OCG || THE ARCHIVE Project BEGINS HERE

THE OCG DIGITAL ARCHIVE | 2010–PRESENT

The links that appear below this link contain and preserve the OUR COMMON GROUND web home since 2010. 

LOOKING BACK ll MOVING FORWARD

OUR COMMON GROUND has been a journey of learning and growing, of questioning what we thought we knew, and of facing hard truths alongside thousands of people who understand the demanding duality of being Black in America.

Across the years, we have listened, argued, learned, challenged power and challenged ourselves. We have tried to understand the forces acting upon our lives while never surrendering our responsibility for what happens on our common ground.

Now we move forward—firing up new engines, but traveling the same tracks.

I am a daughter in the spirit of Sankofa: understanding that moving forward sometimes requires reaching back—retrieving what is valuable, remembering what has been learned, recovering what must not be lost, and carrying it with us into the future.

That is particularly important now.

We are living through a time of extraordinary disruption. The chaos, destruction, deliberate distortion of our history and increasing disenfranchisement threaten not only our political and social standing, but our ability to understand what has happened to us, what is happening around us, and what we must do next.

We do this work because the work must be done.

And we return to OUR COMMON GROUND because there must remain ground upon which we can stand together—where we can think, question, remember, disagree, organize, BEAR WITNESS, and determine for ourselves what is worth protecting and what must be changed.

The pages that follow are part of that journey. They are the surviving digital record of OUR COMMON GROUND since this website was created in 2010—our broadcasts, guests, conversations, commentary, projects, questions and concerns as they unfolded in their time.

Some of the links have aged. Some of the platforms have disappeared. Some of the issues we hoped would be settled are still with us.

But the work remains.

So we will not discard what came before simply because we are building something new.

We will reach back.
We will retrieve what matters.
We will carry it forward.

Sankofa.

Side note:

The pages that follow are the surviving digital record of OUR COMMON GROUND and TruthWorks Network beginning with the construction of this website in 2010.

What you will find here was created in real time alongside the work itself. During these years, I was producing OUR COMMON GROUND and building TruthWorks Network while sometimes preparing, promoting and distributing as many as six talk programs. I created and maintained the websites, wrote and posted the web content, prepared newsletters, developed program and guest materials, created advertising and promotional graphics, managed our social media presence, and handled the digital distribution of the work.

I was doing all of it.

The hosts and contributors brought their voices and their programs to the network, but the web production, promotion and digital infrastructure were my responsibility. At the same time, I was working full-time in a demanding federal leadership position.

There was always another broadcast to prepare, another guest to promote, another graphic to create, another newsletter to write, another website to update, another program to distribute—and never enough hours to make the growing web presence as orderly and cohesive as I wanted it to be.

So what follows is not a perfectly curated archive. It is the archive as the work happened.

Some pages overlap. Some links have aged. Some platforms have disappeared. Some sections were never completed. But taken together, they preserve something far more important: a contemporaneous record of the conversations, people, ideas, programs and issues that occupied OUR COMMON GROUND and TruthWorks Network across these years.

As we move forward—firing up new engines, but traveling the same tracks—I return to this work as a daughter in the spirit of Sankofa: reaching back to retrieve what is valuable, recovering what must not be lost, and carrying it forward.

We do this work because the work must be done.

OUR COMMON GROUND with Janice Graham digital archive, dating from the construction of this website in 2010. They document years of broadcasts, conversations, guests, commentary, special projects, programs, and community engagement across the OCG and TruthWorks Network platforms.

The pages above this point have been created or updated to introduce the renewed OUR COMMON GROUND with Janice Graham

—who we are, what we believe, the work we have built, and why this moment calls us back to the conversation.

The pages and links appearing below this point on the website navigation menu are part of the materials we are preserving as part of the historical record of OUR COMMON GROUND. Some pages may contain outdated schedules, links to platforms no longer in use, or formatting from earlier web versions.

We invite you to explore it as it was created—a record of the work, the conversations and the times in which they occurred.

As OCG returns, selected materials from this archive will be preserved, organized, and brought forward as part of the growing OUR COMMON GROUND Legacy Archive.