Margaret Hollister
Executive Director
Former head of manuscripts at a regional university library. Oversees acquisitions, grant administration, and institutional partnerships. With the Initiative since 2011.
About the Initiative
A quarter century of careful documentation.
Origins
The Initiative was formed in the winter of 1997 by a working group of three retired archivists, a parish historian, and a timber-frame carpenter who had spent the preceding decade documenting barns marked for demolition along a single watershed road. Their concern was practical: no institution in the region was prepared to receive, index, or preserve the materials they were generating, and the communities from which the materials came had no mechanism to assert continuing interest in them.
The founding charter, ratified in 1998, set out two principles that remain in force. First, all materials acquired by the Initiative are held in public trust, not as property. Second, no acquisition is undertaken without the informed participation of the community or family from which the material originates.
Governance
The Initiative is overseen by a volunteer board of nine directors, appointed to staggered three-year terms. Board composition is balanced by statute among professional archivists, working historians, and representatives of member communities. The board meets quarterly; minutes are distributed to member societies within thirty days.
Audited financial statements are prepared annually by an independent firm and filed with the appropriate charitable regulator. Copies are available to member communities and to any researcher with standing interest.
Staff
Daniel Pérec
Director of Field Survey
Timber-frame carpenter and architectural historian. Leads structural documentation projects and maintains the Initiative's measured-drawings standard, now in its fourth revision.
Irene Vatsaas
Oral History Coordinator
Folklorist and recorded-sound archivist. Trains community fieldworkers, supervises transcription, and manages the Initiative's recorded collections. With the Initiative since 2008.
Theodore Okafor
Archivist & Records Officer
Responsible for cataloguing, finding aids, and the Initiative's digital preservation workflows. Holds a graduate degree in archival studies and joined the Initiative in 2019.
Values in Practice
Three commitments shape the way the Initiative works. We consider these less as aspirations than as conditions of operation.
- Community primacy. The community of origin is the first audience and the first authority. Materials are not interpreted publicly before they have been returned, in some form, to the people who produced them.
- Durability over reach. We invest in formats, standards, and institutional relationships that can outlast the current generation of staff and equipment. We decline projects that would compromise this horizon.
- Transparent accounting. Every donor and partner is entitled to know what we hold, what we spend, and on what terms our work is conducted. Annual reporting is a minimum, not a ceiling.