(A script for an unrecorded podcast)
Narrator:
In our last episode we reached September 2012, when OHS Trustee Craig Fees approached the Committee* with a formal proposal to create Special Interest Groups. Three years later, in 2015, SIGs were launched at the Society’s AGM. Environment & Climate Change was first off the blocks, followed quickly by LGBTQ. There are now seven, all proposed and led by Oral History Society members. Today, co-discussant and fellow OHS Trustee Alan Butler takes us back to 2012 to discover what happened in those three (Craig: “intense”) – (Narrator: with slight annoyance) – three intense, eventful years.
Alan Butler: Before we get into that, Craig (Narrator: “!!????!!), I’m intrigued. In our last session you said – direct quote – “And then I lost focus during a Committee meeting in 2011 and found myself volunteering to organise the 2012 annual international conference” (Craig: “co-organise, really”). I mean – the idea for SIGs came out of the conference, so hurrah for losing focus – but how does that even happen? The annual conference is the biggest single event in the OHS year.
Craig Fees: That takes us off-script. (Alan: “That’s fine”. Narrator: “!!???!!”). Okay, the Committee had been asking for some time “How can we bring members of the Society more closely into the Society’s work?” There was a striking powerpoint by then-Chair Graham Smith and the late, wonderful Membership person Kate Melvin: The OHS as a solar system, with Trustees at the centre, where “the work” of the Society was mostly done, and members mainly in the outer circles. The main moment of direct member engagement was the face-to-face AGM, during the annual conference. They could be very – well, lively, in an exciting way, and even contentious. It was during one particularly rambunctious AGM that it dawned on me that members didn’t realise that Trustees were volunteers, and that everything from the Journal to the Regional Network to the annual conference happened because of volunteers, mainly Trustees. Trustees are a finite if willing resource, and to grow the work of the Society the Committee knew we would either have to hike up membership costs, to hire people, which we were not going to do because it would exclude people, or find a way to welcome members closer to the centre who might wish to be involved.
At this point in the meeting we were discussing ways of taking the Society out to members. Although the annual conference moved around the country, it was not the answer: too far away and too pricey for many OHS members, and seen by many as too academic and abstract. So what about working with members where they were, to co-host and co-organise events in the Regions, networking, showcasing what was happening locally, and tying it in to what was happening in oral history nationally and internationally? Very exciting!
Anyway, back at work in the Archive I was directing a Heritage Lottery Funded project called “Therapeutic Living With Other People’s Children: residential therapeutic child care c. 1930-c.1980” (Alan: “That’s a mouthful”), which ran from 2010 to 2011. The Committee always begins organising next year’s annual conference at least a year ahead, which put planning for the 2012 conference smack into 2011 and our project’s final year. One of our project outputs was supposed to be a one-day conference, and we were thrashing around for ideas. The Archive was a perfect setting for such events, if we could find themes and, even better, partners. What better than OHS! I fell into a trance and when I reemerged the discussion had moved on to the annual conference. But I thought we were still back on local events. When I heard “conference about childhood and difficult childhoods”, I dove in head first to co-organise and, as I thought, host. Several weeks later the penny dropped and I realised what I’d volunteered for, at which point my inner voice went “Uh oh”. But I was too embarrassed to admit what I’d done, and it seemed best to just get on and not tell anyone. So that’s how it happened.
Alan: That became “Displaced Childhoods: Oral History and Traumatic Experiences”, with masses of talks and two great keynote speakers: Joanna Sassoon, Project Manager of the National Library of Australia’s ‘Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants oral history project’ over from Australia, and Lynn Abrams, Professor of History, down from Glasgow!
Craig: And despite the theme and the seriousness of the conference, it was a great deal of fun, as creative things are. On the second day, for example, we had a Large Group, involving every delegate and speaker, sitting together in a very large circle. Based on the idea of large therapeutic groups, where you can tackle complex issues, with people in the room experienced with such things to keep it safe. Two discussants set the scene, and the floor opened up into a discussion of whatever emerged: Would it work? Could it work? What would the outcome be?
Alan: Did it work?
Craig: You’d have to ask other folks who were there, Alan. But, from all this a group came together who wanted to continue working on oral history, childhoods, and traumatic experience together. The OHS had no off-the shelf mechanism to support such a thing, and much of the original momentum dissipated before we got very far – start-up groupwork takes a lot of time and energy, with already-busy people. Hence the proposal for SIGs, as a supported group-building/networking toolkit which members could simply reach for. We re-grouped eventually, and before SIGs were launched formally we created a successful if too-short-lived pilot called Psycho-Social Therapies & Care Environments, as a test and proof of concept. It worked.
The conference was fun in other ways, too, and this spirit fed into SIGs. On the day that final conference proposals were due, Carolyn Mears phoned from Colorado to ask if the midnight deadline for submission was UK time or Denver. [Laughs] The call for papers didn’t specify, so I thought “Fair dues. Midnight Denver”. She came and presented at the conference, and became a founding member of the Psycho-Social Therapies & Care Environments SIG. She gave a keynote talk at PST&CE’s inaugural conference in 2016 – about the experience of being a Columbine High School mom, and then of having pioneered a way of working through oral history with other parents and teachers who’d been caught up in the shootings there. We began the pilot SIG in 2014 with web-presence and email group, and held the first AGM, elections, and conference at the Archive in 2016. That was a success, and even made a surplus. Recordings of presentations went up on the OHS website. It was quite something. It showed what a Special Interest Group could do.
Alan: But PST&CE itself was short-lived. Why?
Craig: Well, that takes us back to 2012-2015, and the way SIGs were forged.
Alan: So let’s begin there.
Narrator: [Blowing whistle] Cut!! Cut!!
[Tumult as broadcast ends abruptly]
* explained in Episode 1.
