Elma Lewis Center at Emerson College

At the Elma Lewis Center, we practice community-centered storytelling and radical listening. We collaborate with communities and people of all ages who are the most impacted by systems of oppression and yet often have the least access to craft and circulate their stories and self-representation. We work with social justice leaders to hold space for authentic story sharing, community-centered archiving and intentional circulation practices so the memory of people’s work--as shared in their own words, images, tone, and vibe-- is not dimmed or erased. Our work focuses on individuals and communities sharing their own stories in their own ways. Sometimes this means written or spoken words. Sometimes this means sculpture, a painting, a play, a zine, a website, a film, a poem. Sometimes this means playing music, singing and dancing.

There are three stars at the center of this constellation of story power: the storytellers, the stories, and the listeners. We collaborate with people to hold spaces where people can meaningfully engage with stories and the people telling them. We intend for these storytelling constellations to be a force for co-creating material change and healing justice.

As part of the Social Justice Center (SJC) at Emerson College, we at the Elma Lewis Center are committed to embodying and advancing social justice for the purpose of individual and collective liberation, working with compassion and enduring solidarity. The ELC is named in honor of Elma Lewis ('43), one of Boston’s most important Black female luminaries in the arts, education, and civil rights work. To learn more about her life and legacy, please see About Elma Lewis and our Elma Lewis Living Stories Project.

The Elma Lewis Center team works to develop and strengthen authentic relationships with community-based organizations and movements that center community voices and organize at the grassroots for transformational healing and change. Rooted in networks of trust, we co-create space for narrative truths to build and sustain paths toward liberation.

What do we need to remember? What do we need to know about what is happening right now?

What are the futures that you imagine? Who do you need to listen?

What do you want your stories to do?