Personal documents and the stories we pass down act as our connections to both the past and to ourselves. Each refugee’s story is a testament to resilience and we are working to create a tapestry of our stories. We believe that storytelling is a means of empathy building—providing opportunities for understanding and common ground between refugees and their new American neighbors.

While our loss of personal records can be a secondary act of displacement in both time and place, we also know that our histories do not stop with our displacements. Members of our communities in the diaspora continue to interact and add our personal photographs and stories to archives and social media sites. Our stories and personal documents from before and after displacement help us understand who we are.

Started as a shared idea from two refugee archivists, Sharif Jamal and Ana Roeschley, ORSA is envisioned as a community-based archival resource that is open to all refugees in the United States. Now in its early conceptual stages, ORSA is partnering with UNT’s Digital Libraries to create digital collections for and by refugees, as well as openly available resources on best practices for archiving personal records for personal use. We aim to ensure that refugees and their stories are not only represented in archival collections, but that refugees can easily access and use their own personal collections.