A student speaking in an intimate group session

In the Division of Community, Culture, and Belonging

Featured Work

A red circle, blue circle, yellow circle, and purple circle intersecting with one another.

Solidarity Circles

An opportunity for students to build solidarity practices through engagement with community leaders and organizers, reflection and dialogue, and creative expression. This program includes a stipend. Solidarity is a commitment, not a destination.

Our work at the ELC is all about what stories can do. We believe stories have the potential to create change in the world around us. We all make decisions, policies, and practices based on stories we know and hear. Stories are portals to access, education, historical truth, and visibility. Stories are a marker of existence.

Stories are roots. Stories are hope and necessary dreams. Stories can transform borders into bridges. Stories help us remember that we belong. Stories can seed and sustain our understanding of ways we are connected.

Stories are oxygen.

At the Elma Lewis Center, we practice community-centered storytelling and radical listening. We collaborate with communities and people of all ages who have the least access to craft and circulate their stories and self-representation. We work with community leaders to hold space for authentic story sharing, community centered archiving, and intentional circulation practices so the memory of people’s work—as shared in their own words, images, tone and vibe—is not dimmed or erased. Sometimes this means written or spoken words. Sometimes this means sculpture, a painting, a play, a zine, a website, a film, a poem. Sometimes this means playing music, singing and dancing.

Flowchart linking three words together- storytellers, stories, and listeners

There are three stars at the center of the constellation of stories: the storytellers, the stories, and the listeners. We collaborate to hold spaces where people can meaningfully engage with stories and those telling them. We intend for these storytelling constellations to be a force for co-creating material change.

The Elma Lewis Center team works to develop and strengthen authentic relationships with community-based organizations and movements that center community voices and organize at the grassroots for transformational healing and change.

The Elma Lewis Center is part of the Division of Community, Culture and, Belonging (CCB) at Emerson College. The ELC is named in honor of Elma Lewis (’43), one of Boston’s most important Black female luminaries in the arts, education, and civil rights work.

What do we need to remember? What do we need to know about what is happening right now?

What are the futures that you imagine? Who do you need to listen?

What do you want your stories to do?

Some of our ELC Projects

Portrait of Elma Lewis, 1978, courtesy of photographer Georgia Litwack.
Portrait of Elma Lewis, 1978, courtesy of photographer Georgia Litwack.
Elma Lewis with Duke Ellington at the Elma Lewis Playhouse in the Park during the first of many annual visits by The Duke Ellington Orchestra, ca. 1970. Image courtesy of Northeastern University Archives & Special Collections.
Elma Lewis with Duke Ellington at the Elma Lewis Playhouse in the Park during the first of many annual visits by The Duke Ellington Orchestra, ca. 1970. Image courtesy of Northeastern University Archives & Special Collections.