A gathering of academic and community scholar-practitioners to elevate outstanding community-engaged research, teaching, and mentored-undergraduate research focusing on The Heirloom Gardens Project, the institute provides a forum for exchanging knowledge, collaboration, and building coalitions rooted in rigorous scholarship and commitments to systems change. The gathering also serves as the launch of the 2024 Derian Summer Internship Program, a faculty-mentored, community-engaged undergraduate research program. 

The research institute is part of a larger event series to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Program for Community Engaged Scholarship at Princeton University.  

Sponsored by the Derian Student Internship Fund, School of Public & International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton Humanities Council, Princeton Alliance for Collaborative Research & Innovation, Princeton Food Project, Department of Anthropology

The Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project (HGP) is a collaboration of Princeton University, Spelman College, and the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance to collect oral histories of people who have worked to preserve Black and Indigenous seed and foodways throughout the Southeastern United States and Appalachia. It is currently funded by the Princeton Alliance for Collaborative Research and Innovation, an initiative of the Office of the Dean for Research at Princeton University. Working across six sites over two years, students and faculty will work with communities to interview and archive the stories of farmers, gardeners, chefs, community organizers, local historians and others who have been actively sustaining rich farming, culinary, and medicinal traditions. To date, HGP has collected over seventy interviews and is currently processing the files to be deposited in the oral history archive at Spelman College and hosted for public access by Atlanta University Center’s Woodruff Library. HGP is also developing a story corp training kit that Ujamaa and other community organizations can use to continue conducting oral histories for the project after the initial funding expires. HGP intends to continue its work in other regions of the country and to support collection and archiving of oral histories on this topic for years to come.