audio, or video with the NJ YMCA State Alliance, and agrees that the NJ YMCA State Alliance may broadly share, adapt, and redistribute all storytelling submissions in connection with this project, all participants must provide along with their submissions a signed consent form (linked below), provided as a consenting adult participant or as a parent/legal guardian of a minor participant.
To substitute signed consent, the facilitator may instead obtain verbal consent, by recording themselves reading the consent form and the participant or parent/legal guardian responding “yes” to each statement before the participant shares their story. Consent forms or recorded verbal consent may be uploaded within all online submission forms.
We also ask that any participant submitting an original creative work also complete the licensing agreement included in the consent form. The licensing agreement does not need to be filled out for any storytelling submission type other than a creative work.
| CONSENT FORM FOR ADULTS | CONSENT FORM FOR MINORS |
| FORMULARIO DE CONSENTIMIENTO PARA ADULTOS | FORMULARIO DE CONSENTIMIENTO PARA MENORES |
Compensation Information for Participants
Individual participants - those who share their COVID-19 story in any of the methods provided - are eligible to receive one $25 VISA gift card through the NJ YMCA State Alliance if all submission criteria are met. Participants may receive compensation for one storytelling submission only. We are unfortunately unable to compensate interviewers or story-gathering facilitators at this time.
For organizations that are interested in gathering a planned number of stories and would like to request gift cards in advance to compensate participants, please fill out this form.
Have questions or need more information? Read our FAQs or email Julia.Wieczorek@yalliance.org.