Reports on Evergreen Family Story Oral History Project

Project Report | Oct 13, 2026
Every Family Story Deserves to Be Preserved

By Dr. Winnie Wong | President

Every Family Has a Story. Every Story Deserves to Be Preserved.

Evergreen Education Foundation Takes Family Stories to the 2026 Oral History Association Annual Conference!

October 14–17, 2026
Hilton Portland Downtown, Portland, Oregon
Conference Theme: Landscapes of Memory

What if preserving your family's history were as natural as sharing a family photo?

We are excited to announce that the Evergreen Education Foundation (EEF) will be presenting at the 2026 Oral History Association (OHA) Annual Conference, sharing our Evergreen Family Stories Project—a community-driven initiative that empowers families to record, preserve, and share their stories across generations.

Born from a simple yet powerful idea—that every family should have the opportunity to preserve its own history—the Family Stories Project brings oral history out of traditional archives and into the hands of everyday families.

From Vision to Reality: Our OHA Panel

Our four-member panel brings together EEF leadership and project contributors:

Professor F. Chao, Former President, Evergreen Education Foundation
Dr. W. Wong, Current President, Evergreen Education Foundation
Ms. N. Mackay, Project Team Member
Ms. D. Yeung, Technical Lead

Together, we will share the journey behind the Family Stories Project, from its initial inspiration to the development of a working digital platform.

Our presentation will explore how we conceived the project, its overall technological architecture, and its interviewee-centered framework, which places storytellers—not institutions—at the heart of oral history.

We will also discuss one of our most important commitments: ownership, consent, and privacy by design. Families retain control over their stories, including who can access them and whether they share them beyond their immediate circle.

A special highlight will be a live intergenerational interview demonstration between our youth volunteer, A. Wong, and Ms. D. Young, illustrating how a simple conversation can bridge generations and transform personal memories into lasting family legacies.

Why This Matters

Every family holds stories worth remembering, stories of migration, resilience, education, sacrifice, love, and hope.

Yet too many of these memories disappear when older generations pass, often because families lack the tools, confidence, or opportunity to record them.

We believe oral history should not be a privilege reserved for historians, researchers, or well-funded institutions. Everyone deserves the opportunity to tell their story, in their own voice, on their own terms.

By engaging young people as interviewers and giving families accessible tools to preserve their memories, we hope to strengthen intergenerational understanding while creating a lasting record of lived experiences.

Help Us Preserve the Stories That Matter

Presenting at OHA is an exciting milestone for EEF, but it represents just one step toward a much larger vision.

We hope to expand the Family Stories Project to reach more families, engage more youth volunteers, and make oral history preservation increasingly accessible across communities.

Your support can help a grandparent's memories become a grandchild's inheritance—not in dollars, but in identity, understanding, and belonging.

If you believe every voice matters and every family deserves to preserve its legacy, we warmly invite you to support our work through GlobalGiving.

Because the most valuable stories are often the ones we never think to record—until it is too late.

Learn more about our project:
https://evergreenfamilystories.org

Thank you for helping us turn everyday conversations into legacies that last for generations.

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Sep 16, 2026
Our Family Stories Join the National Stage

By Dr. Winnie Wong | President

Bringing Chinese Immigrant Family Stories to the Oral History Association Annual Meeting

We are pleased to share an important milestone for the Evergreen Family Stories of Chinese Immigrants project. Our panel, “Bringing Oral History Home: Intergenerational Storytelling among Chinese Immigrant Families,” has been accepted for presentation at the 2026 Oral History Association Annual Meeting, taking place October 14–17 in Portland, Oregon.

The Oral History Association is a leading professional organization for oral history practitioners in the United States, and its annual meeting brings together scholars, educators, students, community practitioners, and others working to preserve lived experiences. This year's theme, “Landscapes of Memory,” explores relationships among memory, movement, identity, place, and changing cultural boundaries, questions that are deeply connected to immigrant experiences. For Evergreen, participating in this conference represents much more than presenting our project. It gives us an opportunity to bring the experiences of Chinese immigrant families into a broader professional conversation about whose stories are preserved, how they are preserved, and who gets to tell them. Our panel will share what we are learning about intergenerational storytelling, cultural memory, and the role oral history can play in strengthening connections between immigrant elders and younger generations.

The conference will also be an important learning opportunity for our team. By connecting with experienced oral historians and community-based practitioners, we hope to strengthen our approaches to interviewing, ethics, privacy, digital preservation, community engagement, and long-term stewardship. These lessons can directly inform the next stage of the Family Stories project as we expand participation and continue improving our platform.

Most importantly, this invitation gives greater visibility to the stories of the Chinese diaspora community. Immigration history is often told through policies, dates, and major historical events. Family stories add something different: the voices of ordinary people describing, in their own words, why they left home, what they encountered in America, what they sacrificed, what they built, and what they hope their children and grandchildren will remember.

Our participation in Portland is therefore both a milestone and a beginning. We hope the connections and knowledge gained through the conference will help Evergreen build a stronger, more sustainable oral history initiative and encourage more Chinese immigrant families to recognize that their own family stories are also part of American history.

We are grateful to the families, volunteers, advisors, and supporters who have helped bring the project this far. As we prepare for Portland and the next phase of the Family Stories project, donations of any size can help support this work, from documenting and securely preserving more family stories to improving the platform and sharing what we learn with the broader community. Together, we can make sure that voices we can still hear today remain available for generations we may never meet.

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Sep 7, 2026
Evergreen Family Stories of Chinese Immigrants

By Donna Yeung | Board Member

Evergreen Family Stories of Chinese Immigrants is an oral history initiative dedicated to preserving, sharing, and protecting the stories of Chinese immigrant families for future generations.

Evergreen Family Stories website or Contact Evergreen Family Stories

Over the past several months, we have made significant progress in developing the Evergreen Family Stories platform. Our initial test system is now fully operational, with approximately 50 test users actively recording, preserving, and sharing family stories. Together, they have created approximately 60 oral history videos through solo recordings, one-on-one interviews, and multi-interviewer formats.

Privacy, safety, and family ownership are at the heart of the project. Interviewees retain control over their recordings and decide who may view or share their stories. Permissions can be changed or revoked at any time. Administrative safeguards have also been implemented to detect misuse and suspend accounts involved in illegal, abusive, or harmful activities, helping us maintain a safe and trustworthy environment.

Early testing has also helped us improve the experience for older users, validate our privacy and sharing systems, and address the technical demands of securely storing video. Our next phase will expand testing to 100–150 families, introduce guided interview prompts, improve archive browsing, and prepare the platform for public beta.

For Our Donors

Behind every recording is more than a story. It is a parent’s journey, a grandparent’s voice, a family’s sacrifice, and a piece of history that may disappear if no one takes the time to preserve it. There is a window of opportunity to capture these voices while they are still here to tell us, in their own words, what they lived, loved, lost, and hoped for. Your support helps ensure that decades from now, a child or grandchild will still be able to hear that voice, see that face, and know where their family came from. Together, we can preserve not only the history of Chinese immigrants in America, but the deeply human stories that give that history meaning.

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