Greetings!

Hello my friends, I hope you are all doing well.


I have completed my newest exhibit on Loyola's own, Feminist Forum. Please check it out.


http://wla-archives.tumblr.com/

This past week has been quite exciting at the WLA. I was asked to transcribe some documents that recently came in. This was quite an interesting experience because the documents were near impossible to read. I had to hold them up against the light and literally attempted to define each letter. The document was so badly maintained and the print was nearly all gone. Fortunately, I was transcribing letters/cards so each one did not take as long. I want to thank the graduate students for letting me help them!


Next on the list has been my newest exhibit that I am working on. The Taproots is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating young adults/teens on safe sex and also providing services to young parents.

This is a description of the group from my display.



Taproots was founded by Monica Cahill, BVM, and began as a center for teenage mothers in the rectory of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in 1978. In 1980, Taproots (Teen-Age Parents Realizing Ongoing Orientation Toward Success) moved to a six-room flat at 2424 W. Polk St. Located on Chicago’s West Side, Taproots was offered its services to help ease the difficulties of teen-age pregnancy and single parenthood.

Taproots’ initial focus on teenage pregnancy eventually expanded to include an outreach program which serviced the entire community. Its three-pronged program included empowerment training for young mothers, a child development laboratory for parenting instruction, and adolescent pregnancy forums held throughout the community. Taproots focused on skills training in parenting, nutrition, hygiene, career awareness, and assistance in reaching proper community resources to help teenage parents.

Here are some photos from our archives.

Please check back next week!

Take care everyone,

Sebastian

Hey everyone!

I hope you all had a splendid week and that you are excited for Thanksgiving. This past week I was able to complete my display on Carol Ronen.

http://wla-archives.tumblr.com/

Please check it out!


This week, I decided to change my mind on the organization I will focus on. I felt compelled to research the Feminist Forum because it has been non-existent this year, but they actually held their first meeting last night. I attended and the group was very pleased to know that I am making an exhibit for them.

Here are some photos and papers I am including into my display.

These are only a few examples of what I have been going through this past week. It has all been very interesting because this is an inspirational and respected organization at our school and I am able to trace its origins. The downfall to the collection we have at the WLA is that we hold information from 1995 to 2002. This leaves a ten year gap which does not allow me to look into what they have been working on recently. I have contacted the WSGS department, but they told me that they do not have a lot of information on file. Something specific I wanted to point out is that in the photo posted above, Gloria Steinem attended Loyola. This woman has been active in feminist issues in the United States for quite some time, so I hope my readers enjoy learning about her in my display.

Greetings viewers!

I hope you all had a restful weekend. I have finally been able to finish my latest project on Carol Ronen this past Friday. However, I am still waiting to hear back on some edits from my supervisor so I will post the link next week. I hope you are all excited to see that display because this woman was extremely active in issues such as same sex rights and child/adolescent care. I had honestly never heard of her before, but I could not believe everything she has done. This is one of the first times when I realized how difficult it was creating a display for a person. There were just too many things to share and I also did not want my piece to be too long. As a result, I did struggle more than usual with creating this display, but I hope you all enjoy it.

As for this upcoming week! I am still going through our collections trying to look for areas I have not covered. As a part of this internship, I want to really expand my understanding of women leadership through a multitude of lenses. Therefore, the collection on Church Women United Peoria has really caught my attention. This is a church organization founded in 1941 that represents the Roman Catholic and Protestant faith. They identify as a racially, culturally, theologically inclusive Christian women’s movement, celebrating unity in diversity and working for a world of peace and justice. There are still operating today with over 1, 200 local and state units in the US and Puerto Rico. 

The fact that this group works specifically in Puerto Rico is something that caught my attention right away. There are a lot of material in our archives that speaks to the work committed within the United States, and so I believe that Puerto Rico would provide a different insight. Their culture is different than ours and their national language is not even English. Although, this may already seem as common knowledge, I believe this would greatly affect the inner components of an organization. 

For the next week, I will be going through all of their documented notes from meetings and programs they held. I do not believe that this collection contains photos, so I will need to search on the web. For example, some events that I want to discuss in my next display would be May Fellowship Day (May), World Day of Prayer (March), and World Community Day (November).

Well, I hope everyone has a great week and thank you so much for reading. I appreciate all of the support.

Take care

Good Afternoon,

I hope everyone had an exciting and healthy week. I recently completed my exhibit on the WILPF, so please check it out.

http://wla-archives.tumblr.com/


 As for today, I have been going through the manuscript collections trying to discover the next piece I would like to work on. I have decided on Carol Ronen and for some general background information, she served as an Illinois State Representative in the 17th District from 1993-2000, prior to which she served as Executive Director of the Chicago Commission on Women. Carol was then appointed to the Illinois State Senate for District 7 in 2000 after the resignation of her predecessor, Arthur Berman, and was subsequently elected without an opponent. In 2006, she won reelection by defeating Republican Frank Thomas. In 2007, she announced that she would be resigning as Senator and officially stepped down on February 10, 2008. I was also reading online about her resignation and I came across something that discussed a scandal between her and Governor Blagojevich. I have yet to delve into this topic so I do not have much to share as of right now. Today, I was able to pull up some photos from the archives so I will display these below.

These are just some photos that I was able to scan but there is still a lot of work to do on this project. Please stay tuned until next week. Thank you for reading.

Cheers!

Sebastian