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Community Dialogue Toolkit

Body Image - Active Citizens

CNet has developed a toolkit to facilitate cross community and inter-cultural dialogue through the use of reminiscence and oral history.

The Toolkit

We would like to encourage you and your group to use this valuable resource as a means to creating your own Oral History Group project. There are several parts to the toolkit:

How To Develop Oral History Groups - A Booklet

This should be self-explanatory and is the logical starting point for the toolkit.

Our Journeys - A 30 minute film

The film documents the personal journeys of members of an elderly group living in Bradford who all arrived as immigrants from the Asian sub-continent in the late 1950's onwards. This film is in a sense an oral history. It asks the viewer to listen, and that is something at the heart of oral history. People listening to each other. It is hoped that this film, along with some of the other resources here will be used to facilitate and encourage others to talk about their life experiences and ultimately to have those conversations with other groups and other communities, and perhaps acknowledge that despite our many differences there are equally many commonalities between us all.

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Bradford and Its People

Whilst developing this work we unearthed a mountain of material on Bradford's history and one thing seems very clear, in the space of 50 years, between 1801 and 1851, the population exploded. Even people with well-established family roots in Bradford may not have to dig back through too many generations before they find those roots running out of Bradford, to who knows where? There is a chapter devoted to this subject in the booklet and two Powerpoints to facilitate a presentation called 'Bradford and Its People' and 'Famous Bratfud Lads n Lasses' (opens new window) along with an interesting quiz - 'The Quiz' (opens new window).

Example Biography: Kishan Chand

This is a biography of one of the participants in the Oral History project which CNet facilitated and is provided as an example to draw from. It includes ideas for questions to ask people and ways to use such a biography to get groups talking to each other and about themselves within a group setting.

There are many approaches to this work and it is largely a case of finding out what works for you and the people you are engaging. We expect you will adapt the resources and ideas in the booklet to suit your own approach.

The aim of this material is to create a fruitful exchange within and between different cultural groups. It is this idea of a fruitful exchange that we should hold in mind throughout our activities.

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