A grant to the Institute for Diversity and Civic Life (IDCL) in Austin, TX will support efforts to explore, collect, and share the stories of immigrants and refugees. IDCL will award funds to twenty scholars, activists, and artists as they document experiences of migration and shed light on the multidimensional perspectives of immigrant communities.
The Institute for Diversity and Civic Life is pleased to announce that we have been awarded a grant for $250,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation to support the Migration Narratives Project, a rapid-response grantmaking program to fund the work of scholars, activists and artists who are exploring the stories of immigrants and refugees in Texas through narrative, oral history and other interpretive storytelling methods. This program deepens and expands our Religions Texas public humanities and oral history initiative, which works to gather, preserve, and amplify the untold stories of Texas.
Migration has profoundly shaped Texas and the United States as a whole. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that the U.S. immigration system is deeply flawed. As a border state, Texas has experienced the effects of this broken system. With an incoming presidential administration poised to take new approaches to immigration reform, it is a crucial time to foster public conversations about migration, immigrants, refugees, asylees, and their families in American society. These conversations need to be informed by on-the-ground narratives that illuminate the lived experiences of individuals and allow for nuance, complexity, and a view into the multidimensional perspectives of immigrant families.
