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Visionary Heritage Fellows Program

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The Visionary Heritage Fellows Program (VHFP) offers a unique opportunity for talented students, selected annually from participating institutions, to learn from Visionary elders through direct dialogue, informal mentorship, and video documentation. Each year, the chosen Fellows engage in faculty supervised independent study coursework, documenting the lives of Visionaries the students have selected from communities across the country.

NVLP partners with the student’s educational institution to give each Fellow the academic resources, faculty supervision and training to do a comprehensive research project, including a videotaped biographical interview of their chosen elder. 

DeAndrea Solomon, left and Cleandria Chevalier of Prairie View A&M University were among students conducting video interviews with local elders.

The annual Visionary Heritage Fellows Program Leadership and Training Conference serves as the kick-off of the program. All Fellows attend a five day session held each year in Washington, DC which includes interactive training workshops, discussion sessions with National Visionaries, seminars on leadership development, and a multi-group project in video biography production. With support from Time Warner Inc., NVLP underwrites all of their expenses, including transportation, materials, accommodations, and meals. In addition, the Time Warner grant has allowed NVLP to accept more students into the program and work with additional partnering institutions.

 

This program offers chosen Fellows the opportunity to learn the wisdom of their elders, while gaining valuable research and interviewing skills in the process. The VHFP enables the crucial exchange of ideas, experiences, and knowledge between elders and young people, and offers a solution to the growing need for an ongoing intergenerational dialogue. All Fellows receive full academic credit for their work, and become eligible for scholarship awards given annually at the Visionary Heritage Fellows Program Leadership and Training Conference.

Each year’s class of VHFP Fellows contributes to the archival preservation of African American history, life stories and data (which otherwise might be lost), creating vital resources for scholars, other young people and the general public. All interviews are added, in their entirety, to the NVLP web archive.