The Hawaiʻi Life in the Time of COVID-19 Project is designed to engage our Hawaiʻi communities in examining, articulating and sharing the impacts of COVID-19 upon our Hawaiʻi island ways of life, livelihoods, health, families, communities, education, values and outlooks for the future.

We have designed this project so that our community can reflect upon, share, and document their experiences; acknowledge significant events; honor courageous acts and selfless sacrifices; and help to understand social and economic trends as they unfold.

It is important to document this island-wide and global health crisis in real time, track how to effectively and respectfully respond to it, map pathways of recovery, and project lessons on how to prepare and respond to future pandemics.

The Center for Oral History (COH) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa is uniquely situated to provide an established and long-term platform for our Hawaiʻi families and communities to record their experiences living and working through this pandemic, drawing upon our cultural values and legacies.

Would you like to participate in this project? We welcome your stories or reflections in any form. You can request to be interviewed or self-record your own audio or video oral history; share photos from your journal/diary entries or daily life; or submit poetry, mele, or other art you may be creating while staying at home and practicing social distancing.

The platform will provide the opportunity for participants to be interviewed by the Center for Oral History staff or to record their own oral histories. This approach is based on the Rapid Response Oral History method that was utililzed in the aftermath of the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center and also to document the 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches. It also builds upon the crowd sourced oral history method, whereby we will equip the community with a set of questions and basic techniques so they can create their own oral histories and upload them on to our website. The Center for Oral History staff feels that we have a unique kuleana (responsibility) to provide this resource and opportunity to the communities in Hawaiʻi at this critical moment in history.

Across the U.S. universities and museums have initiated real time online oral history projects to help our communities memorialize and reflect upon their experience. An article in the Smithsonian Magazine provides and overview of the various initiatives. Of significance are the efforts of Indiana University (IUPUI) Arts and Humanities Institute to provide an accessible platform to be interviewed online or to submit recorded oral histories about the experience of living through COVID-19; express their understandings, hopes and beliefs about surviving the pandemic; and provide a resource for researchers and policy makers to interpret and respond to future pandemics. Columbia University also has an ambitious project of surveying 1,000 people over time; a diary study with 500 participants; and in-person oral history interviews with 200 narrators over an 18-month period. The Smithsonian Institution is also initiating an oral history project about COVID-19, as well as other museums.