East Boston Memoir Project (2020-2022)

Founded in 1918, East Boston Social Centers, Inc. is a multi-service agency, serving culturally diverse families and individuals of all ages in East Boston and throughout Greater Boston. In 2019, the Social Centers donated their records to the Northeastern Archives & Special Collections. The records consist of administrative reports, building plans, scrapbooks, newspapers, photographs and other materials pertaining to programs, events, and the organization’s administration. In 2020, the Social Centers approached the Boston Research Center for support in developing a memoir project to preserve the memories of older adults in the community. Through generous funding by the Boston Public Library, GrubStreet, a Boston-based creative writing center, provided 16 weeks of memory-making and memory-capturing lessons to participants via Zoom in the spring and summer of 2021. GrubStreet and the BPL treated this as a pilot program, offering additional memoir courses in the summer and fall of 2022 in partnership with the Roxbury, South End, and East Boston Branches. At the conclusion of these writing courses, some memoirists are opting to add their stories to this web portal.