Through support from Utah Humanities and the Utah Historical Society, the oral history grant provides funding to collect and transcribe interviews and share the content with local communities through public programming. This quarter, the organizations awarded funding to six state history projects:
Mama Dragons Oral History Project
Oral histories of everyday Utah women entrepreneurs
Library Lives: An Oral History of the North Logan City Library
Women in News Oral History Project
Living Memory Moab
“The History and Legacy of Youth Storytelling in Utah: Voices Across Generations”
Learn more about each project:
Mama Dragons Oral History Project: The Mama Dragons Oral History Project will document the experiences of approximately twenty founding members, early leaders, and long-time participants in Mama Dragons. It will preserve the history of one of Utah's most influential organizations supporting parents of LGBTQ+ children. Interviews will explore participants' family backgrounds, experiences raising LGBTQ+ children, relationships with faith communities, the origins and growth of Mama Dragons, advocacy efforts, bridge-building strategies, and reflections on social change in Utah.
The oral histories of everyday Utah women entrepreneurs: This project will focus on exploring the personal stories of how entrepreneurial mothers come to understand and navigate their own and others' entrepreneurial expectations and identities. Ultimately, we will explore how they navigate entrepreneurial ecosystem support while balancing competing expectations, identities, and inequalities in a booming entrepreneurial state and within a culture that both extols the virtue of traditional motherhood and yet proudly proclaims its status as the most pro-business and start-up friendly economy in the country.
Library Lives: An Oral History of the North Logan City Library: This project centers on three overlapping community groups: the staff and leadership of the North Logan City Library, North Logan residents who have lived with the library across its thirty-year history, and residents of neighboring Hyde Park, which to this day has no public library of its own. The North Logan City Library is the community's own institution, built and funded by its residents, and its history belongs to the people who chose to create it. Preserving that history at the library's thirtieth anniversary, while the people who built and shaped it are still available to speak, is an act of community stewardship before firsthand accounts are lost. The project is equally important to Hyde Park, whose complex relationship with public library access has never been fully documented. The oral history creates space for Hyde Park voices to be heard on their own terms, not as a footnote to North Logan's story, but as a community with its own perspective on decisions that continue to shape residents' daily lives.
Women in News Oral History Project: The story of women entering legacy journalism in Utah has not yet fully been documented, and time is running out to tell this story. As in many other institutions, women were rare in newsrooms as the 1900s began. They fought to be taken seriously as their numbers started to grow in the 1960s. It is urgent to gather and tell the stories of this generation of pioneering Utah journalists, from the era when women began covering so-called “hard news” topics like science, politics and health – subjects traditionally reserved for men.
Living Memory Moab: Living Memory Moab is a collaboration of the Moab Museum, Moab Sun News, and KZMU Radio, with support from the Moab Area Chamber of Commerce. The project will focus on women who pioneered climbing, mountain biking, and other outdoor pursuits in and around Moab, from the 1960s through the 1990s.
The History and Legacy of Youth Storytelling in Utah: Voices Across Generations – This project will document the experiences of Utahns who participated in storytelling as children and teenagers alongside today's youth storytellers, preserving an important aspect of Utah's cultural heritage. They will interview current and former youth storytellers in Utah, including young people who have participated in storytelling festivals, school programs, library initiatives, competitions, and community storytelling events, as well as adults reflecting on how those early experiences influenced their lives. The project will also include mentors, educators, librarians, and storytelling advocates who helped develop and sustain these opportunities.
Congratulations to our awardees!
Are you interested in applying for an oral history grant? Draft applications are due November 1, 2026. Learn more at: https://utahhumanities.org/programs/special-projects/grants/oral-history-grants
