We are honored to announce that CAAM has been selected to receive support through the Mellon Foundation Nonprofit Finance Fund to help sustain our community-centered archival work, Memories to Light: Asian American Home Movies. This three-year program, Building and Investing in Financial Resilience Initiative, will help ten organizations—including CAAM and our colleagues at Frameline, Third World Newsreel, and Appalshop—to build organizational capacity to carry on the important work of preserving and providing access to audio or audio-visual materials that tell the story and experiences of communities that have been underrepresented in mainstream historical records and media.
The Memories to Light program brings our mission of uplifting Asian American stories to the most grassroots level, digitizing and archiving home movies that chronicle everyday life, as well as special occasions and cultural events.
“Memories to Light was born from the belief in the importance of telling our own stories,” says CAAM Executive Director, Stephen Gong. “As Asian Americans have historically been misrepresented in mainstream media throughout most of the 20th Century, home movies are the one of the best sources of an authentic record of our lived experiences.”
Since its launch in 2013, Memories to Light has collected home movies from more than 40 families. One collection of films from the Bohulano family—depicting the Filipino community in Stockton, California during the 1950s-70s—was even selected to be added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2023.
This support is especially critical at a time when archival and delivery formats are changing, as well as the ways that audiences and filmmakers access these materials. The investment from NFF will help equip CAAM to work with newer analog video formats, allowing us to archive footage from the 1980s–90s.
Memories to Light footage can be seen in recent documentaries such as Home Court, The Chinese Exclusion Act, and The War Inside. Select videos can also be viewed on the Memories to Light page on our website and the CAAM Channel on YouTube. More footage can be found on the Internet Archive and California Revealed.
Watch Footage From a 1930s Rice Farm
About Memories to Light
Through Memories to Light: Asian American Home Movies, the power of collective memory and media will bring to life the experiences of Asian American communities from across the country and spanning six decades (1920s through the 1980s) of the 20th Century. We hope that this truly unique arts experience will collectively and aesthetically construct shared social, cultural, and political representations of Asian America directly from the community itself. At the heart of this project is how collective memory can be amassed and sustained through interactive participation. Memories to Light: Asian American Home Movies demonstrates the importance of collective storytelling and will provide a greater understanding of the Asian American experience.
About NFF
NFF will work with these 10 organizations over a three-year period to build organizational capacity with the goal of creating more adaptable organizations that carry on the important work of preserving and providing access to audio and/or audio-visual materials that tell the story and experiences of communities that have been underrepresented in mainstream historical records and media.
The integrated program will include convenings and peer learning, customized consulting to support planning for growth and adaptability, a participation grant, and the opportunity to apply to the Mellon Foundation for change capital that will support business model shifts and build long-term resilience. To continue informing ways to improve the field, this initiative is designed to disseminate learnings broadly to the field, sharing successes and challenges in real time, and offering models that other audio and/or audio-visual preservation organizations can use to develop financial strength and adaptability. Learn more at NFF.org.
For more information about this program visit the Memories to Light page on our website. If you’d like to learn more about submitting your family’s videos, contact us at memoriestolight@caamedia.org.
