Project
Overview
NVLP, a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization, brings the generations together and creates tomorrow’s leaders by recording, preserving, and distributing, through various educational media, the wisdom of extraordinary African American elders who have shaped American history.
Some of these elders are nationally recognized legends, and are interviewed on videotape by one of the two NVLP co-founders. Other visionary elders are known solely in their local communities, and are selected and interviewed by NVLP college fellows.
All of this invaluable material is placed on the NVLP website, providing worldwide access to pivotal African American autobiographical narratives, and providing a whole new understanding of this country's past, and the lessons to be learned from it.
NVLP initiatives include:
- The Visionary Heritage Fellows Program for college students
- The Intergenerational Summit on the State of Black America, held in Washington, DC at the Library of Congress, which now includes the NVLP high school essay contest and “Visionary Visits.” Through the initiative, winners of the NVLP high school essay contest, not only get to lunch with and introduce the legendary individual elders honored at the Summit at the Library of Congress, but accompany these accessible icons to their neighborhoods for special assemblies at their schools
- The Visionary Leadership Awards Gala, held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC
- Production of multimedia educational material, including lesson plans
- An extensive, publicly-accessible internet archive of videotaped interviews with legendary African American elders, www.visionaryproject.org
- Publication of a major book on the NY Times bestseller list, A Wealth of Wisdom, Legendary African American Elders Speak,
- Extensive community and educational outreach programs
- We are in talks with several major television broadcasting companies about our proposed new program Visionary Journeys, a series of entertaining and educational television biographies of individual Visionaries
- Complete, individually-bound transcripts, with DVDs, of the first fifty interviews are being presented as sets to the libraries of our partnering educational institutions (most of them historically black colleges and universities)
- We continue to distribute our “Legacy Guide” to African American community groups and churches across the country, to help them with the process of recording their own elders, and we are hoping to expand the first “National Registry of African American Oral Histories”, a web-based registry we created to keep track of all of these historic interviews
- Plans are underway to resume the very popular live web casts of our intergenerational Roundtable Discussions with individual Visionaries
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