New Jersey’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project

Project Name: Community Conversations: NJ’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project

Sponsor: NJ YMCA State Alliance

Dates: Submissions accepted through Nov. 2020

Application: To learn more or sign up, click HERE

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 collected 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.