In November of 2021 scrolling through my personal photo library looking for images not worthy of long-term retention I came across some pictures I’d taken of one of the main streets running through my town. Boring, I thought. Delete. Delete. Delete. Only later did I remember that I’d taken those photographs to document one of the actions that my town had taken to make life safer during the COVID-19 pandemic; widening the sidewalk by extending it into the road so that pedestrians could social distance. How quickly we forget.

Guarding against this forgetting is the Community Conversations: New Jersey’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project.  A collaboration between the New Jersey YMCA State Alliance, the New Jersey Department of Health and Healthy NJ 2030 the Project documented, and analyzed the personal accounts of more than 580 New Jersey residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2020, the New Jersey YMCA State Alliance was preparing to hold public health forums in partnership with the state Department of Health when the pandemic hit, making in-person contact impossible.

Instead the YMCA Alliance switched gears and issued an open call for residents to send in their stories, be they artwork, videos, poems or any other artifacts of their experiences during the COVID crisis.

Once the stories had been collected they were sent to the Walter Rand Institute at Rutgers University Camden where they were analyzed and themes were added. Themes such as the digital divide, challenges with remote schooling, and housing insecurity. The social disconnect theme looks at the loss of human interaction and how isolation took its toll on everyone.

The State Library’s role relates to the long-term preservation of the digital archive and to that end the Library ensured that submissions were in archivable formats and that the appropriate permissions were received. Staff then constructed metadata using the information provided by the YMCA and the Walter Rand Institute. There are three hundred and sixty items in the State Library collection as some chose not have their interview archived and made public. Other submissions contain multiple participants.

There was a lot of incredible creativeness during the pandemic and these stories document the bewilderment, the loss, the isolation, the kindness and self-care strategies people used to survive.

Browsing the community by subject enables you to see all the different themes and the submissions that address them.

As a repository of memory this archive of individual experiences and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will allow future researchers to examine the past in all of it’s complexity and draw lessons from it.